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Does HP + Palm = Facepalm?
ChiefMonkeyGrinder submitted a bit of commentary on yesterday's news that
Hewlett-Packard was buying Palm. From TFA:
"When I first read the news that HP was buying Palm for $1.2 billion, my first reaction was that HP had lost its marbles ('clueless' was how I tweeted it). Why, I wondered, did it need to pay $1.2 billion for a dying platform when it could have used the increasingly popular Android for nothing? (OK, it probably picked up a few useful patents, as well.) I also thought that it didn't have the resources to enter the extremely competitive area of smartphones."
I totally thought âÅ too.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
HP competitor Acer (number 2 in notebooks worldwide behind HP) is coming out with a line of smartphones of its own, and it needs this purchase to leapfrog them.
A ready-built entry into the market. Just dump the Palm OS, bring in Android and there you have it.
called expertise. Palm has a lot of talented employees, a lot of IP, and a lot of faithful users. These things will all be good for HP if they're really serious about competing in the mobile arena. Many companies fail because their business plan/marketing sucks, and not because they don't make a good product. I'm ambivalent about Palm's stuff, but other people, like my father, is absolutely fanatical about his Palm gear.
My guess is that HP, like Apple, sees computing appliances as the death knell for general purpose computers. They want to make sure they're still around for awhile.
That would be if facebook buys palm.
Instead of the iPaq, we'll have the iPom.
But the article basically explains why anyway. The majority of mobile platforms are Linux based, and keeping WebOS strengthens the Linux ecosystem. And objectively, driver support is where most of the issues are going to come into play. Between RIM, iPhone OS, Android, and WinMo, the market is already too fragmented for anyone hoping to reach everyone with a single native application to do so. What's going to be important is what you can plug into your phone (monitor, keyboard, printer, flash drive, etc. ) Apps are icing on the cake, and browser apps for the most part can get all the functionality of a native app. And given that the majority run Webkit, you can even get away with not testing on too many platforms. (Screen size and dimensions are the bigger issue anyway.)
The author does state in the article that he was mistaken about the amount of resources HP has, which amounts to at least $25 billion USD in cash on hand, at least 10x more than HTC and Lenovo (the other big Palm suitors from the past week) have in cash.
When compared to the other major companies in the mobile space, like Nokia, RIM, HTC, or Motorola, Palm seems like a very 'cheap' purchase in order to acquire an entire new line of business, along with their entire patent portfolio.
Additionally, it seems other articles mention the same patent concerns since Apple is now going after HTC (but not Palm).
http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-htc-patent-suit-could-be-another-reason-for-someone-to-buy-palm-2010-3
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/28/apple-vs-palm-the-in-depth-analysis/
www.google.com
WebOS is a fantastic OS from a user perspective -- the card metaphor for multitasking is very intuitive and the whole design of the interface is easy and elegant and *fun*. It would be a perfect fit for that tablet thing HP is working on.
I have a Pre and despite a few issues with battery life and a wish for a larger screen I think it's a great phone. Most information about the phone is provided by members of the computer press who are too lazy and entranced by their iphones to bother giving the matter any serious thought.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
They're probably just looking to expand out of the consumer computing devices market their pretty much locked in right now. This could be HP setting itself up to become a conglomerate company or it could be the first step to them completely changing their product base.
This purchase is totally
The best thing that can be said about this is that it's a really bad investment to pay a billion dollars for Palm. HP is showing a lot of guts in refusing to accept the presumptive Apple vs Google conflict as the definition of the mobile computing war. Generally I would say that HP doesn't have the corporate culture to be anything other than a big irrelevant company like Dell, but if they keep taking big risks and standing behind them that could change. Most likely they will fail, but it would certainly make the next decade more interesting.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
In some of the news reports on this, I saw repeated references to the fact that "webOS can scale" or something to that effect. I don't know too much about webOS vs. Android vs. Chrome, but my guess here is that HP is buying Palm for tablets and MIDs, not for smartphones. I doubt HP has much desire to go against the HTCs and Samsungs of the smartphone world in hardware, and they're not naturally a software company (a la Google and Microsoft with their respective mobile OSs).
