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What Happened To Palm?
Ian Lamont writes "Palm's fourth quarter results came out a few days ago, and they were not pretty: Palm reported losses of 40 cents per share, for a quarterly loss of $43.4 million. It's the fourth straight quarter of losses, and it's clear that the company is not faring well in the rapidly evolving smartphone market. The Treo line is lagging after seven years, and while the Centro has done well, it's not well enough to compete with the likes of the iPhone 3G and RIM's surging BlackBerry line. New competition is on the horizon, with developers and manufacturers working on the Google Android platform and the recent news that Symbian is being open-sourced. What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
I bought my Palm T|X, direct from Palm, within 24 hours of when they first became available. I ordered it direct so that Palm would get all the margin (profit) from the order. I do this when I am trying to support a company. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this. They got more money from my orders than they would have if I had bought from, say, buy.com.
I ordered it overnight on Wednesday afternoon; they sat on the order until Friday, and so I received it Monday, basically five days after I had ordered it instead of one. Annoying, but it was new, they were probably overwhelmed with orders, etc., so I just grumbled a bit. The TX itself, well, it was fantastic. A little thing here or there wasn't perfect, but overall, this was the PDA I'd been waiting for. WiFi, Bluetooth, beautiful display, music and video playback, used almost all my software from my long in the tooth M505 Palm... the TX is fantastic. Really.
Considering that I was so happy with the T|X, I decided to get one for my sweetheart as well (she's also a long-time Palm/PDA user.) So, I ordered it on October 18th. We received it on October 19th. Much better. Unfortunately, this is where the happy tone of the story fades out.
Her TX would refuse to connect to any WiFi node without taking about ten tries. Then it would connect. Once connected, it was fine. But connecting could literally take five minutes of poking and prodding it. This was clearly no good (heck, PDAs are supposed to be convenient, aren't they?) So I called Palm. They kept me on the phone for about 40 minutes (I timed it. Total cost to me, $46.60 via AT&T) I spoke to Cody in support. In 40 minutes, he verified, apparently by following a support script, what I had clearly described to him in the first 30 seconds: This T|X was not connecting properly. Yes, I kept my temper and stayed polite. I know this game.
So he tells me, now I have to call the Palm store. So I do - toll free. I tell them what Cody told me, and I give them the service request number he supplied for my issue. They take it, tell me it will be 24-48 hours and then they will issue (by email) an RMA. This new fellow also explains that the procedure continues such that if they accept the RMA (verify the problem on receipt of the unit) then Palm will refund to my card.
I object: I ask, "Why refund? I want it replaced -- this is a gift!" They say there is no other option, and this is to "protect them from fraud." I ask them how, exactly, giving me my $300 back protects them more than giving me a working T|X... but this only angers the person on the phone, who tells me he isn't going to explain company policy to me. Imagine that. So I thank him for his time (no, really, I did, and I remain polite as well) and I hang up.
So, 48 hours pass, no RMA email. (Definitely -- I kept every email while waiting for the RMA, so no spam filtering, nothing. Man, was that annoying!) So I call them again. This guy tells me that it takes 2-5 days to issue an RMA and the previous person "didn't know what they were talking about." Uh-huh.
So I wait. Five days pass. No RMA. So I call them again. It's October 24th now. They say they'll send it out after 5 pm, specifically telling me these emails are batched all at once. 5pm rolls around... no RMA. 9pm... midnight...
So the next morning, I call them again, only this time I call technical support back at the toll number. (Total time, 20 minutes, Total cost to me, $23.30 via AT&T -- we're now at $69.00 expended on toll calls to Palm support.) We're still sitting on this busted T|X, and no RMA. I'm not happy at all. My sweetheart is dissapointed, to say the least. But I remained polite. The fellow on the phone (Chris, employee number 72485) allowed as to how he could escalate the issue, and fax me the RMA. He did, and we got it, wonder of wonders, and so now we have this RMA. It's a UPS ground return to Palm. Gritting my teeth, I hand it off to UPS and wait.
On November 3rd, I receive an email(!) from Palm saying that they
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Between all the division splitting , they lost their focus. The sole idea of scrapping the palm os development and start to focus on windows mobile must tell you something.
Their current devices were fine for five years ago, but not now.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Palm OS was brilliant at running PDA-style apps. However, that's not the direction portable computing was going, and Palm never did much to address the future. When every other platform was moving into media, Palm was proud of its third-party support calendars with more buttons.
