Comments on: Palm Unveils Tungsten and Zire Sub Brands

Palm is now entering the "push" e-mails market. That's certainly interesting.

Tony

Don't some of the PC companies do this? Have a line that is marketed to companies and another that is for consumers?

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News Editor

Veld is their mid-range, out in 1st Quarter.

K

I've got the Xircom sled and I love it---of course, I wish it were smaller but the size is mostly taken up by a huge rechargable battery. The 802.11b SDIO card (which will come out someday) will require too much power to be useful.

Regarding car names, they always try to mangle some good word into the name like the Integra. "Oh integrity?" "No integRA" So people think it's a good car. Of course Palm went with... well... you see what I'm saying.

Well, Chevy marketed the Nova in Mexico, with it's English name. Unfortunately, in Spanish, "No va" roughly means "it doesn't go".

I even like Razor better as a name, although I guess the scooter took that name after it was Palm V's code name.

I'm sure that names go through focus groups, but I think they blew it on this one.

Product/company names that I've liked have been Apple's Titanium, Acura, Intel's Xeon, Nikon's Coolpix.

Zire is ok, but Veld is also bad.

Off Topic: This is an urban legend. The car wasn't a failure in Mexico because of the name. Think of it this way...it would be like a furniture company in the US marketing a dinning room set under the brand name "Notable." Would you think no one would buy it because who would want a dinning room set with "No table"? Notable doesn't mean the same thing as "no table" just because it's made up of those two words. I bet most people wouldn't even notice the coincidence. It's works the same way in Spanish.

It's a cute story, but doesn't hold any great marketing lesson.

http://pearl1.lanl.gov/periodic/elements/74.html

Matt

Check out the HP 928, forgetting the Microsoft bashing etc. just looking at the layout of the hardware etc.

I think it would be better to inlude the phone element into the screen section.

Screen open, works as speakerphone.
Screen closed, speaker at hinge end ouside, mic at bottom outside.

Screen flipped round, speaker and mic at the same location, but operated from the reverse side.

Zuber

Yes, I'm aware of that. If they can offer the same sort of package that Danger's device will supposedly offer ($40 for unlimited data and a decent amount of voice minutes) and get the device to sell for about $300, it could indeed be a formiddable offering. But, I tend to doubt that either of these will be the case. If it sells for $500 and you have to pay per the megabyte, it will have a marginal impact.

Scott

You'd think so, but people are still running Exchange and Domino servers. Tungsten MIM is for these people.

And to the person that brought up the demise of MyPalm, the problem is it's hard to provide that functionality to people for free. And now that Yahoo! can do almost all the stuff MyPalm used to do, the market for such a thing is dead.

Also a couple of US carriers have issues PR to the effect that they intend on expanding GSM/GPRS coverage in the US.

Like it or not, CDMA is still a niche market when you consider the global viability of your product. As you say, there are expensive options, but not many. Welcome to life in a niche market.

So patience will obviously be required in getting niche support for PDA-Phones. It is still conceivable that support will grow - look at how the availability of organic and vegetarian products has grown. But also recall how long that actually took.

And just as an aside - I use Cingular. Their coverage is WONDERFUL for my needs. I don't do a lot of traveling, and no one has a better plan than the one I have. If one becomes available, I might switch, but I will probably tend to stay with GSM/GPRS as it offers many more options. If I found that GSM service sucked, that would be a factor, but as all the companies expand, I don't really see that as a pproblem. Maybe CDMA/TDMA will develop something that will change my mind - it's quite possible.

Learn patience - you'll be better for it.

In fact none of Kyocera's or Samsung's smartphones are available in GSM versions.

CDMA:
Qualcomm PDQ
Kyocera 6035
Kyocera 7135 (announced)
Samsung I300
Samsung M330 (announced)
Samsung I330 (announced)
Treo 300

GSM:
Treo 180
Treo 270
Palm Tungsten W (announced)

Sounds to me it's the GSM world that's getting the shaft.

Treo 300 (released, and hard to get hold of from stores - they are selling REAL well).
Kyocera 6035 (monochrome, lots of fans but soon to be outpaced by the 7135).
Kyocera 7135 (RSN - Yay!)
Samsung Bluechip (RSN - Sounds good too ...)

Those are the PalmOS PDA/cellphone combos.

On another front, Verizon/Sprint/KTTI/KDI/Alltel have a swag of Brew enabled phones coming that are also very cool - but more from a cellphone with PDA functionality perspective than PDA with cellphone pov.
There are some great phones that unfortunatley have only been released to the Koreana and Japanese CDMA markets so far ... but variations of many of them should be here soon as well.

Verizon also does a nice job of letting you use their "Quick Network" feature to get online...without having to subscribe to their mobile web service.

You I-can't see beyond my border excuse for intelligent life. GSM is the WORLD STANDARD. REPEAT: THE WORLD STANDARD.
CDMA sux. CDMA is ploy to rip you off and you defend it? Oh, you MOROM! Get with it sukhead.
You are pretty excited about SMS, eh? It's new, eh? WRONG, SUKKER! IT'S ABOUT FIVE YEARS OLD! You are just living a techno-backward country held hostage by a CDMA vendor that pays your government. SUKKER.

check out the WORLDWIDE CDMA coverage here:

http://www.cdg.org/world/cdma_world.asp

Then take an anger management class and learn how
to make at least a semi-coherent post.