More likely, I would bet, is that HP has doubts that Android will scale well to tablets (current offerings in the market notwithstanding), with their relatively higher computing power than phones, and their experience with the Slate is probably indicating that Windows 7, despite being a good desktop OS, is not scaling too well down to the netbook level and below. Thus, they might be leaving open the option of pushing a tablet/MID level of computers based on webOS to compete with the iPad on iPhone OS.
And, if that doesn't work, as others have said, Palm has both a valuable name and lots of talented employees that can become HP's mobile arm, thus allowing them to have their asses covered and prevent shareholder panic.
Is your hand bigger than your face? Lets see, turn your palm towards your face...
IMHO, this purchase is about control and product differentiation. HP wants to take control of the whole stack, not just the hardware, and they want their mobile device to stand out from the crowd, like Apple's does. If they had built a phone that runs Android or Windows Mobile, they'd be at the mercy of Google or Microsoft, respectively, when it comes to developing the software. And, said software wouldn't be significantly different than the same software running on anyone else's devices.
To me there's 2 fairly clear things to be said about HP's buy:
They don't like Windows Mobile 7, they already use Windows Mobile in their devices, but they must have decided 7 was uncompetitive and too closed down by Microsoft.
They don't like Google, they like selling big expensive enterprise servers, so selling a device which emphasizes connecting the the gCloud was kind of out of the question.
Of course HP has a long heritage of mobile design via other buyouts, the original iPaq from Compaq came out of a research project from DEC. It'll be interesting to see how their heritage melds with that of their one time main competitor in mobile devices.
They are able of the best and the worst at the same time: Their old COMPAQ laptop division who's now called Elitebook are in the top best machines. But their consumer branch (Pavillon) are the worst machine ever made. They have a good marketing, they are everywhere and everybody use their product but not many people loved them. When you have warranty the service is great but if you don't and it is a common issue, they will deny the problems, and wait for a court order before making a recall which they will fix by putting exactly the same flawed part. I have tons of broken HP machine coming to my office and it is always a well-known common problem. They make good printer, but they load their half working driver with crap, spyware, crapware... They also are responsible for the ink markup, they encourage customer to buy a new printer every time the ink runs out. They spy their competitor and their customer. I don't know where they are going with palm, I don't even know if it will be for better or worst....
Oh right, this joke doesn't work on the internet. Thanks for trying, though.
When I was a young buck working my first developer job in college Compaq had the best little handheld ever created...it was the iPhone of 1998...it was iPaq. It ran Windows CE, which is shit today because it's hardly changed since 1996. However, in 1998, it was amazing. We developed some software for them (and the customers went with $4000 ruggedized B&W models as opposed to the $500 or $600 iPaq, which was awesome. HP bought Compaq, started making the iPaq with cheaper and cheaper parts. it got shittier and shittier and slower and slower and Microsoft focused on bastardizing it into a phone and HP said meh. Then iPhone comes along (which I have and love btw), and everyone's like, oooh, it's never been done before, well arguably not as good, but still, iPaq as a bad-ass machine in its day and HP fucked it...guess what they'll do with Palm, who it could easily be argued beat out iPaq only to fuck themselves with incompetence. While I'm at it, fuck Android...bring on the flamebait. The irony of the parallels between the phone computer was between Apple/iP* and Google/Android and Apple and Microsoft back in the day is clear. Microsoft copied from Apple and released an open, but shoddy platform. Google is copying from Apple and releasing an open, but shoddy platform. I may be alone here, but I hope Apple wins this one. I'm sure I'm alone in being excited about actual innovation coming out of Redmond with Windows Phone 7...but it looks like their glossing over some clunkiness (typical).
Posit:
The HP buyout offer was announced after the closing bell yesterday - $1.2bn, or $5.70 - and after-hours trading traded $PALM around $5.88.
Proposition 1: The only reason someone would pay more for these shares than the tender offer is if they think another offer is coming, and the last time I checked, the only other interested party was Lenovo.