And don't get me started about the Graffiti 2 debacle ("Easy to learn, even if you'll never get faster!"). Instead of working out a deal to keep using Jot and its trickier-but-faster strokes, they switched to that two-stroke abomination that instantly cut power users' data entry speed in half. Way to save a penny, Palm!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Their hardware is solid. They just need to release an OS that is more capable than Windows 3.1.
Buying and selling their own name to themselves for 6 years. Leave palm alone. Just leave them alone. Can't you.
Way back, Palm was not the only company making PDAs. They succeed because all the applications that were developed for them. Is anyone writing apps for the palm? Palm does not even know if it's Palm OS or WindowsCE.
Rim was the next palm because they went the next step and integrated the back office into the thing with secure push e-mail and other apps.
The iphone iswhat is next. It's not the touch screens per se. It's the fast processor and great IDE that will lead to the next generation of apps. If you saw the keynote you know I'm not blowing smoke: They showed a full blown medical imaging application ported to the iphone in less than a man week.
The touchscreens main virtues are it's large area on a small device, and it's morhpability to the application. This is the next step. This is why for example Rim will be next to die after Palm. Look to Nokia and Android to actually compete against the I phone.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
RIM happened, then Apple happened.
Shipping an obsolete OS is what killed Palm. I stopped caring about them in 2005 when I realized that they were never going to ship any hardware with Palm OS 6. I don't know whether Palm OS 6 would have generated more success than Palm OS 5, but lo and behold, it's 2008, and they're still shipping an OS that lacks multitasking support and dates back to 2002. It's no surprise, then, that they are failing in an industry that is rife with competition from more modern software.
Palm once led the PDA market. Their PalmOS platform was revolutionary in the 90's because it was flexible, fostered good battery life and most importantly was easy to use. When Palm moved into the smartphone market, they did very little to revamp their aging operating system. Rather, Palm tacked on advanced wireless functionality their platform couldn't really handle. They are losing to Apple and RIM because these companies designed their hardware and software from the ground up for rock-solid email and voice communication.
What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
Not a thing. Stick a fork in them, they're done.
That is all.
The reason I think RIM will linger and then die is that they don't have the economic resources to compete with the iphone. They'll linger because they are damn good at what they do do. Bussinesses like them for the present better than iphones. the iphone killer app has yet to be written. And then there's the exclusive carrier contracts. But over time they won't beable to keep up with the application dev and versatility of the iphone.
Nokia has the cash flow to try and fail four or five times from scratch against the iphone. They have the engineering chops to compete on performance. And if their first few attempts fail, the worst that happens is they lose the high end phone market till they come up with something to rival the iphone.
Android the ability to compete with the iphone on apps and speed of software innovation. It can be backed by the google cloud and that may possibly turnout to be better than the apple cloud (though apple would just switch over if that were the case, but it would erase an apple exclusive advantage).
Android + samsung can produce both awseome hardware and software at affordable prices and with substantial cash flow to back it till it catches on.
But Apple still has a killer advantage: OSX and platform integration. OSX means people can write Hub apps for the apple desktops and then have companion mobile apps for the iphone. You won't have to re-write your code or support two platforms. Or have compatibility libs. Heck you won't even have to have two IDEs: Xcode does it all. So both from the developer and consumer point of view apple is much more fascile and seamless.
Apple recently bought a low power chip maker so the horse power and battery lifr in these is going to keep getting better. Since apple will always be able to more tightly couple the OS and hardware, they are going to get every drop of power out of this thing. It used to be that it was the communication hardware that ate the batteries. Presumably nokia's better at that but with the new generation it's the computing and screen display power. Things like background service will eat your battery. Apple thus may have the better hardware strategy as well as the better software strategy.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Make a phone that is aimed at business users.
remember blackberry? the old one? the one that ONLY did email?
That little device with its tiny niche' market rocketed RIM to the company that they currently are. Unfortunately RIM has completely lost sight of what used to make them so incredible. The market needs a new paradigm for business phones. there used to be nextel, and the blackberry 7520 (which i said they could have when they pried it from my cold, dead fingers) but sprint is basically flusing nextel down the toilets. they're hoping to phase out the network and poach the users onto sprint.
This is all another story...
The point is that there is definetely a group of consumers out there who don't WANT a phone with an MP3 player, a camera, lots and lots of bright, shiny surfaces, tiny buttons, etc. etc. we don't want phones that we designed for the 15-20 female market. We don't.
Lets look at something like the blackberry 7520 (the phone that i had up until yesterday) to the blackberry curve (which i have now had for about 24 hours).
