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Sony/Palm To Team Up
diane wrote to us about the latest joint press release: Sony and Palm are going to be teaming up, to make "Wireless Music, Video Devices." Palm will also start to use Sony's memory stick format as part of the deal, a response to the pressure from Handspring's devices. Diane also noted that this makes Sony one of the first Windows' licensees to go with the PalmOS over WinCE, another sign that WinCE is in some troubled waters.
I own a Palm III and have ordered Visor (it hasn't arrived yet). It's hard to say how much "pressure" is being placed on Palm by Handspring and the other clones. My definition of pressure may not be the same as yours (unless we're talking force divided by surface area of course). Palm devices have been dropping in price since Handspring arrived on the scene however. I recently saw the Palm IIIx at Buy.com for $259, just a little more than the Visor deluxe but with half the memory.
And is the Handspring COMPLETELY code-compatible?
The Handspring Visor series runs PalmOS 3.1, the same as the Palm IIIx and Palm V. Its ROM is not flash-upgradeable however. So it can't use software like FlashPro to store memory in ROM that isn't being taken up by the OS.
Another issue is that Palm recently released Palm OS 3.3 which must be installed in flash ROM, so the Visor can't be upgraded to this version of the OS. But Palm usually releases upgrades to its OS in RAM anyway. So this might not be as much of a handicap as one would think.
Upcoming... palms with tactile feedback?
Hanspring and the initial reviews of the Visor claim its buttons have very nice tactile feedback.
Does this
I considered a Sony digital camera recently and bought an Olympus C-2500L because it comes with both SmartMedia and CompactFlash slots, and I wasn't locked into Olympus as a memory vendor. I put 160MB in there between them, at a price I could never have approached using Sony Memory Sticks.
It seems to me that if we buy hardware that uses Sony memory sticks, we're locked in to one vendor and will pay higher prices. Are they even licensing memory stick production to anyone else?
Thanks
Bruce Perens
P.S. The Olympus C-2500L is wonderful. Still film is dead.
Bruce Perens.
Yeah just to throw my hat into the ring here I was really surprised when I took a look at Sony, Inc.'s prospectus the other day. The most profitable division of their company is, by far, the Playstation division. I guess I had already envisioned them at this technological behemoth - churning out multi-thousand dollar Wega's and XBR-2 sets by the millions, not to mention their record company and motion picture studio. Is it that these don't turn as much profit, even though they're shipping more product? It seems like there is just a lot more money in general in the motion picture/recording/consumer electronics market than in selling PSXs, but I've been forced to reconsider as of late.
--
"Some people say that I proved if you get a C average, you can end up being successful in life."
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
Sony is in pretty much every market around...besides the gigantic consumer electronics force, they've got PCs, the PSX2 (which Sony wants to pretty much be the main machine in your house; forget the PC!), and now Palm...they're teaming up with everyone. And not only that, they're making their own OS.
Maybe this time we'll get a more benevolent ruler...
Then again, I could be wrong.
Sony is only second to apple as being the king of industrial design. The only thing that had kept me away from PalmPDA's are the design. Granted the PalmV looked nice, but it was very expensive for my taste. Now we might have some nice looking devices at a price that won't empty my wallet. On a side note... I'm acutally kind of glad that its not apple and palm teaming up. Nobody wants the iPalm.
If they make a good product (you seem to like yours) why don't you want them to have a big share? That means cheaper prices for new palm devices. The incentive is to work w/ palm becuase they apparently have they duckies in order. MS got hammered partly because they wouldn't let anyone work with them. They wanted to buy everyone out.
I'm going to get flamed for this, but I've got to say it anyway. Anyone else out there becoming afraid that Palm is getting too much market share? Last I heard, Palm had somewhere between 65% and 85% of the handheld PDA market.
Granted, I own a Palm, and I love it. However, if 3Com/Palm get such a high market share, where is their incentive to innovate with the platform? The desire to get people to upgrade is one incentive to improve it, but you know the company will run faster with the competition nipping at it's heals.
World Beach List, my latest project.
Sony is peeved at MS' overtures into the gaming console market, which comprises about 30% of Sony's profits. They will be aligning themselves with any company that has competing technology against MS. They've recently signed a deal with Sun to foster the spread of Jini in consumer devices.
MS still has not learned how to work with companies outside of the computing environment (Sony is not just a computer company, as we all know). They made the same mistake with the banking industry. They are trying to buy up broadband but that won't work with the consumer device market.
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
You have to wonder if Sony would have been willing to do this before Judge Jackson's finding of fact was released. Now that Microsoft will probably start to loose its grip on the market I think we can expect to see more team ups between MS licensees and MS competitors with superior products. As the software giant falls we will probably see a lot more innovative ideas coming about thanks to companies that could not previously team up due to MS pressure.
Now when will I be able to get an add on to play FF8 on my pilot?
~Caliban
The real problem with Sony here is their penchant for closed or proprietary formats and devices.