Proposition 2: I anxiously await a bidding war between two desktop manufacturers for control of $PALM, a company with a beautiful, technologically sound, poorly managed OS. Why? Because they *also* own Be's old technology - a beautiful, technologically sound, poorly managed OS.
Proposition 3: To properly modernize BeOS, whoever buys them should work cooperatively with the Haiku project for things like, say, Wi-Fi or USB, and in return offer Haiku patent amnesty under $PALM's patent-folio umbrella.
So, who do I want to win? Neither, really, since whoever buys them will focus on the handsets alone and neglect the fact that they FRICKING OWN BE, INC., and thus an opportunity to develop a netbook-OS that doesn't suck.
HP's attempts at open-source relations have been like a high-school backseat tryst: HP climaxes early, loses interest immediately and leaves the eager and supple open-source community sexually frustrated, so to speak. Lenovo has been, at best, benign and neglectful. They at least offer the open-source alternative to Windows on their hardware, but it's not exactly advertised, and because M$ subsidizes hardware with OEM buy-ins, it's actually more expensive an option.
Perfect world option: I'd like to see Google buy them, incorporate the niceties of WebOS into Android, and what's useful from Be's 15-yr-old OS be merged into ChromeOS. Competitors would cry foul but, come on, Android phones already outsell Palm phones, and both are dwarfed by Apple and Blackberry
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
I posted on the earlier summary about how even my ancient Palm Tungsten E2 functions very well as a retarded little laptop and won't bore anybody by repeating myself. I will, however, note that with a thorough upgrade and proper marketing, this small device (or it's grandkid) could effectively replace a lot of bigger, more power-hungry devices.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
This defect? http://hplies.com/
Why? Why would the Compaq brand name annoy Jobs?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
... if tablets were an actual market? Where's the customer base for this? If tablet computing, and not the mobile expertise, is the justification for that price, they're really crazy.
Dog is my co-pilot.
Seriously, did the article writer not read ANY of the readily available information about the purchase?
Possibly he was too busy wanking off onto his Android, as he is apparently a MASSIVE Droid Fanboi.
However, had he actually read up on it he would have noted that HP is MASSIVELY interested in WebOS. Particularly in bringing WebOS into the TABLET market to compete directly with the iPad. Hell, the HP execs practically reached through the internet and slapped us all silly with their enthusiasm for WebOS on a tablet!
Of course, there is also the fact that while HP had a very strong showing in the early days of smart phones, their recent offerings have been very lackluster. With HP acting as partner and "sugardaddy" to Palm, Palm can begin to put out some really impressive smartphone offerings, along with HP offering the fantastic WebOS on an HP tablet. It's a great combination, and the WebOS platform has a great future ahead of it.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
HP is currently garbage. It makes sense that they would make a move like this. Not one of their products is worth purchasing, and their customer 'support' is appalling.
sorry for palm loyalists, but you know a company have no future if it changed hands several times already.
palm started as independent, was sold to US Robotics, then became part of 3COM when they acquired USR, then spun off, splited in software and hardware, merged software and hardware again, now they're HP... uffff !!! got tired just of typing that. thing is, no one at palm knows how to sell their stuff right or survice in a cut-throat environment. when they were pretty much alone in the PDA market, they were doing fine. now against heavy competition in the smartphone busines ? not so much. if the didn't get bought, they'd have ended just like comodore, bankrupt despite the excelent amiga computer.
now the disturbing stuff:
despite the benefit that now i'll be able to buy a palm pre with employee discount, i think palm will end up as apolo and compaq. compaq is now just a brand for a line of el cheapo PCs, appolo was used some time ago in a line of cheap printers. in this newest acquisition, all the brain capital from palm will be diluted inside the body of this behemoth, the products that directly compete with other HP offerings will be axed, and the brand re-used for some other HP products.
yes, i know. sad but true.
[disclaimer] i know this by experience. i used to work for EDS, now "HP enterprise services".[/disclaimer]
What ? Me, worry ?
There is no evidence that Android and its model – a free ubiquitous operating system running on a plethora of devices – will ever dominate the profitable end of the market. That’s a commodity market where being adequate and low priced is what it takes. Free and open doesn’t mean success in consumer markets. Linux on the desktop anyone?