The 7520 (which was an astounding success, btw) was big. really big. But we LIKED that about it. It was rugged, I would routinely chuck it across the office to demonstrate to the non-believers why it was so amazing. Its size also allowed it to have BIG keys...ones that you could type on. The screen was recessed, it NEVER got scratched, ever.
This is the type of thing that business users want....functionality.
Now lets look at the curve:
the buttons are f*cking tiny. You can't type with your thumbs, you have to use your fingernails. I can only assume that this is because the phone was designed for 8 year old girls. The dropped the scroll wheel on the side that made the old blackberries have such a (in my mind) LEGENDARY interface. Honestly that was one of the best interfaces i have EVER used. They dropped it for a stupid trackball that, while pretty, is all but useless unless you use two hands to operate the phone.
Okay...rant rant rant rant...i hate the new blackberry, but this is my point:
A market (that used to be dominated by RIM) has been abandoned. there is a sizable gap that needs to be filled, and this is Palm's opportunity to start turning a profit again.
If you dont' belive me about the 7520, ask anybody that owned one. Most of the people that did still keep it (with the service turned off if they have to) as an organizer. It was just THAT good, and there currently is nothing on the market that offers the same level of functionality.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Palm suffers from the same fatal illness that has killed so many once-promising companies - totally inept management.
From their board minutes: "Let's make a Linux OS! No, wait, let's buy BeOS and use that! Great, it works, now let's not ship any products that run it! Now let's announce another Linux OS! Now let's announce an UMPC with a different, incompatible Linux OS than the first one - I mean, second one. Now on shipping day, let's cancel the UMPC and "commit" to the first Linux OS! Let's write an emulator that runs on another company's tablet, and give it away for free - but not ship a product of our own that runs it! And in the meantime, to keep our customers entertained, let's keep selling the Palm name to ourselves over and over again!"
Didn't these guys used to run Atari?
Palm is the new Amiga. They both had great devices that were ahead or the best of their era, but then decided to sit on their butts and stop innovating.
That's what happened.
What happened is they started with a good product and nonexistent customer support, and they just rested on their laurels instead of building their customer loyalty through good service. Now better products have come out, and products with actual customer service have entred the market. What happens after that is only natural.
If you have a problem with your palm pilot, your only hope is to find a forum where some other unfortunate soul has ran into the same thing and managed to figure out how to fix it, and was generous enough to share their experience. Either that or you'll find 35 threads of others having the same issue and nobody has figured out how to fix it.
Yes I own a palm pilot. Right now my screen refuses to re-calibrate the stylus (no it's not a "screen wedgie") so I have to press 1/8" below wherever I want to click, and there's evidently no way to fix it short of replacing it. Lucky me.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
In 2004, Palm planned to convert PalmOS into nothing but a GUI and backwards compatibility API layer, replacing the OS with Linux. Lots of Palm software assets and licenses were transferred among Palm, China MobileSoft, and the Japanese "Access" mobile SW company over the next year or two.
By now, we should be able to get smartphones with easy Web access, the thousands of little PalmOS apps, and all the Linux apps, all upgradable at a "tap" over the air or USB from the Internet. But it never happened. Instead, Palm put out a couple of different models of Treo, which were excellent phones when released, but rapidly eclipsed by more frequent updated releases of Symbian and Windows phones.
I bet what happened was that just announcing a PalmOS/Linux smartphone earned its execs and directors a lot of money, money changed hands in the endless spinoffs/acquisitions/mergers, but no one ever paid a team to convert the phone to Linux or PalmOS as a layer on top of it.
Another good question is why I can't just install Linux on any of the new phones with HW compatible with it, and keep my telephone service contract. That should be easy by now, and shouldn't require Palm to do it.
--
make install -not war
This thread is peculiar timing for me, as i just spent the last few days resurrecting my Visor Prism for a Head-to-Head with my Dell Axim x51v and my AT&T Tilt...
The long and short of the comparsion? Palm never confronted Wince and its Descendants...
My early Palm's, the III's and the V's, were SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE EARLY WINCE PDA'S...
Good screens, GREAT battery life, and once you got the hang of Graffiti...you could fly on
entry. The Wince recognizer STILL isn't quite as good as the early Palm.
The Palms were soooo much better that Palm had the market essentially all to itself. For the FIRST FEW YEARS.
But then, Palm failed to grow, Palm failed to innovate (How old is Garnet?)... ....and each generation of Windows PDA got slowly and slightly better.
So, i remember attending the MS PDC in Denver ('97) and spending over 8 (F******) hours, working on my Compaq Companion (rebranded Casio Cassiopeia), getting the modem and Pocket Outlook and Pocket Explorer working over a 9600 baud connection. If the "windows" in my 16th story hotel room had opened, the Companion would have taken a Unscheduled Flight.
