Comments on: Ruby: Droid Beat Us to the Punch

Also, the WebOS devices have this HUGE area of empty space on the front that is uses for the gesture area. Your average sales drone isn't going to know, care or bother explaining that. People want to see as much screen as possible on their devices these days. Barring that, they want to see cool LED-illuminated touch sensors or buttons. If you just have a big strip of black plastic, people are going to to think Palm was lazy or cheap and could've installed a bigger screen. Heck, I KNOW very well what the gesture area represents and I think it's a huge annoyance and could have been put to better use for something else...like a larger screen!

Finally, the Pre feels good in-hand but lacks the rock-solid build quality that the Droid, iPhone, BB Bold and Nexus One have. It feels and looks cheap, especially the power button, keyboard slider, and the microUSB port cover. That's unfortunate, as the Pre is actually a more comfortable device to hold & use than any of the above devices.
Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->Verizon Moto Droid

Hmmm. Creepy advertising - scared the customers away? Bad network? Blanket release of Android phones? Store monkeys couldn't demonstrate the product? Lot's of technical effort in making it sync with iTunes while not actually doing a deal with Apple? Designing a product that was a list of bullet points that the iPhone didn't have? Ran out of geek purchasers? There may be others.
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Sammy the Walrus IV on Mar 19, 12:15 PM said:

oh how I love this. Everyone and their mother has been saying how webos is not bad and a great interface. blah blah barf.

people..wake up. no one is buying webos.

either all these non-buyers are just plain stupid and are missing this wonderful webos

or

compared to other phones, palm's offerings are just sucky and underwhelming, regardless of webos.

Its the same beat that all these people are marching to calling for someone to buy Palm. Why would you pay $4 for a stock that can very well be under a $1 in a few months time?

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ilo on Mar 19, 12:28 PM said:

They tried to quickly hack together an OS that would look falsely "good" on the surface so that someone would buy them during the smartphone hype bubble (Microsoft, RIM, Nokia, Motorola, etc.) Didn't work. The OS is riddled with shortcuts and compromises that would require an enormous amount of effort to fix for the long term health of the platform. Trying to hack a connection to iTunes by impersonating an iPod, instead of building a proper sync client like everyone else, is a perfect example of this. They filled the channel with product because they new their last gasp chance was to get bought in late 2009, so they wanted to make the numbers look good then. Once you are toast (as they are in 2010) who cares? All that being said, the real problem must be a poor IP portfolio, and the perception that Apple would sue the pants off whoever owned Palm if they ever were purchased by a serious competitor.

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1. tablets are a low volume niche product. any market that forms will be created, self-fulfilled, and thus dominated by the iPad. let it go.

2. the Pre/Pixi/webOS gesture area is an unnecessary, silly, unintuitive, confusing, clumsy, weak, display-reducing gimmick.

By "huge" I primarily meant relative to the available screen space on the Pre or to the Pixi's screen & keyboard. The iPhone at least has nearly a half-inch more screen space than the Pre and maintains its hard button. The Pre, especially the button-less Pre Plus, is just so...barren under the screen. Otherwise, yeah, what Gekko said about the gesture area. It just seems SO last decade and SO unintuitive. Yes, there is and will continue to be a need for off-screen "stuff" but NOT at the expense of the very screen itself!Perhaps it's time for a reintroduction of the old Clie or BB jogwheel or some sort of pressure-sensitive area on the side or backside of the device? I've always maintained that the expanse of black plastic around the earpiece would make a good area for doing at least basic forward & back gestures.

I also agree with your sentiment about only Google using Android in 2 years. OR, at best, only Google will be using Android 4.0 (or whatever) and everyone else will be farting around with 2.x or 3.x. Google is using those droves of Android licensees now to stir up developer interest and to build market & mindshare for Android just like how Palm used to "use" the Palm OS faithful as paying beta testers for their latest FrankenGarnet device. They'll fragment the market a bit more than reel everything back in for themselves and exclude everyone else from the big party in the name of tightening their focus etc.
Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->Verizon Moto Droid

Now I wonder ... what if the Foleo had gone on. Where the hell would it have fit with the Pre and Pixi of today?

