Palm Responds to the iPhone 205
Several people noted a NYT piece about Palm's response to the iPhone. Essentially, their response appears to be to hire a former Apple engineer and a couple other folks -- while also pursuing plans to perhaps sell the company. Nothing like a dual approach to the problem.
Re:allinone (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple is attempting to make a sexy all in one taht doesn't rely on windoze mobile and market the hell out of it. Palm has done nothing.
Re:allinone (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:allinone (Score:3, Interesting)
Destiny (Score:5, Interesting)
Somehow I get the impression that the iPhone's future... destiny, if you will... is already determined, and anything Apple's competitors might do at this point is more or less irrelevant. Nothing is going to steal the iPhone's thunder if it turns out there actually is a market for it. And if there isn't... it'll sink without a trace, as will any rivals.
As cool as I think the iPhone is, I'm currently leaning toward the second option. Too expensive, too little demand.
Good riddance to palm (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:allinone (Score:5, Interesting)
Camera? Sure 0.3MP. Memory? Sure 1MB. etc...
Sure some phones now come with mini-sd slots and what not. But still, if I want a camera my 5MP Canon will do much better. If I want an MP3 player my iPod will do much better. If I want a processor in a box, my laptop will do much better. There is a difference between "doing a lot of things" and "doing a lot of things well."
Combine that with lack of choice [in most markets] and people are easy prey for the doo-dahs and whatnots.
For me, when I bought a phone I looked at some key factors.
1. quadband so I can use it anywhere
2. relatively small
3. decent standby life
Anything else is frivolous and hardly gets used.
Unless you see phones with a 4MP camera, 128MB of ram, 500 MHz ARM, etc... it's hard to say they're really "replacing" anything.
Tom
Agreed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Good riddance to palm (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:allinone (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's very late to the game. Their implementation may be better, but they're stealing the paradigms, not innovating them.
How wise is industry wisdom? (Score:5, Interesting)
I went into a big box computer store recently, to buy a cable for a PDA I'm developing for. I was shocked; a few months earlier thre had been about twenty feet of counter space devoted to PDAs. Now there was zero -- just two shelves under the counter, maybe two feet wide, half for Palm, half for HP iPaqs. In its place was now twice the retailspace, devoted to iPod accessories.
While the industry had been busy competing to offer "updated" PDAs, Apple has kicked the entire lot into retail obscurity. They can't even, as entire industry, hold their own against fashion cases for the iPod Nano. Apple is a company that has carved out a niche by not only ignoring, but flagrantly defying industry "wisdom", which comes from a group of people far too focused on what each other is doing.
The problem, I think, is this: when the innovations are pursued on the basis of their low marginal costs, they tend to end up having marginal value too. Palm hit the innovation ball out of the park with their first generation PDAs. They scored a series of base hits with their upgrades through the Tungsten series. Palm has the customers and retail channel (for now); the sentiments quoted above say that they should use them to innovate within the bounds of the PDA or smart phone paradigm. But we have reached the point where the value of the next "PDA innovation" is not enough to get you on base -- not in a game where a base hit consists of a $200 retail purchase by a consumer.
The true destiny of the PDA is not to accrete laptop like capabilities. It is to become a cheap commodity. The world needs a Palm m505 for $19.99; not a Life Drive (just discontinued last month) for $399. That is the true meaning of convergence: PDAs have become marginal appendages to phones; their job is to sell phones.
The idea that PalmOS should become more like PocketPC and accrete new features only makes the situation worse. As the sales of PDAs plummet, both Palm and PocketPC will suffer, but PocketPC is destined to drop even faster.
The problem for a company like Palm is not that money cannot be made with a product whose fundametal retail value is destined to plummet. The problem is that money cannot be made with a conventional tech company culture, which is biased towards on stuffing as much features and functionality into a product as will fit. The best thing would be for Apple to buy a nearly moribund Palm for a song.
Re:allinone (Score:4, Interesting)
Think outside the box! The zeitgeist is shifting to a new paradigm!
Re:allinone (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't dispute that. However, I'm not sure how well implementations are going to work when you've got, say, a Wii hooked to your TV, a Palm Treo as your phone, and a Windows box as your desktop. We need standardization to make sure that the information is able to be seamlessly integrated, and no company seems to want to open up.
Palm needs advertising (Score:3, Interesting)
But you'd never know it if you don't already know what a treo is. I've go a 650 from sprint, my boss has as blackjack. Other than fit in a smaller pocket, the blackjack doesn't do anything the treo can't despite the nearly 2-year difference in release dates. And I'll trade the pocket aspect for the runtime as my Treo can go 2-3 days between charges despite frequent web access and heavy usage unlike the Blackjack's ~1 day heavy usage.
Have you ever seen a treo commercial? I haven't but I'll see fifty bajillion "Helo Moto/Razr/Red" commercials this week. C'mon, run something on CNN during the financial hour, for cris'sakes.
People crank about the lack of updates to the PalmOS. When was the last time you actually updated your Symbian phone? Heck, what percentage of users know what os their phone uses? PalmOS is not the easiest to code for? Fine. How does it compare to symbian? Or the motorola in-house OS? Oh wait, there's not many apps for Symbian because of network carriers locking phones and motorola will tell you to sod off if you don't want to jump through their hoops. Obviously it isn't impossible to code for given the sheer number of programs out there and the big draw items are as pretty as anything on Windows Mobile. (Documents to Go, for instance, is both pretty and a solid mobile Office app)
Re:iPhone as a phone (Score:2, Interesting)
Steve Ballmer is full of shit as usual. Qwest has been hounding me on a weekly basis to renew my contract with them, but I've got news for them: they're wasting their stamps. I'm not signing a contract with any carrier until I see the iPhone and have a chance to try it. I need a new phone, and unless the iPhone sucks, it will be my next one.
That means that Apple/Cingular have stolen market share from Qwest without shipping a single phone.
Re:Destiny (Score:3, Interesting)
The quest for "free" and "cheap" phones in North America has meant that high-end phones really don't appear very often.
Apple actually has guts to introduce the iPhone into the US first, where paying more than $100 for a phone is rare. Of course, doing so in Europe, means they'll have to compete against the other half-million phones occupying the same price point.
Re:mugging for a cellphone (Score:3, Interesting)
Thousands (possibly tens of thousands), every year. The market for 'second hand' phones is huge.