OTOH, my x51v (with a Stowaway BT Folding KB) has around 90% the ESSENTIAL functionality of my current laptops, and the x51v is a 3-year old PDA.
YES, the battery life on the Axim sucks, Yes, the Windows Mobile 5 Pocket apps are still a little underpowered and slightly flaky.
However, in raw functionality, my TX has less power than my x51v, Garnet is flakier than WM5, and i have to go to a bunch of 3rd party apps to get equivalent functionality with the Axim.
The TX's battery life is not all that much better, and the display screen isn't half as good.
ON THE BLACKBERRY SIDE; email on the Treo 700, though way better then my Treo 180, is still a relative PIA, compared to the Idiot Simple usage of a Blackberry.
And though i vastly prefer my Curve2 to my old Pearl, both of them had equivalent basic functionality to the Treo 700 in line-of-business apps, such as contacts and appointments.
Internet access on the BB is just a little behind the best of the 3G/4G phones. Display is also slightly-to-moderately behind, but has been catching up.
So, Palm got beat by cellphones on voice and Internet connectivity. Palm got beat by Wince on applications deployment and display. Palm got slaughtered by RIM on email functionality. Palm (along with everyone else) GOT MASS MURDERED BY Apple on multimedia delivery, which will only get worse with the 3G iPhone.
And both LG and Samsung, gigantic industrial conglomerates with HUGE MONEY, are lining up to play whack-a-mole with the iPhone. They may not succeed, but they WILL deliver many more powerful cellular devices to further eclipse the Palm line.
I STILL LOVE MY PRISM, but it's SOOO Olde Skul...
Palm SHOULD HAVE become the "iPhone", but they got fat and lazy with a dedicated user base.
Then once they fell behing they didn't have the: talent, vision or resources to catch up.
Palm -- "The PDA That Time Forgot"
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
Palm's demise was common wisdom when it was still dominant in the marketplace, and I never understood why. Even today, the several-year-old OS is better than Blackberry at everything but e-mail, and better than Windows Mobile at everything (I switched from Palm to Windows for a few years and just switched back; what a relief and pleasure to not be fighting my phone all the time).
I understand the OS can't multitask, but they've had plenty of time to correct that. I suspect it's too complicated for most consumers, and does not provided features needed by corporate IT for management, support and integration. But they've had plenty of time to correct that, too.
I'm sorry to see it die off. I love my Treo 755p. It's incredibly efficient, very reliable and, for my needs, highly functional.
What happened is they lost their best people to Handspring. From that point on it's been all downhill.
~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
...I tried to find a Palm that didn't suck, since I needed one for certain medical software. (Emulators for Nokia or other devices are just far too slow, and can't turn on and off instantly.) I used my old Sony SJ33 until I finally came to the conclusion that all of the new Palm devices are garbage. Anything built since they moved to NVFS is a buggy unstable timebomb. My solution was to buy a refurbished Tungsten C from these guys, which was much faster than my T|X and perfectly stable. It's worthless for the internet, but as a PDA I like it (and the price) so much that I bought an extra one, just in case I drop it or something.
You're confusing Palm with some other PDA. The platform is wide open -- here are the documents. The Internet is lousy with Palm software, some commercial and some free. My Treo has applications from ten different sources, including an excellent free HP-42 emulator.
1) Spinning off the Palm software division. One of the reasons Palm worked so well was that it's hardware and software were tightly integrated. Removing that integration turned them into just another PDA/Smartphone manufacturer with nothing different to offer. Add to that a hardware third party (the only reason they split in the first place) that basically imploded and a buyout of the software division, and you got a disaster on your hands.
2) Axing off Hotsync Server. I had more execs wanting this function than I could count just so their secretaries could update their calendars on the fly. So when they couldn't get it because Palm decided it wasn't important enough, they switched to Outlook, since Exchange could share calendars over the network. Add to that the frustration of getting a Palm to sync with Outlook without duplicating something and you got a recipe to can your palm with something that syncs right, like Windows mobile or RIM.
