Comments on: The iPhone Impact on Palm

The trap Palm has gone into is that they are aiming only at the so called business segment. This is something the large ones like Nokia, SE, Samsung, Motorola - well - everybody else except RIM has deliberately chosen not to do. They only include a handfull of phones in that segment compared to several dozens in other segments.

I think the business segment with regard to gadgets is something that only exist in the US. There may be many reasons for this, but I think the main reason is the Americans urge to be uniform, and particularly within the business segment. In Europe a phone is something you change every 6 months so you look good. Anyway, it is a small niche, in global spec it is miniscule, but most importantly it is a niche that is *not* the technology leader, it is not even technology driven, and certainly not something to associate yourself with if you are going to be hip, cool, or even stylish and classy. It is impossible to walk around with a Bleckberry or Treo and at the same time be classy and stylish, or even geeky (then you go for HTC or a Linux phone if you can get one, or simply an N95).

Having looked at the iPhone more closely I find it both classy and stylish, maybe to the point of being boring, boring in the "Desperate-Housewives"-kind of way, if you know what I mean. It is definitely not geeky or hip or cool, although the technology is cool. It is THE perfect toy for grown up girls (women, housewifes in particular), and will therefore sell alot, in the US at least. I don't think it will sell much elsewhere, the specs are just too low at the moment (2 MP camera, no 3G etc). When it finally comes to Europe it will be old news as well as being even more outdated technologically. Besides, watching movies on a small gadget is just too geeky (or plain childish) to be classy, yet the device itself is too classy to be geeky, so for all practical purposes it will be a walkman phone and has to compete with SE who comes with a new and classi*er* walkman phone several times a year (SE need some competition here, but the iPhone is not it, not even close at the moment). I have to admit that the iPhone seems to redefine ease of use in a phone, which is THE weak spot on all Nokia phones, and in this respect it pushes the technology several notches compared with any other phone. So, the iPhone clearly is the leader in ease of use as well as being both classy and stylish. In some ways it is a technology leader, and it has to be because it is heading for a technology driven market segment, the main segment, the largest segment. Point is: if Apple chooses to go for the American business segment sometime in the near future, they will totally wipe out both RIM and Palm. Chances are that the iPhone even with today's specs will be good *enough* for the American business segment (and if the boss has one, the rest will follow ...)

The Foleo, which I think is an extremely good idea and concept in general, is also aimed at that miniscule market segment. I just can't for the best of me understand why Palm has chosen that path - again. By increasing the specs just enough to use YouTube, the market suddenly widends several thousand times.

Regarding impulse buy I think it is more like this: In every price segment people tend to expect the same specs, and this is in most respect true. Sure there are some differences, but they are tiny, it is more a matter of this phone having 3.2 MP camera while that phone have 2 MP camera, but included 1 GB SD card and so on. What is left is design, looks, feel, size, sound.

... you need better spam filtering.

Micael

If he's a good salesperson, his goal is to move product, especially products that aren't selling quickly.

Peace Out
Alan

Uhhh, I'll take a stab here and guess that you have never had to support yourself / family on a paycheck from sales. The only people with that kind of motivation are the bean counters. The sales guys are usually motivated to move anything and everything that puts commish in their pocket, including the furniture if necessary.

I would be more inclined to say "his goal is to blow smoke near certain orifices so that the customer feels great about their purchase, thus cherishing their product, thus having a + experience, thus returning at the end of contract, thus generating more commish." Or who knows, maybe he was just being honest. :-o

Pat Horne

Someone mentioned email above. I can't hardly keep more than a few hundred messages on my Treo because the memory is so minimal. Selecting all and deleting, which is as easy as swiping down the check marks on the side, take about a minute of freeze time before completing the task. Welcome to 1998.

No multitasking in the treo. Spend 5 minutes looking for a web page, look at a note, begin looking for web page again. I suppose people enjoy slow torture?

Anyhow, the Treo is a far better phone than the iPhone, for dialing a contact out of a list of 1000 in three seconds, with one hand. Thanks, Handspring! And the treo is great for speacialized information, like medical apps. I don't need that, nor do most people, but some industries do!

Oh yeah, "thousands of applications" that are no longer installed on my Treo due to memory issues or "third party" crashes. It's a selling point.

I don't get this. The Windows Treo 750W is probably the only Palm device that is still selling outside the US together with the Tungsten TX, (except maybe in the UK where one or two 680s are sold). All reviews you can find on 750W clearly show that this is one of the best smartphones ever created.

