Comments on: New PalmSource Licensees Expected Soon

Steve Crane is a veteran of the video game industry, having spent the last ten years working for Electronic Arts, Knowledge Adventure, Activision, and, most recently, Midway. At Electronic Arts, he was the manager of The Sims franchise, the best-selling PC game of all time. At Activision, he built the company's console game division and created such top franchises as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Spiderman. He currently runs Midway's San Diego production studio as well as the company's third-party development division.
Steve has a doctorate in oceanography from U.C. San Diego, and he spent the early part of his career designing computer graphics systems for professional video production and animation. A real-time video special effects system he worked on was awarded an Emmy for technical achievement in 1990.""[/i]

I like that this guy has a Doctorate in Oceanography, of all things, lol.

Otherwise, pretty interesting background for that crew & advisors

The deal did not exactly say that someone gave Palm or lent Palm $50 million. What I believe happened is that TI extended to Palm a $50 million line of credit that they could use only to buy TI processors. Perhaps TI was given stock options or something as part of the deal. But, that is what I think the "loan" was. It mostly let Palm take $50 million off the debt side of the ledger while they were assembling the parts for the new OS 5 models. Otherwise they would have had to pay Intel cash on delivery for ARM processors.

Just my idea and as time goes on I see nothing contradicting it, but I would have thought by now it would have been confirmed publicly. I expect that TI's other customers would have demanded the same sweetheart deal if they found out, so it had to be kept secret.

I guess this is not germain to the case at hand, but I never miss a chance to bring it up since I get predictions right so rarely.

"Ex-Palm Officials Offer Portable Video Game System

By Ben Berkowitz

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A company started by former senior executives from handheld computer maker Palm Inc. (PALM) on Monday unveiled a handheld product code-named "Helix" that combines video gaming, music and the organizer from the Palm operating system.

The company, named Tapwave, was founded two years ago by former Palm vice president of worldwide product development Peng Lim and vice president of product management Byron Connell.

It plans to enter a marketplace -- portable video gaming -- that in the last few months has ballooned.

Lim serves as president and chief executive of Tapwave, while Connell is senior vice president of marketing. Other top executives are Marian Cauwet, the vice president of engineering who held the same role at Palm; and sales head David Wenning, also a Palm veteran.

Pricing and availability details for the Helix have not yet been made public, but what is known is that the company boasts a high-profile lineup of hardware and software partners.

Among the hardware companies contributing products and engineering to Helix are ATI Technologies Inc. (ATY), Sony Corp. (6758), Motorola Inc. (MOT) and Yamaha Corp. (7951)

Games publishers who have already agreed to license some of their top titles for the platform include Activision Inc. (ATVI), Infogrames Inc. (IFGM) and Midway Games Inc. (MWY).

The company has also licensed the PalmOS operating system from Palm subsidiary PalmSource and game development tools from Fathammer.

Market research firms have pegged total video game hardware and software sales at $10.4 billion in 2002 in the United States alone, and global hardware and software sales in 2003 are expected to top $30 billion.

'MORE SOPHISTICATED GAMER'

"Nobody was addressing the need of the more sophisticated gamer in a mobile sense," Connell told Reuters recently.

Connell and Lim said the target audience for the Helix consists of people 18 years to 34 years old who have largely "graduated" from Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s (7974) Game Boy Advance portable gaming unit.

The Game Boy platform has had a stranglehold on the portable gaming market for well over a decade, handily defeating any and all comers, including long-gone devices with names like GameGear, TurboDuo and Lynx.

But the portable market has become increasingly crowded again. Nintendo is selling two Game Boys, the Advance and the Advance SP, and Finnish cell phone maker Nokia is preparing to launch a cell phone and game deck combination device called the N-Gage.

The Tapwave executives hope to compete with those two units on the basis of superior technology.

The Helix boasts twice the color palate of the Game Boy and nearly 16 times that of the N-Gage. It offers a screen resolution well sharper than either one and a much larger screen size.

Connell said the device will play full-motion video in a number of formats, as well as music in the MP3 format. It will also ship with a photo viewer and all the productivity applications that are part of the Palm OS.

? Reuters 2003. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content, including by caching, framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters and the Reuters sphere logo are registered trademarks and trademarks of the Reuters group of companies around the world."