3) Switching from Dragonball to Xscale. My Kyocera 6035 smartphone is over 6 years old. Personally, I usually get 7 days use out of my phone before I have to recharge it, and thats with a 6 year old battery. New it used to go for 2-3 weeks with moderate usage. Show me a Palm phone that could get 3-5 days without a charge out of the box. The Dragonball processors were not the fastest chips out there, but were unbeatable in the energy usage department. When Palm switched, the devices got fatter, bigger, and sucked battery life like water, All without offering a big benefit vs older Palms. I guess you now got more memory and more functionality available but what difference does it make to the exec that just using it for his calendar and contacts? All he knows is that his palm's battery lasts 1/4 of the amount of time of his old m515 and is twice as thick. So he tosses the palm to his secretary and goes out and gets that blackberry that everyone is talking about.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
First PDA was an M130, amazing piece of hardware with an amazing price point for the mobile market. I was sorely disappointed when it went tits up. Bought another, died again for unspecified reasons. But I was hooked at that point and got a Tungsten E. Far more durable, in part I attribute this to the optional clamshell protective case. Pretty screen, interesting software options, but doomed due to Palm's lackluster embrace of the wireless world. The whole Palm/PalmOne branding fiasco, lack of focus on product lines that actually fit market needs, and other douchebaggery ceded too much market share to other smartphones. Palm should have beaten Apple to the iPhone years ago, PDA's are supposed to be their fucking core competency! Blackberry beat them to it even earlier.
I got a Berry 7250 with my last job and the PDA became sorely neglected. The office integration was slick and I did all of my contact management/scheduling/note crap in there, plus email, etc. For casual entertainment, the internet was more than sufficient for browsing news sites, message boards, etc. The PDA was relegated to ebook reader. I like the idea of carrying reading material with me for whenever there's unanticipated downtime.
Lost the Berry when I switched jobs. Don't really feel the lack of the berry since the new position has different responsibilities, less mobile tech support and stuff, more desk-bound. PDA is back doing service as primary downtime reading device. The iPhone has a certain lure, especially with the big price break/performance increase, but I'm trying to avoid picking one up just on gee-whiz factor alone.
What I really liked about Palm and PalmOS is that there was a real PC mentality. "Hey, it's your hardware, do whatever the hell you want with it." Early palm adopters were very hacking-oriented and they came up with uses for the device the designers never anticipated. I loved the docs2go program with the ability to sync down a copy of a word doc and edit it on the palm. The IR keyboard turned it into a proper cheap-ass laptop and was pretty much in a class of its own until the ultra-lowend laptops started coming out recently. The thing that pissed me off about all the other portable devices, even the berry, is that they're less hacker-friendly. I've yet to see a berry ebook reader or even a means of uploading a text file to it. Emails truncate anything too large, same goes for putting large amounts of text in outlook notes. Adobe never wrote an acrobat reader for it like they did with palm.
I'm still not sure how much of a walled garden the iPhone is going to be. From the sounds of it, it'll be more open than typical American cell phones but less open than the pc's we've all come to know and love. I'm interested in seeing how it develops. I'm just very sad that Palm so thoroughly suicided itself. We'd probably be five years ahead of where we are know if they had their shit together.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
1) They haven't bothered to significantly upgrade their technology in years. Their development cycles are too slow and they've been milking their platforms as cash cows for too long with too little improvement.
2) PalmOS was clearly a dead end years ago and their Windows based systems basically outsource the crown jewels (the software) to Microsoft.
3) Treos were nifty at first but they've stagnated compared to the competition. Palm missed the idea that email is a killer app and never developed the backend infrastructure RIM did.
4) They don't have the financial resources or scale to compete long term with Nokia, RIM or Apple. And they have no defensible or must-have products to compensate.
5) Their "strategy" has been insane. There is no focus to the company. No vision. They buy technology and never use it. They break the company up for no clear reason and then put it back together.
Every mistake that the pundits wanted Apple to make, Palm tried.
They licensed out their OS. Then, because the licensees were complaining about Palm's unfair advantage, they split into separate hardware and software companies. They even bought Be, which everyone said Apple should have done instead of buying NeXT.
So what happened?
Well, the software side (PalmSource) came out with a fancy new OS based on the BeOS stuff they bought. And...the licensees all said "We'll get to it."
So PalmSource said, "Oh, and the 6.1 version will be even better!" So the licensees (including PalmOne, the hardware side) said, "Great! Tell us when it's ready."
So PalmSource panicked and said, "...um, great! Um...hey...we'll make our next OS based on Linux!" And the licensees said, "Oh, okay, we'll wait for that one then."
And so, without planning to, they committed the one fatal error when you're up against Microsoft - they stood still. Microsoft can't catch a moving target, but stand still and they'll run you over. The PDA market dried up and all the licensees bailed. PalmSource got sold off to a Linux company. PalmOne decided to make a Linux OS of their own, and it'll be ready Real Soon Now.
was in assuming that ordering direct from Palm was better from their point of view. It isn't. Manufacturers don't specialize in logistics, distribution or warehousing, all of which are complex problem spaces that require significant skill to execute correctly. In fact, many manufacturers are so inefficient in these areas that it actually costs them more to sell you a unit than for you to buy it through distribution, margins and all. It also costs them far more to attempt to diagnose and support a problem than to accept a large batch of returns from a major distributor.
