Crunch Time For WebOS, BlackBerry

GMGruman writes "Hewlett-Packard is planning to unveil its Palm WebOS strategy in a few weeks, while RIM is allegedly working up a new version of its popular Curve that uses the new BlackBerry OS 6 and its touch interface. WebOS has largely faded from view since HP bought it nine months ago, and RIM's been largely silent since its summer release of the BlackBerry Torch, its first successful modern BlackBerry, and the fall announcement of its PlayBook tablet. Meanwhile, it's been an Apple iOS and Google Android show at CES 2011, in the popular press, and in customers' hands. (Microsoft and Nokia essentially ceased to matter by Christmas 2010.) Is it too late for WebOS and BlackBerry? They're running out of time, and the public signs of their plans are not so positive. Still, the two 'also-ran' mobile OSes have a couple opportunities to resurrect themselves."

Comments

Not too late!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! "Microsoft and Nokia essentially ceased to matter by Christmas 2010" --- dream on my friend

On a serious note - I dont think its too late to come back for WebOS and RIM. WebOS is a robust and smooth OS that was sabotaged by Palm's mishandling. And as far as crackberry they have a strong enough market presense to take their time

Re:Not too late!

[postbigbang]

Let's see.

Big WebOS and Blackberry web stores with 100s of thousands of apps. Nope.

Cult status of the phone itself. Nope.

People across the world waiting up at stores for the next release, or waiting to upgrade their operating systems with glee. Nope.

Vast ecosystem of accessorizers, weird add-ons, and wicked strange looking cases. Nope.

I'll admit that WebOS is kind of kewl, and you can't deny the crack nature of Blackberries, but you can get that crack in droid and iOS. So, I don't think the poster is dreaming.

Re:Not too late!

[PCM2]

RIM has always enjoyed customer loyalty comparable only to Apple's. They don't call them "CrackBerrys" for nothing. But it's precisely because of this that they face a tough challenge: They need to evolve their product fast enough to keep up with the other smartphone platforms, but they can't change it so much that they alienate their hardcore base. RIM may have leaned too far toward conservatism, though, because their current figures show most of their new subscribers are coming from the lower-end handsets in their product range. That suggests the more savvy consumers with more money to spend are wandering off to iPhone and Android, which is bad, because "business types" represented RIM's hardcore demographic.

Re:Not too late!

[postbigbang]

Even the hardcore are taking a hard look at what you can do with other phones. Three months after the iPhone came out, it was forbidden in the board room, but everyone was curious anyway. Six months later, it was the counter-culture thing to have there, along with your CrackBerry. Then the Crackberry was pulled out less and less. The carrier-captive stupidity stopped a few more.

When you look at Droid 2 from Moto, or any one of a hundred other models, it does a lot of work, with a fat community of apps and support. iOS made itself the one to beat, or at least look kewl up against. RIM has tried to remarket the BB in this direction, but so far, it hasn't captured the imagination necessary to reignite sales and get growth. Failing something truly amazing and a community re-think/re-do, the business types aren't going to look at RIM first, but they'll still look.

Maemo and MeeGo

[TAiNiUM]

As if Maemo and MeeGo have already died? Maemo has a very active open source community and, even though MeeGo will supplant it, will live on for a long time.

Re:Premature to write off Microsoft

[Junta]

So I have a WebOS phone. I find the multi-tasking interface and frankly the menu for quick changes to the radio highly enjoyable. I took it for granted until I tried to navigate around on an Android phone. WebOS (and Blackberry is imitating it on Playbook) has a great way to interact with concurrently running apps and switching between them in full screen mode. The radio menu I didn't think was special, then I found myself working on an Android phone and having to jump out of the menu to go to system settings to do something with bluetooth that was much more immediately accessible on my Pre. Also, surprisingly, my phone had LEAP wireless support out of the gate and my peers were having to try to hand hack wpa_supplicant.conf to get the function out of their Android handsets, that didn't work out of the box. WebOS 2 has Cisco Anyconnect support baked in, but Android is not there yet either. The messaging app does a good job of putting everything (SMS, AIM, jabber, whatever) in one coherent interface.

From an API perspective, they completely screwed up by *not* having the 'PDK' from the get go. They foolishly thought Javascript+HTML5 was 'good enough', with no camera api, no microphone api, no 3D api. Their hardware features crappy, fixed-focus cameras. They rectified mostly the software side, with a nice OpenGL+SDK that makes it trivial to port linux apps (and evidentally iOS), but desperately need decent hardware. One thing they did *almost* just right was the integration of inductiive charging into the experience. They should never have had a non-capable back part, they should have had third-party access (added in WebOS 2), and they should have officially blessed a car-oriented usage of the technology.

So the big thing is they nailed the UI. On the surface, however, the 'big names' that created that have been poached. It's hard to say what will happen now. Microsoft and Google do have the disadvantage that they can't dictate every nth detail to the handset makers, which gives Blackberry, HP, and, of course, Apple, an interesting advantage for the most seamless experience. Apple's vision is clear and I'm not a fan of it myself, so I like an alternative. Palm came closest, but I don't know how Honeycomb, WebOS 2, and the next wave of Blackberry devices will pan out.

