Comments on: palmOne Stock Dips Again

It seems like for the past 3 years or so, the June-Sept doldrums set in and Palm/P1 just grinds to a halt, new product-wise as the user reports begin to trickle in about the current crop underperforming/unreliable products launched in the spring. Then the buzz begins to build about a new model for October and the anticipation sets in anew!!

And what will this accomplish other than to wreck sales of existing models and place PalmOne on the verge of financial ruin?

Now is not the time for PalmOne to pull an Osborne.

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Editor, http://Pocketfactory.com
Contributing Editor, http://digitalmediathoughts.com

P.S.

If P1 is still around in its present state in 2 years' time, I would wager that they will offer no more than 3 or 4 non-smartphone PDAs, mostly low/midrange models.

http://biz.yahoo.com/t/45/503.html

http://biz.yahoo.com/t/46/3395.html

PalmOne is the manufacturer of the Treo. PalmSource licences the OS ... not only to PalmOne, but also Kyocera (7135 - OS4, but stil a very capable SmartPhone), and Samsung (OS4 model now hard to find, with OS5 model coming).
Sony-Ericsson is a cellphone manufacturer. They license their OS from Symbian. A company owned by Nokia. Sony-Ericsson is a joint partnership, and not the licensee of the PalmOS from PalmSource.
Nokia use Symbian for their SmartPhones (the ones you would compare with a Treo) - very capable OS .... and not all their phones are cheap.
Motorola use a Java based OS, a highly capable cross platform OS.

You forgot to mention Research in Motion - but I guess they aren't viable competition because they are Canadian :)

Convergence is coming. Phones are getting smarter, PDAs are getting more conected. The device you carry will likely refelct what you do most - data or voice. This might be a trainwreck from two immovable paradigms coming together, but it could also be the start of something new and improved.

~ "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." - DV ~

Sybian Ownership (%)
Ericsson 15.6
Sony Ericsson 13.1
Nokia 47.9
Panasonic 10.5
Psion 0.0 (was a little over 30%)
Samsung 4.5
Siemens 8.4

Sony Ericsson have about as much of a stake in Symbian as Sony does in PalmSource. Also, the Metrowerks Symbian development tools are now owned/managed by Nokia. So, while other companies have a stake in Symbian, I think it is pretty clear who is in control :)

~ "Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed." - DV ~

I know all that. What I'm talking about it the classes of device, the Palm based smartphones and the Symbian based ones--SE being the far more capable of PDA functions over the Symbian-based Nokias. And what I'm driving at is that all the smartphones of any real substance are priced insanely out of reach.

Motorola use a Java based OS, a highly capable cross platform OS.

Except that it isn't 'highly capable' if you can't do anything with it. Show me the reams of third-party software. Show me the equivalent to Documents to Go or Textmaker. Show me the full HTML web browser with single-column rendering. Go ahead, I'm waiting.

PDAs might be getting more connected, but they don't seem to be getting much more phonelike. My bet is that if anything comes of this, it will be that cellular radios become more common in handhelds--not for the purpose of being phones, but simply for wireless internet. In that case, there'd be no point in trying to shoehorn unneccessary connectivity features into phones, and you could let them be phones. Even if that were to happen, however, it would be at most temporary. There are movements afoot to deploy WiFi over large areas using mesh networks, and in a few years WiMax will be making an appearence.

...Says ensign Gekko to his shipmates on the bridge.

You realize of course that the PDA market is going down with them, don't you?

We are witnessing the decline of a PRODUCT CATEGORY...not a company. PDAs are a dead market. Profits are gone...Sony is gone..followed by Toshiba, Tapwave, and within the next 12-24 months you can expect Dell to join the rest of the Society of Abandoned Hopes. In the end only two players will be left competing for what few table scraps remain in PDA sales: HP and PalmOne.

So man the lifeboats while you still have a chance, Gekko. Or at least grab some souvenirs before the ship slips beneath the waves.

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Editor, http://Pocketfactory.com
Contributing Editor, http://digitalmediathoughts.com

Well I tried to pick up the brunette at the end of the bar, but all that got me was a slap in the face. So I settled for a jar of ****tail olives instead. Oh, and I also helped myself to the silverware in the galley as well as the towels in the ship's spa.

By the way, did anyone else notice all those barnacles on the hull as she capsized? What a mess.

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Editor, http://Pocketfactory.com
Contributing Editor, http://digitalmediathoughts.com

Twit's like yourself have been calling the demise of Palm and PDA's for over 5 YEARS!

JLM.

http://www.pepper.com/products/pepper_pad_2_specification.html

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/content.asp?contentid=3324

Foo, get a review unit!

Apparently OQO hasn't sent out review units to the press yet. I'll send their PR rep an email asking whats up.

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Editor, http://Pocketfactory.com
Contributing Editor, http://digitalmediathoughts.com

Nobody recognizes that quote from a very prophetic 1999 movie?