Just buy the thing locally from a retailer with a no-questions-asked return policy, and if there's anything wrong with it that you think might be a hardware defect, return it and try another one. This would have saved you $100 in phone calls (though why the hell are you paying over a dollar a minute for long distance?) and would have saved Palm several hundred dollars in support costs.
-Graham
'Palm Computing filed lawsuits in Germany and Italy against Microsoft on Thursday, stating that the "Palm PC" designation will cause too much confusion among consumers .. a Microsoft spokesperson said.
.. :)
"We don't see how the name Palm PC conflicts with the name PalmPilot."'
Yea, who would confuse Lindows with Windows
davecb5620@gmail.com
This was a letter from Engadget to Palm back in 2007, it left an impression on me after I read it. I think most of it still applies today.
Dear Palm,
Man, what a crazy year, right? We know things haven't really been going your way lately, but we want you to know that we haven't given up on you, even though it might seem like the only smartphone anyone wants to talk about these days is the iPhone. It can be hard to remember right now, but you used to be a company we looked to for innovation. You guys got handhelds right when everyone else, including Apple, was struggling to figure it out. And it was the little things that made those early Palm Pilots great -- you could tell that someone had gone to a lot of trouble to think about what made for a great mobile experience, like how many (or rather, few) steps it took to perform common tasks.
The problem is that lately we haven't seen anything too impressive out of you guys. Sure, over the past few years the Treo has emerged as a cornerstone of the smartphone market, but you've let the platform stagnate while nearly everyone (especially Microsoft and HTC, Symbian and Nokia, RIM, and Apple) has steadily improved their offerings. So we've thrown together a few ideas for how Palm can get back in the game and (hopefully) come out with a phone that people can care about. (And we're not talking about the Centro / Gandolf.) Read on.
So yeah, it was probably a smart move to recognize that you needed to offer a Windows Mobile version of the Treo to appeal to enterprise users, but there are literally millions and millions of consumers who want a high-end, powerful mobile computer that isn't built around Exchange server support. What they're looking for is a great user experience. Apple has done a good job tapping into that market, but there's still a huge opportunity out there for Palm to offer a smartphone that's just as engaging as the iPhone, but that's also open, rather than closed, and more geared towards productivity.
Frankly, you've taken a turn from being the respected underdog and innovator to repeat offender in stale gear. Every press release you issue or "leaked" photo we see these days is another dent in your already banged up armor, and really, we're not sure how much more we can take -- our loyalty has practically become an embarrassment among peers. The New York Times totally nailed it when they said "Palm is about to release a new model in its Treo line and photos leak out to silence." That said, we humbly submit a few (mainly practical) suggestions for how you can turn things around, organized by hardware, software, and other.
Hardware
Get thin - Three words: FIGURE IT OUT. If HTC, Apple, and Motorola can offer thin (and we mean friggin' thin) smartphones, you can too. We know you think the Treo is perfectly proportioned, but it's not. It's chubby. No excuses any more, ok? It doesn't have to be as thin as the iPhone, but you've gotta trim some of the fat.
Bigger, higher resolution displays - Make the screen bigger and up the resolution and you'll go a long way towards winning us back. There's no reason the 750 shouldn't have 320 x 320 (or higher) -- Windows Mobile 6 supports that, or didn't you hear? But for new devices you might want to have the keyboard slide out, like with the HTC Hermes or the Samsung i730. It's a really smart move. The long and short of it is this: if you can find some way to marry the expanse of something like the iPhone's or G900's massive, high res screens and still retain the spirit of the Palm keyboard, people will be very interested.
Speaking of the keyboard, don't mess too much with it - Apple may or not add a physical keyboard to the iPhone (our money says it won't happen), but the one the Treo has now is pretty good and it's pretty much the one thing that's keeping a lot of Treo owners from jumping ship. And from what we hear, the Centro is going to have a keyboard that's "impossible to type on" -- not
The only software I've paid for on my Treo 750 has been Opera. Everything else, VNC, Windows Remote Desktop, Putty, and countless others have been free. I can administer my entire system, either at work or at home from my phone. If gives you a sense of power kind of like the power God must feel when using a Treo.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
like many tech companies Palm has succumb to NBTS ... Next Big Thing Syndrome. Instead of maintaining its succesful product Palm put all its effort into the NBT trying to be the smartphone leaders while abandoning its lead in PDAs. Palm hasn't made a new PDA in years and its software is languishing. Now imagine if palm had an ounce of smarts and had continued to work on the life drive. Giving it a 30+ hard drive or an 16Gb flash mmmmmm would look a lot like an ipod touch wouldn't it.