Good point and it helps to show the flaw in BlueAnon's logic above. It's all about the zen, baby. ;) Specs don't win out, you need the whole package. A Dell Axim may very well do a little bit more and do it at a better price than this device, but it certainly sounds like this device will have a better form-factor for gaming. This has been my biggest complaint about the whole "gaming" concept of both PPCs and Palms. No licensee for either platform has offered a device that is comfortable to hold/use for gaming. This simple (and painfully obvious, IMO) "feature" could make all the difference in the world.

On a separate note, when the rumors of the sub-$100 Palm were coming out, I predicted that if Palm was smart it would still have an SD slot because this is an extra source of revenue for them (a lot of people would buy Palm-branded SD games, software, and even blank cards because they don't know any better). Well, they didn't know any better apparently. This device here looks to follow this idea using what every game system company already knows to be true: You make money on the razorblades, not the razors. This could be good news for us consumers, too, because I anticipate that this device could be priced nicely.

Scott

For someone who doesn't know the internal workings of Palms, would naturally assume a 64 meg device is better than a 16 meg device.

It's become a hardware game and that is a game that Sony plays very well. This next year is going to be fun!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Eagles may soar but at least weasles don't get sucked into jet engines.

Peace,
-Bartman007

P.S. I will probably be submitting my N710C to the Palm Graveyard soon. I have had serial port trouble for a while, but discovered I could fix it by taking the case apart and repositioning the serial port. I was doing it at school and was bumped by someone. It ripped the connector on the PCB off. To make a long story short the repairation totally screwed it up. Once my TT arrives I will take my Clie off life support by disconnecting the battery.

P.P.S. If anyone wants to send condolences to my Clie, I will supply you with an appropriate paypal address. =)

>>Hello! How frigging long does the drive spin to dump a multi-MB song from itself to the iPod's RAM? This is not read-off-the-Microdrive-and-kill-the-batteries PPC-like stuff I'm talking about. It's spin-up, read, dump, spin down. It CAN be done -- especially with the 1500 mAh batteries Palm SG is using. Or the ones Sony is using in the NZ.

Great! Then my Palm turns into a PPC. No more execute-in-place. Say bye bye to Palm OS Efficiency.

The once place where this doesn't neccesarily hold up is when dealing with cards. We already have the VFS Manager, and what I EXPECT to see is some of those VFS concepts abstracted into RAM. A single, unified layer for the programmer to deal with application data.From the user perspective I don't think you'll see a lot change, however. I think the realities of mobile computing really reward application centric computing..

It shouldn't be surprising that there a lot of people tha think this concept should be applied on the desktop as well. There are several companies wanting to replace your existing file system with one that puts your apps first, and makes them responsible for managing their own data... which should sound familiar.

Yeah, but that's a stupid argument. Most desktop applications that need to are already using databases. But many other applications need files; Palm-style databases just won't do.

Why???

I think your confused about what a Palm database really IS. It's a terrible naming convention, as a Palm Database is more or less a file broken up into discrete chunks. You can use records as a kind of delimiter, but a Palm Database has very little in common with relational databases of the desktop and server world.

This is a discussion about the storage of application data, not the physical structure of how it is stored or accessed. In that respect that type of data is irrelevant..

mikecane: Your talking completely about execution and nothing to do with the basic architecture.

The problem isn't in app-centric computing, it's in the Palms limitation on HOW the apps get to manage their own data. Right now we have a single layer of data management (categories). It would be nice to be able to give users more options in storing and cataloging files, I completley agree. A hierchal file system DOES give you more options, but I do not beleive that it represents the best choice. Why not maintain an app-first perspective of computing, while improving the ability of applications to manager their own data? Isn't that what you really want?

False. It's not about price. Dell listens to CUSTOMERS and gives them what they want and are willing to pay for. Read the book "Direct From Dell" by Michael Dell.

6 months? 8 months? what Sony did to Handspring will look like a spring picnic compared to what Dell would do to Palm Inc gadget sale if Dell does POS.

You have GOT to be joking? Microsoft and Dell don't have the resources? My God, Dell alone has the power to CRUSH Palm...if it were serious about the PDA market. This weak economy nearly drove Palm to the brink of death. Luckily, Dell and Microsoft are more concentrated on meat and potato markets like Desktop and Server hardware/software markets.

Dell has mastered making money on Laptops and PCs. They take an existing market and do what it takes to eke out a profit. As an example, they run new sales almost every day, advertised to a limited group of people, designed to keep the order pipeline filled. I rather suspect that Dell sees no way to make the kind of profit margin they want using the PalmOS platform.