Re:He's off in some strange place

[Junta]

It gets worse as it goes. So first we say they need WP7 UI (which is the last UI I'd envy) on webOS core, but modernized (basically claiming the core is good, but not good at all... internally inconsistent), then goes on to say how HP needs to get away from Microsoft (the recommendation to 'buy' Windows Phone 7 UI seems to fly directly in the face of that.

What HP has to do is simple, and it might be too late. They need to release hardware that actually is on par with the industry (still no autofocus notably, and somewhat underpowerd CPU/GPU) and they need to basically continue the vision that was getting better on software (the HTML+Javascript *only* api was a disaster). With the brain-drain that obviously followed in the months after the acquisition, the webOS platform may be unsalvagable (*particularly* with a new CEO at HP pretty much explicitly saying the consumer space is less interesting).

Nokia totally ceased to matter...

[drolli]

I saw that when i was in China and Indonesia.

What kind of stupid article is that?

Nokia's market share for smartphones may be dropping but that is happening since they started to sell the Nokia 9000 communicator (Yes that thing could send email at a time when most people may just have heard of the net). Nokia is always having a few trial phones (e.g. the Nokia 9000 was one) to figure out if it works well, and then may decide for a radical switch in the second model (e,g, the 9210 switch to symbian), or trash the series. They have done that now with the N800/N900, so i think they will now pack the experiences frome these devices into a new one. The fact that some often sold symbian phones do not qualify as smart phones is no reason to write the platform off prematurely. I also have an Android device and i like it; however some things, e.g. the "everthing need to be linked to your gmail accocunt" idea to work correctly (e.g. sync/backup) is a little exaggerated. I already discovered some annoying things which my Nokia E61 from End of 2006 does, but my Android 2.2 device doesnt (connecting to an ad-hoc wireless network, using the PC via USB to conenct to the net - and yes there are situations when i dont need additional complications, namely when travelling. The E61 i still use connetc to everything to which it can connect).

I believe that meego paired with the philosophy of Nokia not to try to fuck the customer by forcing him into specific solutions but to just give the device all capabilities for connections which can be imagined will serve well. After seeing the many ways in which apple fucks the customers and google believe that they are not evil, i prefer companies selling me hardware (opposed to thinking of the Software they can put on the Hardware to "advertise" their services to me (or, in the case of Apple: force-feed me).

Re:Premature to write off Microsoft

[Yoshamano]

As a happy Palm Pre owner I wanted to echo the parent's view on webOS. A friend of mine who just recently switched from a Pre to an EVO comments on how tight the core OS is on the Pre compared to his EVO. He'd still be using his Pre if the hardware wasn't sub-par and the app selection wasn't lacking.

All of this reminds me a lot of BeOS. Superior from a technical standpoint. Lacking a development base and userbase coupled with market forces working strongly against it.

Hopefully webOS 2.0 (or in my case, 2.1) and the Palm Pre 2 are where webOS's and BeOS's stories part ways. If not, I imagine these things will resemble BeOS R5, an amazing piece of software far ahead of its time that quickly morphed into Be Inc.'s swan song.

BlackBerry is doing the right things

[Deviant]

I think that it is premature to rule out BlackBerry. I work in IT consulting and I saw many executives try an iPhone and end up going back to BlackBerry because they were just so fast/fluent with the devices. They had a button on the one side set to the calendar and another set to the email and knew all the keyboard shortcuts and it was truly amazing to see how quickly they could get things done. Not to mention that with BES (which they are now giving away for free to organisations under 2000 devices - which I imagine is the vast majority) you can do things like invite attendees to appointments in particular meeting rooms, see their availability and the rooms when scheduling the appointment, etc which are not possible with ActiveSync and particularly not with the iPhone. The enterprise features like being able to force policies which can configure pretty much every setting on the device, wirelessly deploy apps and updates, etc are pretty unrivalled as well.

I personally had a Moto Q9H WM6.1 device until I got my iPhone 3G and I was happy with the iPhone until I was given a company issued Torch at my new job. I am impressed - it is a great really solid and well constructed device compared with my iPhone 3G with nearly as good webkit browser, a better screen, better battery life, more RAM, great multitasking, a great 5 megapixel camera with flash, just as good Facebook and LinkedIn apps and with the above described better Exchange interaction via the company BES server it is a great product for me. I like the fact that it has both the touchscreen and a trackpad as moving the cursor around an email or a mouse cursor around a web page are sometimes better than tapping/holding on the touch-screen (though it can do that too). I like the fact it shows up like a USB disk when attached to a PC and I can just drop music and video files onto that drive and it just works for indexing/playing - even things like OGG/Divx which never worked with the iPhone unless you re-encoded them. I am sure future versions when they get their QNX OS and a higher-res screen and faster processor etc will be even better.

I am waited with great anticipation for the next generation of BlackBerry. The current generation will work just fine for me until then and I don't really miss the iPhone. The Torch is doing what it needed to do - keep their existing customers happy with a solid device better than a iPhone 3G/3GS this generation while they pull a rabbit out of the hat next one which should really be a contender...