Apple has demonstrated very well the advantages of a tightly integrated optimized stack especially in mobile devices. They and RIM together account for the great majority of the profits accrued in the entire cell phone market. Apple’s personal computers are far more profitable than generic PCs.
I see HP wanting to go up against Apple in the mobile device space using Apple’s own business model. Why would they care to enter an Android market where it’s so hard to differentiate themselves? If they want to push volume with low profit margins they already have that with their PCs. Do they want to repeat that? I doubt it. They’d end up losing to the Koreans and Chinese.
Palm has been successful – technically – producing devices coupled to operating systems that offer significant consumer value. What they lack is capital. They also lack a Steve Jobs figure – a visionary willing to take risks who isn’t answerable to anyone in the short term. (He has his track record to back him up.) Will HP identify or hire such a visionary and then will they give that person the freedom to execute on their vision? If they do they will be a formidable competitor to Apple. If all they offer are some technical skills, capital and manufacturing capacity, then they will be competing in the lower less profitable tiers with the likes of HTC, Motorola and Nokia.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
HP has plans to be one of the last standing in the consolidation of technology companies.
The patent portfolio alone is likely worth the purchase price even if it is only used defensively.
HP likely has no plans to ONLY do devices on WebOS as diversity in business is the best way to win.
Most everyone thinks WebOS is a great platform and has only lacked the advertising budget and deep pockets to drive it forward. The Mobile market for smart devices hasn't reached adolescence yet and HP just cheaply put themselves in a great position to be one of the last standing in the mobile market.
Post back when you actually *try* to write a complex WebKit app that runs well on all the webkit platforms unchanged. WebOS / Android / iPhone Its a sheer and utter fantasy that because its "WebKit" its "write once run everywhere". Maybe someday, but not today.
"A few useful patents?" Palm was making touchscreen handhelds before touchphones were conceived. They likely have a plethora of patents that the iPhone and other touch phones clearly violate. I really had hoped HTC would have bought them or maybe Google. Thus shoring up the patent situation and leveling the playing field. Essentially, that would have given the big 3 (MS, Apple, Google) a near equal amount of fire power thus staving off a global, thermo-nuclear patent war. HP did okay with iPaq's but I just don't see them as a phone player.
I see this more as a move to back up the tablets they are making, than an attempt to get into mobile (though they also have that now as well, with shipping phones to support and enhance).
Android is not as well suited to the tablet space, exactly because of the physical buttons (the Pre has one physical button like the iPhone).
The issue is that with the larger form factor of the tablet, physical buttons become awkward to hit. Also what side do you put them on - with a tablet it can make sense to use it in any orientation, but the more buttons you have to hit the harder they are to find when you need them, and Android has that menu button you have to use often while using apps.
The buttons android offers make a lot of sense in something that is always held the same way in the hand, but doesn't scale well to larger form factors.
One example.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My workstation is an elitebook and I get a couple of bluescreens a day(!). On the other hand, my Dell Precision M70 from 5 years ago runs as good as new... although that may just be the benefit of running Ubuntu at home versus XP at work. But even with XP on my M70, I never had the same kind of issues I have now with the HP.
That's not to say that the EliteBooks (and enterprise-grade systems in general) aren't worlds better than their consumer-grade trash, but still, there are far better options.
Is there anyone around here that has not totally given up on HP's products? They have some of the worst customer service in the business and their PCs are inferior to the competition, without exception. Even their former forays into the handheld market were incompetent at best; I still have an iPaq H2215 with the rubber coming off of the sides, what a piece of garbage.
The only bright spot is that this makes it that much more likely that HP will implode in a puff of logic.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Although John Gruber is one of the worlds biggest Apple fanboys (and can, therefore, be a tad biased at time) he hit the nail right on the head with this post called Herd Mentality.
In short, the only way to win is when you control both the hardware and the software. Companies who do not, generally get locked into a price war with little to nothing else to differentiate with.