Now I also wonder ... could that be why the designs of both Pre and Pixi are so small? They expected people to buy -- or already have -- a frikkin *Foleo* to type emails?

Now I triply wonder ... would they have switched the OS on the Foleo to webOS?

And finally I wonder, wtf would they have called the Foleo OS? Did it ever really have a name?

Sometimes you really DO have to do what ya gotta do, even if it is almost-guaranteed fruitless.

Furthermore, Engadget is ignoring that the REAL fact that the Pre was a total-pre-beta device at that CES show with nothing behind it (the story of why the CFO left Palm on the eve of the show is probably WAY interesting). THere was NO WAY for Palm to get it out faster.

And finally, MANY believe the whole Pre thing was a total farce from the beginning - it was DESIGNED to get Palm BOUGHT but, due to Palm-the-stock's a-MAZ-ing exuberance, the stock skyrocketed and the plan backfired on Palm and they actually had to come out with a REAL DEVICE!

1. late launch
2. sprint only
3. no SDK
4. awful advertising
5. itunes sideshow
6. pixi
7. shiit build quality
8. dated hardware

why wouldn't they push it more??????

my point is that of course Verizon would push the Droid phone. it's their brand and their EXCLUSIVE flagship phone. they have a vested interest for it to succeed.

Regarding timcane's incessant rants about Nokia's death, they still sell more than a million phones a day, every day.

A Palm classic.

E-T

Of course Garnet is outdated and Palm took an eternity to bring WebOS to market but did Palm need to kill their existing customer base in the process? And couldn't WebOS have been developed to enable some reverse compatibility other than Classic so existing customers and developers could migrate easily?

E-T

and it won't stop the Supersonic! in fact, the Supersonic's whole reason for living is Sprint 4G!

JLG outta know. wasn't he the guy who was offered many many millions of dollars ($25M+ in his pocket?) by Apple (CEO Gil Amelio?) for BeOS Inc. but he got greedy and foolishly turned them down only to be then later snubbed by new CEO Steve Jobs and ultimately bought by Palm years later for ~$1M (in his pocket)?

Really, Asus, just frikkin buy Palm already.

Same here. Not a single one, anywhere. Still Berry, iPhone/iPod, Sidekick (or clones that resemble it). And damned Kindles. Hell, I saw *CENTROS* in the wild!

"Much has been said of Palm's rebirth through its new operating system, the WebOS. The problem with that line of thinking is the market has spoken, the product hasn't done well against its competition: Android, free and rising, muscular players such as RIM (Blackberry), Nokia, Microsoft, perhaps, and Apple. Who, in their right mind, would want to buy into the smartphone OS race now?" - JLG

The FIRST thing I thought at CES '09 upon seeing the Pre was "Wow, that thing'd be awesome on a 9" screen!" The card + finger metaphor is just BEGGING for a larger, higher-res screen!

The first thing I thought upon using a production Pre last June was "wow, this thing's underwhelming in person but it'd still kick arse on a tablet or at least a larger screen!"

First of all, 320x480 is far too few pixels for WebOS. Palm has too much "stuff" going on screen. It needs at MINIMUM a 3.5" or 3.7" screen (ideally larger) at the current resolution (ideally higher) with some of the onscreen elements refined to be more finger-friendly. That's one of the chief complaints I've heard from people accustomed to iPhone/iPod Touch---they say the Pre is slow, has an unresponsive touchscreen and is too fiddly when trying to toggle certain "buttons" or onscreen icons. A lot of them who are former BB/Palm/WinMob users lament the loss of the stylus, d-pad, or jog wheel but that's nostalgia and those things aren't coming back.