You will love the internet on that SLOWWWW speed of the iphone

It's the same speed Palm inflicts on Treo 680 users; at least iPhone owners are better off because they have the option of using faster wifi where it's available.

Where's wifi for the Palm OS Treos?
Where's 3G for Palm OS Treos?

I don't want a Windows Mobile Treo because quite frankly, there are far more superior Windows Mobile smartphones (e.g. Samsung SGH-i600)

Palm should have spent its R&D on improving the Treos rather than coming out with some crippled Linux laptop.

Though I've been a PALM-pessimist for quite some time ("TREO will not save PALM" (*)), in general I haven't had too much to say about PALM management's execution with what they have in the environment in which PALM competes.

That is, PALM's decision to "try another sector" makes absolutely total sense to me - when the Big Guys get interested in the sector in which you have one product, it's time to get outta town!

Granted - I was totally shocked (and floored!) by the Fooleo - I expected WAY more than that (I have to admit I bought into the crap that PALM was oozing with software/hardware geniuses - now we know - hey! - they're like any other company out there!). To give PALM the "benefit" of the doubt, though, maybe someone said:

== "We gotta show SOMETHING at D!"

so they did, ready or not.

But, IMHO, they HAD to get away from the TREOs because they simply cannot compete with companies like Nokia that spit out a new phone every 9 days (on average):

== "...And we have the COUNTER-evidence of PALM's failing position
== in literally all-things-PALM!
==
== That is, they MUST come up with something different and better.
==
== TREO will not save PALM.
==
== Maybe something different and better will.
==
== Stay tuned!"

-- http://tinyurl.com/yrx4bv

Of course, the horrible Fooleo world-reaction may kill that guy before it walks but I think they HAD to do it.

==========

(*) Finally coming true, IMHO.

I highly recommend:

*TreoMemo (http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9309/treomemo-review/ - great improvement over the standard Memos app)

*CallBlock, mp3 edition. Review pending once I get my PC back online - a great way to block the bank from calling you! :D )

*CallRec or similar, for recording those extortion attempts and similar.

*and an 8GB sd card.

I'm in the same boat - my 680 arrives in next couple of days and I too cringed at the implications of this article's title. I draw solace in the fact that I dropped (& totally immersed) my T3 in a water filled gutter tonight - I took it as a sign from above that my decision to buy a Treo was timely. (BTW I think the T3 will dry up and live to fight another day - At last I discovered the purpose of those loose screws on the slider!)

Even so, I think Apple still has a fighting chance. ;)

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

do I =really= want some remote website to record/know that I religiously click on EVERY SINGLE ONE of your posts?

Actually, from a quick look at the page source it looks like all the navigation code is in client-side script, so the only servers that know about your embarrassing browsing habits are the ones that you're actually browsing to.

Ah. Except that I can see Google Analytics knows you've been there. As it knows you've been practically everywhere on the web these days.

If you're looking for a browser where no remote server ever knows about an HTTP request from you, just let me know because that would take about 10 minutes to develop. It'll have an address bar and a pretty green "Go" button, and every time you tap "Go" it will pop up an attractively formatted message that says "No web pages for you, Privacy Boy!"

Or we could customize that message for a small additional fee. ;)

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

Actually, I can see I was mistaken when I suggested that Google Analytics would be able to tell which sites you browsed to within WiiTabs: it would only be able to record that you landed on WiiTabs since all the browsing you do once you get there looks to be private to you and the site you're browsing to.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

Uh, no. Enter http://nytimes.com

POOF go the tabs!

wsj.com and foxnews.com work fine, so I suspect Karl Rove is to blame for the nytimes.com problem. ;-)

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

Maybe I'd feel different if I had 80GB of memory...

Anyway, this by way of pointing out that the 8GB on the higher-end iPhone seems like a lot to me. (Well, I don't know how much H.264 video will eat vs DiVX AVIs...)

Oops! Download complete.

Now to looky...

How can the iPhone possible compare to palm's industrial design?!!?
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9470/possible-palm-gandolf-specifications/

As someone else here is fond of saying: Giggle.

== "Of COURSE the iPhone and Fooleo work together - see!"

We'll all just wait for the iFolio -- from Apple!