Then go live in the "world" and be happy. Here in North America CDMA is what we do. Like it or lump it.
You think there's no good reason for it?

MUCH reduced power usage, far more handsets per tower (good for both the provider and the end user), easier migration to 3G, faster interim 3G data. Sure you can get some good GPRS performance in the mean time, but at the cost of a good number of time slots on the network. I can just imagine the TV commercials to ensure similiar to the high speed cable vs. ADSL with neighbors calling each other bandwidth hogs... We'll be seeing GPRS users looking around for other GPRS users on the same tower, and saying "OK, whose using all the time slots!" [Enter the voice of James Earl Jones and the Verizon solution...]

In fact it may trouble the CDMA haters when they do their research at GSM and CDMA association websites to glean that the technical reasons are so compelling that the migration path of GSM ends in the CDMA camp as well. Perhaps someone will chime in with, "all your air-interfaces are belong to us"...
UMTS will use a CDMA air interface (Wideband CDMA). So get your terminology straight. Your issue isn't with CDMA, it's with IS-95, the protocol that the Verizons and Sprints use over a CDMA air interface.

One might look to iDen (Nextel and Telus Mike) for relief as it's feature set is more GSM like, in areas like flexible call forwarding etc. In fact, having toured the switch facilities in Canada, it even runs on GSM switches. But even there, Nextel has announced migration to CDMA.

But regardless, even for a PDA news site, we've bashed that argument to pieces in previous threads here, and there's little to be gained with further whining along those lines.

Deal with it. Even if the arguments were constructive, they serve little point here.

-Craig Bowers

When you say 6035 think "workhorse", "robust", "durable". While past it's prime, it's still useable. I use it every day, couldn't make it through a single work day without it.

> The 7135 was announced back in June and there
> is still no official release date.

Info was leaked, kyo lawyers tried to get the leaks plugged, then finally it was announced with a release date of "Q4".

> The Samsung currently available is also old and
> has a crappy color screen.

Nope, it's a nice color screen that can double as a flashlight in the dark.

> I already mention Treo 300 -- for Sprint -- another
> network with lame coverage.

Now here's the crappy screen, that puts off concentric lcd waves when tapping it.

> The ONLY decent pda/phone available for Verizon
> is Thera -- for the outrageos price of $799.--

You are so off base with that comment. Thera is a PocketPC with a dialer added on. You can't dial from pocket outlook which must be synced with the dialer address book. It only has 8 hours of standby (vs 150 hours for the 6035). To use as a regular phone you have to hold it upside down because they got the speaker and the mic backwards. It's a brick too, and has no screen protection. I've dropped my 6035 about a dozen times from waist height onto asphalt, concrete, tile. It takes a lickin and keeps on tickin. Can your pocketpc phone do that?

> If you've kept up with released pda/phone
> combos released this year, you'd know that
> models for GSM are far more plentiful and
> more functional, better screen quality, better
> form factors, etc. than CDMA (except if you
> want force yourself to go with limited Sprint
> coverage).

I've kept up with them. They're not ready for prime time. Especially the T-Mobile, PocketPC Phone Edition. Who wants to reboot several times/day?
My 6035 is 16 months old and I maybe soft reset once every couple months.

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David

[I posted saying I connect using a Palm m515 to Verizon phone (it happens to be a Kyocera QCP 3035)]

Oh, and each platform has its own set of difficulties integrating with our corporate office and e-mail. Neither works overly well.

I still think that the technology exists to bring full Pentium II or higher class PCs to the PDA form factor and wonder why the notebook vendors just don't do this. OS in ROM, fast boot times. 100% compatibility. Seems like a natural move.

What part of Palm introducing the Zire sub-brand as entry-level did you miss in this article?

Tungsten T is essentially a OS 5 version of a m515 with slightly different body style. Priced around the same but using the new OS, Bluetooth, etc.

If I was a betting man I would guess the m130 goes to $200 and the m515 goes to $325-$350.

-Kevin Crossman

Tungsten sounds like a crash-proof device. Both names won't get used. Both will be referred to as "my palm".

Pentium was the 586 and it was thought that each iteration would have a new name, but they stuck with pentium on through MMX Pro, II, III, 4. That means we should be running a 80886 processor by now.

Too much effort is going into the name thing. It will quickly be forgotten and become part of nomenclature as coke, pepsi, and sprite. Like "lincoln town-car" Does that mean it's unsuitable for driving on country roads? How about "Windows NT based on new technology" I have a box that says that, but isn't that redundant since NT already means that? What's the successor to XP? "XP version 2 with whitening and tarter control? :-)

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David

Never underestimate the power of GOOD Marketing/Brand.

When the ARM-based Palms come out, people will hopefully port one of the open source handheld platforms to it and give it some decent software base. Existing Palm applications will continue to run in such an environment under emulation, just like they do with PalmOS5.

If Palm were smart (fat chance), they'd then drop PalmOS6 and move over to something better. At least they should tolerate it. If they try to fight it, they'll lose.