The Answer and a GREAT midi:

http://www.neomillenium.org/fc/fightclub.htm

ardiri: That Sony is very nice. I fondled the 50. A tad heavy and bulky, but great promise.

>>>just because you dont like the PPC, it doesn't mean its crap

This is true. But the fact is, whether I like it or not, is that it IS crap!

For the PPC weenie: wait and see. Sales will tank. One dose of that clap is enough. PalmOS penicillin to the rescue in the form of Treo.

Pocket PC sales have been rising for two years, and Palm sales have been falling for two years. You don't think that that's long enough for people to stop buying Pocket PCs if they don't like them? And you've been predicting this same thing for years, too. The fact is, there is no backlash. As incomprehensible as it is to you, most people don't mind using a Pocket PC. In fact, 48% of the market prefers it over Palm. PalmOne needs to wake the hell up and start producing models to really compete on features. The Treos are far too expensive to compete with most Pocket PCs, and the phone niche isn't one where you can get the large number of consumer sales.

Can anyone here concieve of the idea that PalmOne actually needs to compete, and can't simply be lifted into heaven on the wings of its own innate perfection? And here's another question--how many people here have actually owned a Pocket PC? I always hear all these tired old memes about Pocket PCs, and as far as I can tell no one has actually compared them against the reality. I have both an Axim X30 624 MHz and a Tapwave Zodiac 2 in front of me, and I've also had the Zire 72 and Tungsten E. The Axim is the best unit of the four, because it offers more speed, features, and value. THAT is what I'm talking about. PalmOne needs to compete.

I think this is false. The iPod gets its incredible battery life from just powering up the HD to *dump* the file in RAM. If a POS PDA did this too, I don't think it'd suck the life out in an hour. PPCs keep churning the file from the Microdrive; that baby keeps spinning while the MP3 plays. palmOne/PalmSource does not have to make the same mistake.

Well let's look at that then...

My 40GB ipod gets about 7.5 hours of life in the Apple approved run down test. Take an albums worth of songs encoded at 160Kbps and let it play continuously round and round at medium volume, no EQ settings etc. Not that that's normative playback behaviour but what it does is load up the flash ram and play from there for virtually all 8 hours.

Now instead jump from song to song, listening dynamically rather than via a playlist (flash use is minimized), set volume and EQ normally, and your battery plummets. I *have* had the ipod last about an hour here.

Now does the ipod caching model work on a PDA? I would argue that subtantially it does not. The ipod model is based on the playback of large files (multi-megabyte) in a semi predictable order, in a read only manner. PDA usage is small file access, with little predictability of which will be accessed next, in a read-write manner. That means substantially more frequent use of the HD. Caching writes in ram for 30-40 mins at a time (as the ipod does for reads) would be problematic. And unless that cache was non-volatile, it would also be tramatic should a reset happen, or a battery run down event.

"PPCs keep churning the file from the Microdrive; that baby keeps spinning while the MP3 plays. palmOne/PalmSource does not have to make the same mistake."

Well to be fair, they've already made the same mistake. PalmOS TrgPro's and HandEra 330's have long used the same Microdrives in the same fashion.

But an internal implementation could have different operating parameters.
I'm saying that it takes the current 1400mAh battery in my Tungsten C to give it minimum acceptable performance, and it takes the current 850mAh battery in the ipod to give it barely minimum performance. Popping an ipod like HD into my tungsten is going to require it to have a substantially larger battery to maintain minimum acceptable performance. Added bulk, added expense. It's a lot cheaper and simpler for PalmOne to add USB host, and let us use any USB mass storage device we like (especially ones with their own power source). Why limit yourself to an internal HD, when USB host or firewire gives you a plethora of options, including CD drives etc.

USB bridge functionality, without the USB bridge box in the middle.
http://www.delkin.com/delkin_products_usb_bridge.html

I think you mis-understand what is going here Mike. To paraphrase what cbowers said 2 posts above: iPods can do caching because they don't dump all of the HD to RAM (you think they have 20-40gb of RAM??). They can do caching because it is an mp3 player and is designed to simply cache the next x number of songs in a playlist. That can't work for a PDA or laptop because data is retrieved in a more dynamic, random way ('randomly accessable'). i.e.: the pda doesn't know what data you want until you go to get it - at which point there is no benefit in 'caching it'- because you now have the data.

Look at the Treo, it dominates the U.S. market for cell phones(no, it's not the world, but they're obviously doing something right), and still everyone wants to predict Palm's demise. I could care less about PDA's, and I'll bet you the influential inside of PalmOne feel the same way right now. They've been the only ones getting anykind of traction in the smart phone market. Their opportunity is as great right now as when the original Pilot debuted.

Stock prices go up and down, especially when not even based on actual revenue and NOI numbers. Let's see who's standing in a couple of years.