Why be another Android purveyor when, if you get it right, you can be something much bigger and better? Of course, whilst owning both means you get a chance to win, it doesn't mean you can't lose (as Palm has shown).
Granted, HTC have done well, but they're still ultimately constrained by third parties who may or may not share HTC's best interests and aspirations.
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Huge mistake, just like merging with Compaq. Their slogan.. "Lets do Amazing" or "Innovation" but, where is it??
That's a very good example of what I am talking about....
Vanilla Android isn't cutting it, so everyone has to brew their own "secret sauce"
I don't think it is necessarily a negative to be able to provide customized experiences across carriers and devices. *shrugs*
Reply to That ||
"didn't have the resources to enter the extremely competitive area of smartphones" ??? The HP IPAQ smartphones had more features and more capability in 2003 than the so called 'invention of the year' iPhone when it was launched in 2006. I hope HP kicks Apples ass.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
There are a lot of homebrew applications that modify the UI and various aspects of apps. I have an addon that does exactly what you say, though only for text messages.
While Palm doesn't directly support those apps it doesn't try to brick your phone when it finds them either.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Actually HP has a long history with Unix, both HP-UX and Digital's Unix product. They also have a long history of producing handhelds. This is a really smart move for them, if it works. Right now, they have this iPad-like thing, which is really cool, but only runs Windows, which, frankly, isn't going to be that great on it, and has been a failure in the same market for years. Now they have Palm OS, which is actually a really great product, despite its failure to capture the hearts and minds of enough customers. This means that they are in position to make a genuine run up against the iPad. Plus, they can throw out the x86 cpu in their tablet and replace it with an ARM CPU that will perform better and suck much less battery power.
So yeah, this is a really smart move, and I'm excited to see what they do with it. HP has a lot of management that's skilled at foot-shooting, but if they can get over their cultural tendency towards NIH and really invest in this product, it could be pretty cool.
I thought the same thing initially but then I thought about it a little more and found one way it could work. HP obviously just doesn't know how to make/market mobile devices (see the puny sales from Jornada and iPaq) so just slapping Android into an iPaq isn't going to help.
Instead, buy Palm who is actually pretty darn good at it and give their management and engineering teams gobs of money and marketing muscle to work with. Then buy out of the Sprint exclusivity and they got a chance to move some phones.
On the other hand, if Palm disappears into the HP borgness then it'll likely be mismanaged to hell by the same people who've failed for a decade to do anything meaningful in the mobile market.
Didn't Palm end up with BeOS?
I was relieved to hear about how you tweeted about the news. It's not enough for people to say how they feel about something, because then we're left wondering, "But how did they tweet about it? Is there something more in a tweet somewhere that I'm missing out on?"
I wish more people would post about how they tweet about something, or blog about what they tweeted, or tweet about what they tweeted about something else. In a Utopian future, Slashdot "stories" will no longer be posts about webpages on other sites. Instead they'll be posts about how we all tweeted about something we heard or saw, or what we read in someone else's tweets about stuff.
I've retweeted that it's "clueless" and I've also tweeted that I'm glad you tweeted about it and I've also tweeted that I wrote this slashdot reply about all this and I've also tweeted that I feel a lot more comfortable now that everything that needs to be tweeted has been tweeted, so there's no awkward gaps in our communication. Oh, one final tweet: thanks again!
Wait, we're supposed to respect the analysis of someone who, by his own admission, "still [has] HP mentally filed in the box marked 'printer companies'"?
And the first product will be... ...the slap?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Sure, but the buttons they added are really more for system control and not app interaction. They are all optional, not required the way Android hardware buttons like Menu are. An android app knows those buttons will be there and relies on that fact.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When you have warranty the service is great
No, it's not. I had a single broken keycap on my warranteed HP Mini 110. Once we established that they couldn't possibly do something as easy as drop a keycap in an envelope and mail it to me, the case manager (yes, I escalated!) said that the only option was for me to ship it in for repairs. Oh, and they they wouldn't pay the $20 shipping cost.
Me: I thought it was under warranty.
CM: It is.
Me: So you're paying for shipping?