What about it sony? You are big enough to force the specs to be publicly released. Because you don't force the specs to be released, we Linux users are forced to wait for the chip to be laboriously reverse engineered by determined geeks. This just hurts your reputation, and hurts it more than you know. So get out your pencils and do some figuring on the value of making friends with 1,000,000 geeks.
The same goes for the stupid winmodem in all the newer VAIO's, also with secret specs. I was forced to lay out an additional $100 for an AT-command compatible pcmcia modem.
My advice to any Linux user about getting a VAIO: don't. Wait until Sony does something about their undocumented hardware. Look at other laptops in the meantime. Email Sony, tell them you'll buy a VAIO as soon as specs for the sound/video chip and the modem are publicly released. Look at other laptops in the meantime. Don't buy a VAIO.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
All it takes is something like a palm pilot with built in Richochet and an audio jack (there have been PDAs with one but not the other), and then someone like me in California will be able to walk around listening to a small college radio station in New Zealand.
Problems:
(1) Bandwidth
(2) Battery life
If these two problems are solved to the extent that you could listen to online radio stations for a whole day, then much much more cool things would be possible than just listening to NZ radio stations.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
The real problem with Sony here is their penchant for closed or proprietary formats and devices. They were into that 2.88 MB floppy drive for a while, then the mini-disc, and now they're pushing this memory stick when it seems to me that it provides very few advantages over the industry standard flash memory.
Who knows how well they'll operate in an environment where they have to get along with a number of different devices.
Hotnutz.com
Memory stick, phooey! And is it just me, or does Sony's prorietary "ATRAC3" music format sound suspiciously like "8-track v.3"?
:)
While I welcome several aspects of this (Sony teaming up with Palm instead of WinCE, motivation to boost Palm hardware cpu power, general competition), I'm a little disappointed that it'll push Palm further down a proprietary road. I'm simply not interested in buying into any technology that has hand-slapping of perceived-errant consumers built into it. No Sony memory sticks for me. Maybe my next PDA will be a Visor. But then again, the idea of playing 8-tracks with my Palm is strangely appealing...
I think not...(*poof*)
As good as this news seems, I have to wonder where the Palm platform is headed in terms of expandability. I just ordered a Visor Deluxe with the Springboard expansion slot to replace my Palm III. Then along comes the TRGPro with Compact Flash. Now we've got Sony (PalmMan?) with the memory stick.
That's three, count 'em three, incompatible standards for one computing platform. The Springboard module is bigger than CF so you can make a CF to Springboard adapter.
But what about the memory stick? Granted its supposed to be as small as a stick of gum. So you could probably squeeze it onto the same device as a Springboard or CF slot but we're talking about a device that's the size of a deck of cards here. There just isn't much room for expansion slots.
So you're going to have the situation where one technology will catch on and the others will fall by the wayside. If you bet on the wrong one, you wind up with a hand held Beta VCR. That's a bit of an exageration since you could still use the device as an organizer and handheld computer, just like the Palm Pilot. And it will still run rings aroung WinCE in terms of usability.
I would guess that the memory stick will die out as a technology. It only seems good enough for, well memory while CF and the Springboard are much more versatile.
Does this
While I know about NT's disadvantages compared to 'the Unix approach' of operating systems by personal experience, I have no clue about those OS's that have to work with scarce ressources like WinCE, PalmOS etc. Any URL's with a fair comparison? To become more on-topic -- is there a real technical reason for Sony to drop WinCE or is it just the fact that Microsoft may not be the most pleasant company to do business with? The article gave no background on that...
I've been waiting for someone to pull this off for some time. All it takes is something like a palm pilot with built in Richochet and an audio jack (there have been PDAs with one but not the other), and then someone like me in California will be able to walk around listening to a small college radio station in New Zealand.
If you've been paying any attention to what the radio industry is like in the United States you'd know how supremely cool this is. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) controls access to the airwaves. No new frequencies have been allocated to radio in most urban areas in over half a century, and there's been a huge amount of corporate consolidation in radio: it all sounds the same because it's all owned by the same people. And on top of this, the FCC has censorship power, with some very vaugely defined rules about what you're allowed to say on the air (nothing "obscene", "indeceny" is allowed only late at night, announcers can make "no direct calls to action", and there's that odd distinction between advertising and underwriting announcments, etc).
The Sony/Palm deal at least has the potential to produce something that can break this corporate/government monopoly on the airwaves. Imagine, never having to listen to country music, just because you're in texas...
Questions remain: will it handle streaming MP3 like ala icecast, or will it force you to use something like RealAudio (or worse, will they invent a third format, and try and force people to adopt yet another server-side technology)? Will they go beserk making it (sl)easy to use and therefore inflexible (e.g. make it hard to access any unusual content by providing people with a limited number of channels to flip through)?
The one thing that I find distressing about this announcement is that it's Sony doing it... I was hoping it would be a small start-up -- preferably one with an IPO I could ride -- though that's not the main reason. Sony does a great job with economies of scale, but I'd feel better about a world that has a few more sources for consumer electronics.