No, the Treo does not even come remotely close to dominating the U.S. market for cell phones. It may be popular with the enterprise market, and with high muckety mucks, but even given a $500 price drop it still wouldn't be close to dominating the market. I think you're taking PalmOne's spin about how popular it is a little too seriously. Compared to the cheap phones you see at Radio Shack, and the popular higher-end like the LG VX7000 and the Motorola v600, the Treo 600 is still relatively small fry. It only 'dominates the market' if you look at the market for smartphones based on an open OS, which is still a small subset of phones in general.

Yes, I'd yet that long before I posted.

1. Er, so if I go to Korea and get a patent for breathing air and get myself written up in Engadget, does that make it a good idea?

2. Let's think back on Samsung's history when it comes to announcing smartphones and then actually releasing them.
http://www.palminfocenter.com/view_story.asp?ID=6599

By the time it comes out, battery and HD technology may well make this feasible. On the other hand flash pricing might also have done some interesting things...

"Really. Funny. I have a 40GB ipod with less than 5GB free. Only 15GB of it is music thus far..."

Read the bottom of my post where I talk about "mobile storage".

"And if HDs and PDAs don't mix, then why the hell is a HD being put in a CELLPHONE?! Eh, eh?"

It's for MP3 playing, digital video, and mobile storage. The digital video will absolutely kill the battery. Read the bottom of my post where I talk about "mobile storage".

Like I want to pay for 128kbps compressed files.

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Generic PDA > 5mx > Vx > m505 > N770C > T625C > NR70V > e310 > m550 > h2210 > T/T3 & h4150
StarTac > T28m > T39m > T68m > T610 > T630 > K700i (nxt week)

My dream PDA would be essentially similar specs to the T3 in an m500 formfactor (metal body of course). A T|C-style small D-pad would be perfectly acceptable in such a formfactor.

I could even live with so-so battery life. I'd just want a hardcase that fit as snugly & was as thin as the old Palm V aluminum hardcase!

As opposed to the Tungsten T line, which has maintained the same casing for three generations?

http://urlcut.com/jake

_________________________
Lord, help me become the person my dog thinks I am!

If they transfer even a smidgen of that craftsmanship to their '05 PPCs then they might be on to something...

I think the Zires (at least the mono ones and the Z31) were designed by Palm/P1 in-house but I'd imagine the Tungstens are still farmed out to someone else. Another Ideo design was the original Apple Lisa mouse and that fantastic looking but sadly underperforming Logitech PocketDigital camera from a few years back. Definitely Palm V influenced and one of the most elegant products I have used in recent memory. It uses a similar flat battery as the V as well.

Honestly, anymore this site depresses me. Things have definitely calmed down too much since the peak of PDA craziness (2000-2001), and that craziness was the very reason I got into this in the first place. Palm needs to stop worrying about the Pocket PC.

The Palm V became wildly popular because it was simple, relatively inexpensive for IT departments, and it fit in your jacket pocket. When you had to use it in a business environment it looked like it belonged there as opposed to the "nerdy gadget-brick" designs of the Windows CE Palm-size devices of that day.

I agree that Palm can't design their own cases anymore. What they need to do is outsource design to IDEO like they did for the V and come up with another stellar form factor. Cut the features if need be to fit it into the case; the Palm V/Vx was *far* from cutting edge when Palm was selling it. The HP Jornada 540 series and the Casio E100 had color screens and SH3/MIPS processors, respectively. (In all honesty, I still think the Jornada 540 was a much prettier device than the H36xx iPaq form factor that took it over.) What did Palm have to offer in the Vx? Beautiful design, stellar battery life, and a simple operating system. You weren't worried about its 8MB of RAM (as opposed to the PPC with 16-32), its greyscale screen, or its small little Motorola 68K processor, because in the end it just *worked*.

When Apple released their G3 processors, clock speed was all the rage in the PC world, and people with little to no knowledge on the microprocessor subject found it suicide for Apple to release a machine - and attempt to market it in a mainstream fashion - with a 300MHz processor as it went up against Pentium III-class processors at 733-800MHz. What did Apple do? Educate their users on calculations completed and on the "efficiency" of the Mac OS. They had to drill into people's heads that clock speed wouldn't tell you the performance of the machine. They gave tests with Photoshop filters and MPEG rendering, frames per second rates in Quake, etc. showing that their machines could keep up with or eclipse PCs with a greater clock speed.

This is what Palm needs to do now. If they have to give me an Intel StrongARM running at 206MHz to fit it inside of a Palm V-size case I'd care less because the current Palm OS is pretty efficient; however, they're just going to have to differentiate their product - and their hardware demands - from the Pocket PC. I bought this ThinkPad X40 I'm typing on and it only has a 1.2GHz Pentium M, but I knew it would be fine for the business use I was giving it, because I knew that my hardware demands were less than those of 'mobile' gamers. Most people don't look at the numbers that way (this is the same reason people look at horsepower numbers when buying cars, although torque is what really moves the car).

Acting like a Pocket PC underdog is going to make you the Pocket PC underdog, so differentiate. Apple's doing great right now.

P.S. Did IDEO design the Visor Edge?

..: eston
http://www.hyalineskies.com/