CM: No. You have to pay shipping.
Me: So I have to pay, out of pocket, to fix a part covered under warranty?
CM: No! The repair is free! You only have to pay shipping!
Me: Then it's not free.
CM: But it is! We're not charging you to fix it.
Me: When I get my bank statement, will I have $20 less my account than if I hadn't had this problem fixed?
CM: Yes.
Me: Then I have to pay out of pocket to have it fixed.
CM: No, blah, lather/rinse/repeat.
They "compromised" and allowed me to pay a carrier directly instead of buying HP's own shipping label. I ended up paying more than $20, but I was perfectly happy to.
Oh, and for the punch line: when I got it back a week and a half later, the packing sheet stated that they'd replaced the keycap. And the hard drive. And the motherboard. Oh, and they generously fixed it for free, even though they'd determined that a user-installed part had caused the problem. I don't know whether the part that broke my keyboard was the sticker I put on the outside of the case, or if it was the 2GB DIMM I installed and that they moved over to the new motherboard before returning it. I swear to God I'm not exaggerating a word of that. I still have the packing slip at home as a souvenir.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
My experience is very diffrent. I send 10 to 20 units a year under warranty; They ship me a box with a prepaid waybill, I put the machine in the box and use their waybill, then I receive it fixed. No charge. I have nothing negative to say about their warranty service.
A silly comment no doubt, but does that qualify him as an idiot? Comments like yours demonstrate why the public at large is so convinced that IT guys are unfriendly people whose opinions must never be challenged. I'm not targetting you specifically, I see this "your wrong, so you suck" line trotted out on /. all too much. I just ask that you remember the last time you were wrong aut something, did it help having somebody insult your intelligence?
Give it up. BeOS is dead and never coming back.
BeOS isn't dead! It's alive and working in a supermarket in Scunthorpe!
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I agree but Vzw must have been working for a quite a while on getting the license for "Droid" from LucasFilm. Notice that the original Droid was a Motorola but the Droid Incredible is from HTC, so Droid is a Verizon brand. I'm pretty sure Palm wouldn't want their "splash" phone to have a brand they don't own and Vzw probably wanted their first Droid phone to be just "Droid" not "Droid Pre".
Next is AT&T. Yeah, they are going to risk the wrath of The Steve cutting off their money-truck. Notice that AT&T doesn't have much beyond Blackberries competing against the iPhone. The Android OS devices are nerfed and WinMo 6.5 is obviously end of life.
So that leaves Sprint. It's bigger than TMobile, seems to have more advertising dollars for devices, and has a history with Palm.
Soooo yeah. It was the best thing that Palm could pull off.
I've been on slashdot so long I'm starting to get out of touch with the cool stuff if it ain't on slashdot.
You might have heard of this thing called *corporate politics* where merit means nothing and technical considerations be damned when it comes to someone's career. All the expertise in the world means nothing if HP manages Palm the way they've managed their other failures *cough* ipaq *cough*.
Let's face the facts, here. Ever since the merger with Compaq, they've been on the downhill slide. Just the other day, I had to download drivers from HP's website because, while they can ship a workstation with a Windows Vista DVD, they can't seem to figure out that they also need to ship the drivers with it. So I'm stuck with this high-end HP workstation running at 800 x 600 with no network connection. Had I not had a corporate network, it would have remained no more useful than a doorstop.
And my laptop is no picnic either. Yes, it's made by HP, and has the unenviable distinction of frequently being unable to figure out which display to use (HINT: when I'm not connected to a monitor, you should turn the LCD on. For some reason, HP can't figure this out. Worse, when it can, it often resets the display resolution to something like 800 x 600, instead of the native 1440 by 900.) In the last year or so, HP has really dropped the ball on quality, and it's starting to show. When I can discover major flaws within a few hours of use, it's clear their QA department isn't being allowed to do their job.
But I digress. I've found that companies that make awful products do so not because the engineers are idiots, but typically because technical decisions are made for political reasons. Palm's expertise in this area is irrelevant, because the corporate culture at HP seems to hinder whatever innovation Palm would have brought to the table. Just look at how the ipaq flopped.