I had, for no actually good reason, swallowed the line that PALM was afloat with software/hardware geniuses. Now that the empirical evidence is overwhelming that such a view is DUHmb to the point of STOOPID, that EXTRA respect is gone

Ever heard of the "mythical man-month?" Most good software (that is delivered on time) is created by small groups of talented people, not organizations that are "afloat with engineers." The problem is the communication overhead of a large team, which increases geometrically with the size of the team.

You could develop more products in parallel with a bigger company, assuming they do not have a lot of dependencies on each other. (Nokia seems to manage this, for example.) I suspect that Palm tries to keep the teams who are doing product development pretty small.

David Beers
Pikesoft Mobile Computing
www.pikesoft.com/blog

Amen, brother!

However, there is a sting in the tail. From Pogue's review:

Apple says that the battery starts to lose capacity after 300 or 400 charges. Eventually, you’ll have to send the phone to Apple for battery replacement, much as you do now with an iPod, for a fee.

Since it'll need recharging every day (or let's be generous and say every other day), that means your battery will start to crap out after about a year and a half, at which point you'll need to send your phone away to Apple and pay them to replace it. Sending away an iPod isn't such a big deal, but sending away your phone? That'll suck.

No MMS? No camcorder? For such an advanced device, these basics are odd omissions.

In short: not many surprises. The software keyboard, as predicted, doesn't match up to the physical keys of a Treo or Blackberry, althought Mossberg seems to have gotten along fine with it, and the glossy interface is fun to use but requires extra, unnecessary taps to get things done, due to the lack of physical buttons. (Amusingly, you have to switch to the iPod app in order to control music playback, although you can use the earbud mic button for play/pause and next track. For a device that's so media-focussed, this seems Dumb. Even a Treo with pTunes can do this without switching apps... but then, a Treo has buttons.)

Will it kill Palm? I doubt it. But as I said in my editorial all those eons ago, unless Palm pull their finger out and give us some more varied hardware designs, and wifi, they're going to find themselves in a dilly of a pickle.

Tim
I apologise for any and all emoticons that appear in my posts. You may shoot them on sight.
Treo 270 ---> Treo 650 ---> Crimson Treo 680

http://blogs.business2.com/netly/2007/06/a-review-of-rev.html#more

nobody can defend palm. palm has sat on the ball and have done nothing for years. now it's time to pay the piper.

hawkins, dubinsky, colligan, et al should be embarrassed and ashamed.

Palm Inc. as we know them today (PalmPilot onwards) was acquired by 3Com in '96, prior to the launch of the first Pilot handhelds.

I highly recommend reading "Piloting Palm".

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Treo 700P

By anyone, including a Shameless Treo Fanboy.

30%?

8%?

Of 300,000,000?

That's a lotta iPhones...either way.

> ...Another win for Apple's marketing department.

Ya think?

Have ya read the articles about "daily expressions of interest" in, say, Germany?

An amazing success.

Thought 1: A survey of 39,000 != 300,000,000.

Thought 2: Results are from an online panel, implying a more tech-savvy respondent than other kinds of surveys might attract. (Of course, I have no idea of Lightspeed's methodology. Just saying...) This kind of person will naturally like the idea of a slick gadget like the iPhone.

Thought 3: One in three Americans would have trouble finding their ass with both hands, let alone operating an iPhone.

Thought 4: Reading Lightspeed's press release, only 50% of respondents (and that's the young, hip ones) had ever actually seen an iPhone. Who's to say they won't change their minds once they do? (or once they see the price tag...)

Anyhoo, I'm not really denigrating anything, I'm just a big believer in the old "lies, damn lies and statistics" maxim. I've no doubt iPhone will be a hit. It's been marketed too well not to be. I just don't think it will be quite as huge as people are expecting.

Did someone pee in your corn flakes this morning?

Such disgusting behavior from you wouldn't be a surprise.

Sweeping, derogatory statements about Americans from someone who's whined about the comments made about him and his own nation is just as good as peeing in the flakes.

You've forgotten where PIC is hosted, who runs the site and where most of the readership is based.
You've forgotten that it's those Americans which you call dumb which have worked hard to provide you with that Treo you so love in addition most of the operating systems and cars which you use in that nation of 20 million called Australia.

I think many of the citizens of that fine nation would agree that a lot of their fellow Americans are dumbasses.

I suggest you look up "joke" in the dictionary sometime

Who needs to when we can just read your posts and laugh?

Ha de ha ha, sport!

By the way, even at $600, the iPhone is far more within the reach of Americans than that Ferrari, beach house or butler. In fact Palm until very recently has been selling most of its Treos at that price point to Americans.