I like the Treo phones; they are capable and the ones with the Palm OS are pretty good. Nice screens, etc.
But, every time I go to shop for a new phone, the Palm PDA-type phones are always so damned expensive. When I can get a Windows Mobile phone for free (or $99 for a delux one) with my plan, paying $600 for a Treo doesn't seem to make much sense.
They've marketed for a fairly small segment it seems, so I don't know why it's a surprise that they're struggling.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The problem with Palm was simple. They were a hardware company with a software arm. They spun off the software side so they could offer devices with different OSs, mainly so they no longer had to compete with Microsoft. The software side created a mobile OS that was technically superior to most out there, but cheap hardware couldn't run the microthreaded OS real effectively.
Enter Linux. Palm has been working on a Linux kernel based OS for the past couple years now. When I was down there awhile back, they were hiring Linux guys in a major way. They're at least as far along as Android, and maybe further. The main reason you don't hear about Palm's Linux distro is because they keep tight lipped about things, unlike Android, which has been more about marketing than about actual development now for a long, long time. The thing is, Palm takes longer because they tend to do wild things like...make developer tools available before the thing is released...stuff that Apple could never be bothered with doing properly.
When Palm started they had these piddly little 68000 CPUs and less than a meg of RAM. They did the right thing - they followed the Zen of OS design and produced a minimal OS that performed amazingly on such a machine. But recent Palm machines are way more powerful than the workstations I used to have on my desktop. You can't control a beast like that with a toy OS. The MS strategy was correct after all - write a slow bloated OS because one day, in the not too distant future, it will cease to seem slow and bloated on fast new devices without anyone having to change a line of code. Maybe there's a message there: take into account what's available today, but make sure you're writing code in such a way that it'll last as long as you expect your business to last.
And after countless years, did Palm *ever* write a tool that allowed you to find out what was actually stored on your Palm? None of the Palms I ever owned had such a feature.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Firstly, I want to say that for the entire 2-year period I owned a Treo, I desperately wanted it to be the perfect device. It was so close.
But, what happened to Palm is simple: their flagship device was simply not something you could rely on.
Because "franken" garnet (palmos 5) had no form of memory protection or scheduling, a million little hacks were needed to make it seem like a modern, functional OS. Users were demanding advanced functionality (like background processing for MP3 players), and instead of introducing a modern OS core (ie. cobalt or palm's UI on linux), they chose to hack in feature after feature to the ancient palmos 5. It was cheaper (in the short-term).
The treo 650 was somewhat stable if you didn't do anything with it. If you simply used it as a phone, never installed any software, and rebooted it regularly, you could usually count on it to function when you needed it.
If, however, you installed any software (particularly that which runs in the background), within a month or two the phone would start crashing randomly. It didn't matter which software you installed; eventually, one or two apps would cause device instability, and you could spend days and days trying to figure out what was wrong. I'm saying this a 24/7 debian user, sysadmin, with 10 years C/perl/java experience (and having even written several palmos apps); I truly can't imagine trying to debug a treo as a business user.
In the end, a phone/PDA must be reliable. It cannot drop calls, forget to notify you of an appointment, or lose data. The treo failed on all three fronts.
Compounding this fundamental flaw was the fact that Palm (the company) was so arrogantly silent on the issue, slow to release patches (most of which didn't work anyway), and often in denial that the problem even existed. When confronted, often their line was "it's your 3rd party applications." Wrong answer. This is a modern computing device. If the OS crashes, it is not the fault of the applications. What is this, 1992?
This was the major problem, but not the only. Lack of automated background sync, simple over-the-network sync, true multitasking (or even context-saving task switching), sufficient workspace memory, and wifi made it even less attractive. The sudden rush towards Windows Mobile alienated the remaining Palm supporters, who were hoping for Cobalt (palmos 6), not WM5.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
They failed to capitalize on their strengths.
.jpg, etc.) play .wav, .mp3, and other audio formats with a very capable mp3-player application, display videos from many video formats (after a brief but easy conversion process).
