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.

Comments

Sony Memory Stick Harmful?

[Bruce Perens]

The Sony Memory Stick seems to be a Sony-proprietary implementation. In contrast, we have SmartMedia and CompactFlash, which are much closer to being open standards. They are consortia, I think, but they let everybody in who has the price of admission and thus the devices are priced like commodities.

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.

Sony's Interest

[mochaone]

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.

Re:Sony, the next MS?

[calibanDNS]

I think Sony's approach to being in every market is very different from the MS approach. If you bought a MS OS you got a MS web browser too. If you buy a Sony PC all you get is a Sony PC. Buy a Play Station, get a Play Station. They're not forcing multiple technologies onto people who just want to buy into one of their technologies. Notice that the Memory Stick slots aren't the only means of inputing and outputing data on the Sony PCs; they have the hardware to support a Rio or any other portable MP3 device. When Sony makes it so that you have to use thier MP3 device with their PCs then we've got a problem, but I for one don't forsee that happening.
~Caliban

Too Much Diversity?

[IHateEverybody]

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.

At last: Internet "transistor radio"

[doom]

This sounds very encouraging:

Sony was vague about its plans for future devices. It said only in the joint announcement with Palm that the collaboration would result in "an entirely new line of handheld electronics products that will not be limited to electronic organizers but are expected to include a wide range of mobile wireless telecommunications-enabled AV/IT consumer electronics products."

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.