Palm could have carved out a nice lineup with 4 WebOS devices between June '09 and now (devices listed in order with which they should have been released):

#1 Midrange smartphone. Pre specs & screen mated to the Pixi formfactor. This would've been the ideal WebOS launch device. It should have been on Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, unlocked GSM, EVERY CARRIER POSSIBLE at launch. Palm's arrogance with sticking to Sprint to try and force VZW's hand reeks of GM shuttering profitable dealerships all over over the country. Ford too--can you believe a city the size of Charlotte NC doesn't have a single Lincoln/Mercury dealer remaining? I continue to fail to see how intentionally limiting the sales venues for a company's products is expected to translate into higher sales.

#2 A "Pre Touch" non-phone PDA/PMP would be a solid device for the (apologies for using this term again) the Mike Cane/Gary Mayhak types (or me, even) who want to experience/play/develop for WebOS but do not need/want the cost and commitment of a costly 2yr contract. Maybe something that's a notch above the iPod Touch spec-wise but priced comparably (you gotta admit the iPod Touch is rather overpriced for what you get). Palm could keep onboard storage to a minimum for such a device (2gb?) and let users add their own microSDHC cards. This would have been a fantastic followup device to release last summer when WebOS still had a positive buzz. Palm could have sent these things out like candy to all the journalists, developers, bloggers etc to build up some WebOS buzz.

#3 A 9" tablet with solid specs. Offer it in both wi-fi and 3G versions and price it above Archos and below iPad. This would've been a perfect holiday '09 device to preempt the iPad announcement.

#4 High-end phone w/ 3.5", 3.7" or 4" LCD and slide-out keyboard. Droid or iPhone 3GS level specs. Refreshed 4G version whenever the market deems it necessary. This should be coming out right NOW to battle the Droid, Nexus One, SuperSonic and iPhone 4.0 head-on!

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->Verizon Moto Droid

very difficult to undercut the ipads pricing - also palm needs to start making money.

palm doesn't have the infrastructure in place to create a compelling tablet.

they'd need to persuade companies to provide content for their tablet.

webos by itself isn't enough.

Teal Software duplicated the User Interface of "webOS" within two weeks of it being shown at the original CES WITHOUT having a Pre in hand - just videos of the demos.

How could ANYONE think there is an insane enough company out there willing to thus spring for webOS to use on a tablet?

Seriously!

Do you think Yet Another Window Manager (of which Linux has about 479) is REALLY worth ANY Palm buyout price!?

I have never seen any valuation placed on Palm's "patent portfolio" that was not the purest of raw unsupported speculation.

I know of NO COMPANIES that are currently licensing ANY one of Palm's patents - not one.

Does anyone have ANY hard evidence that Palm's "patent portfolio" is being licensed in even the MOST minimal manner by ANY company (other than, say, ACCESS)?

If NO COMPANY is licensing ANY part of Palm's "patent portfolio", what valuation can be placed on it?

These are serious questions, BTW - show me the beef and I'll start believing in the "billion dollar buyout due to patents" theory.

Well...maybe just a little.

All the resources Archos devoted to adapting Android will have to be duplicated by every other damned company to get Android to "acceptable" on a tablet.

OTOH, webOS is already there. From my fondles of it, all of the screen elements seem ginormous on those small screens. They'd scale properly on a larger screen.

The only company that makes sense as a Palm owner is Asus. Asus doesn't have its head up its ass and is aggressive. They could put out something superior to the crop of Android vaportablets being hyped at a price that would exterminate them and dominate the market.

I also wonder how wicked fast webOS would be on a Tegra2 CPU.

There will be room for an alternative to the iPad. I'd rather see it be webOS than Android (and if it has to be Android, then it's Archos, period!).

I think it ain't gonna happen.

Truly.

Have you read the (literal) apology from Palm (internal) developers noting that different groups INTERNAL to Palm had different understandings of how webOS multitasking works?

They might have the resources (*) but they might not have the management-derived organization.

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(*) With the Doom-n-Gloom going on right now everywhere in the media and the declining stock price they might be losing some of those resources as the more-Real-World-aware employees move on to better-guarantee greener pastures (I know, if all is true in the DnG, I would).