And this really doesn't bring anything to the crappy-computer market HP seems intent on cornering. Palm devices actually work well, are intuitive, easy to use, and not all that expensive. I'm not sure how HP will manage to incorporate a well-built, well-designed product into their line of decidedly mediocre products. People will buy crappy computers if they can save a buck, but Palm buyers tend to expect their devices to work, and work well. Palm buyers tend to be more sophisticated than HP users, so I'm not sure how well HP will market to them.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The case manager told me directly that netbooks are handled differently because they have small profit margins. Their service might be good on items they actually want to sell you.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Why do Android "physical" buttons have to be physical?
I thought about that as well, but the problem is they have to be relatively large to be useful - and that means quite a strip of pixels on the display you can't use for the application.
Worse though, it would mean a custom build of AndroidOS, that you would have to wait for the tablet makers to add into whatever official Google update came down the pike... perhaps Google will see the need for this and add it at some point.
I also think that currently you are not allowed to use Android unless you meet the spec, which again includes the real physical buttons. But again, something in the future Google could modify to allow for virtual buttons on tablets - but that's not true yet, so there is still some ways to go before Android tablets can overcome this.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I vote for H.PeePalm. :)
I've said it time and time again--Apps are not a major decision factor for me when purchasing a smartphone ; they're great but I'm looking for something that at the core does email, messaging, contacts, calendars and calling really, really, well. This palm pre in my hand is truly a revolutionary device...The iphone cannot touch it. It doesn't matter that I'm coming from a 1st gen iphone, the OS and user interface are pretty much the same up through the 3gs...Finally I'm not fighting my phone.
Another post from me over at precentral:
My Last post was when I first purchased the Pre back in December of 09.
I'm not going to rehash what's already out there...just point out things that surprised me coming from the iPhone.
THE GOOD: WEB OS is the mobile platform of the future, here NOW. Notifications are handled unobtrusively and elegantly: Receive an email? Miss a Call? New track playing (music app, even Pandora!!!). Get a new mention on twitter (tweed does not req. that app be open to receive notifications). A slick news ticker style bar keeps these constant streams of information organized and always at my finger tips. This is much more efficient than the pop up/ badge notification system on my iphone.
USB drive mode. This means freedom from that headache of a program iTunes. +1 palm, +1
The Physical Keyboard is awesome. It's great to be able to A - keep all of my screen real estate while entering in text fields and B- have the ability to search for just about anything from contacts to google from any screen.
The Back Panel Mirror is a slick touch...and much appreciated for the times I need to do a quick once over.
The convenience of always having the system menu at the top. I can instantly toggle wifi, bluetooth, led flashlight (nifty patch, hehe), and airplane mode no matter what application is in use.. On my iPhone to toggle anything I had to close my app...open the pref. app, toggle, then close that pref. app and re-open the previous app. Needless to say a huge waste of time!
TOUCHSTONE: Love how easy it is to charge and the auto speaker/ auto answer features that are enabled when mounted to the base.
I think in the long haul, WEB OS will come out as a top performer with widespread adoption.
i agree
LOL'ed - literally.
And that doesn't happen very often.
I love the Pre, and I knew everything about it before it went on sale, but that's because I'm a gadget junkie. Palm/Sprint/Verizon/AT&T have screwed up marketing this thing from day one. Palm went with the weird albino girl talking metaphysics and leaving everyone with the feeling she was advertising some kind of new-age book or something. Sprint was a little better, at least showing the Pre in ads, but I don't think any of those ads really showcased the Pre, more of a mention among other points. Verizon and AT&T? I don't think I've seen any major advertising pushing the Pre from them, they tend to focus on their networks (download while calling for AT&T, coverage area for Verizon) and spend less time on individual phones.
Ultimately, I blame Palm for this. Apple didn't try to rely on AT&T to get their message out, they went straight for the customer with ads that were entertaining and informative, as far as commercials go, about the iPhone. Palm put out 3 commercials that left people confused about what the product even was, let alone why they'd want it......
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
the best part is, no one will ever read this
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!