It is not that their OS could not keep up... it could. My Palm Tungsten (not even the newer version) runs some excellent third-party applications that can read/write documents compatible with Word and other word processors, read / write spreadsheets from Excel and other brands, display PDFs quite well, swap screen orientation, display picture files (.gif,
It was great. Bluetooth, wifi, etc. The touchscreen was great and the handwriting recognition was very good. Often better than trying to type it all it.
In short, the Palm had almost all the little pieces that go into the iPhone today, 3 or 4 years ago! So... what went wrong?
They did not take all those pieces and put them all together into a single, smooth package or set of features. The completely failed to capitalize on those strengths, and instead threw them away.
Example: the Treo phone. Now, among the STRENGTHS of the Palm were: nice high-resolution touch screen, and good writing recognition OR a pop-up on-screen keyboard. So, what did Palm do on the Treo? They made the screen SMALLER, scratched default Graffiti support, and put in a shitty little blackberry-style keyboard! I.e., they adopted a competitor's solution and at the same time gave up two of the advantages they had over that competitor (Blackerry).
They followed that pattern in a number of other ways... compromising their own strengths in order to cater to the perceived desires of their competitors' customers.
That is simply not a way to get ahead.
Palm could have BEEN the iPhone, 2 years before the iPhone. But they dropped the ball. Again and again and again, they "compromised" by giving up their better features in order to emulate others.
They've got a pretty strict monopoly on stuff for the Palm, and they'll charge you for anything. There's nothing free in the world of the Palm.
What are you, paid by Motorola?
I went five years never buying software for my palm -- because I could get all I needed for free. And now that I do buy some software, I almost always have at least two strong competitors for what I want to pick up. As often as not, I can get free-as-in-beer or OSS software for it.
On my TX right now, beyond the basic:
AudiblePlayer (for audiobooks)
PocketTunes
Documents To Go (reads Office 2007 files better than OOo, and works better than PocketWord!)
TCPMP 0.66 -- GPL'd and plays TiVo's videos. CorePlayer is a non-GPL'd release of the same thing, with built-in AAC support.
Filez -- an OLD OOS file manager.
Google Maps, and a LiveJournal client.
"Eat Watch", the hacker's diet custom weight log.
HandDBase 3 -- a simple database program
HandyShopper -- a free as in beer shopping list program
And a whole bunch of games from PDAmill, a company that went out of business because it's games were too "non-palm" to sell well enough.
And beyond the list above, there's software to use the Palm as a remote control, emulate video game consoles, and connect to a windows desktop via desktop-sharing.
What the hell do you want to do with your PDA that Palm doesn't have software for? (And, for that matter, have you ever wondered why the biggest release for any new PDA platform, from PocketPC to Nokia's Linux things, is a Palm OS emulator?)
The hardware is fine, but there's no software to do what I want to do with it.
Until then, they're going to get raped by the PocketPC, because it has a more open platform, and the Blackberry, because it does the few things anyone cares about better.
The Palm Hardware is NOT fine. Why did the LifeDrive have only 32 MB of ram? Why doesn't the TX have a microphone OR a vibrating alarm? Why do my TX, my Treo 600, my friend's Centro, and my old zire 71 all use ENTIRELY different power and accessory connectors?
If PocketPC is ahead in the market, it's simply because they've gotten better hardware and newer releases. Palm hasn't released a new PDA in three years. THREE YEARS! And the darn things still make up 10% of their sales volume.
On a completely unrelated note, Palm is opening their platform in the only way they can, thanks to the most bone-headed management call a company can make. ("Palm OS" is no longer owned by Palm, y'know) They're going to have a Linux-based PDA OS out next year, code-named "Nova", and they'll either return to glory to sink to obscurity based on that.
I had a palm M105, which i loved very much (especially for it's capability to accept AAA Standard batteries and rechargables, which are available even in the middle of nowhere). It did what it should-it kept my Adresses, my Appointments and my notes - and was well readable in bright sunlight (simple plain monochrome LCD). Then I bought a Z31 (after the M105 was stolen). It wis not readable in Sunlight, but i overall appreciate it because you can use it as MP3-Player and the memory card gives you space to store dictionaries etc. In End of 2006 my beloved Nokia 6310i started to fail and it was clear i was going to Japan for my Job. So i decided to get a smartphone. I tried to find a Palm Treo to buy (i really would have liked it), but missing 3G just excluded the models from the list. Now, nearly two years later, i see still no Palm OS device with 3G. For me it's dead. I am missing a lot of the convenience of the palm's PIM functions on my Nokia E61, but i have gotten used to it. I am looking forward to the day when a Palm OS Emulator will appear for Symbian OS to run the old calendar app on a Version of a Nokia Phone with a touchscreen.