Foleo Product Announcement Strategy Analysis

I have issues with what Palm has done over the past few years - but I could give a poop about what Colligan or anyone else does on their free time. It's about what they do when they're WORKING that's been the problem.

My gosh Vampy. They are protected because of all the cutting edge products the have pushed out for the last 4 years. Gotta stick with the innovators baby!!! Woof-woof

Pat Horne

The nicer side is just giving them directions on how to go bankrupt, so what you have essentially said is, both your evil and good sides wants them to go under.

Get into 2005 already. If standalone PDAs had a market, Palm, HP, Casio or any number of other device makers from yesteryear would be doing it. There is no market. It is about the cell phone.

Ok, whatever.

Your (original unedited) post clearly drifted into what appeared to be discussing the guy's sex life. Whether you believe you "didnt write anything offensive" is for you to decide, I don't really care. The fact you said you wanted to go back and edit it might give you a clue about your own feelings. Attempting to blame others for that desire is another clue.

Your ridiculous personal attack against *ME* (copied above) was unnecessary. If it scared you *that* much that I pointed out that your off-topic comments about his personal life don't seem to bolster your case against Palm, I'm deeply sorry.

A lot of your perspectives in this thread are very thought provoking, but I'm really not interested in reading your amateur psychological profiles of me or anyone else in these forums.

Sony went down that road when it designed its brilliant OLED-screened VZ90. With both CompactFlash and Memory Stick slots, it works well as a media player. Unfortunately, when the device came out (Japan-only) it was hideously expensive and Sony had already decided to pull out of the market. There could've been a great market for such a device, but with the demise of Tapwave and Sony, don't hold your breath.

If you're looking for a solid, inexpensive PalmOS media player, get a Tapwave Zodiac 2 (dual SD slots!) and an old copy of TCPMP (freeware media player). With its nice, big screen, its ATI video chip and 128 MD of RealRAM™, the Zodiac 2 is probably the best cheap media player you can get. Last year the company responsible for selling off Tapwave's inventory after the bankruptcy was selling new units for only $125. They started with several hundred units and the last time I checked, they still had a couple hundred left.

TVoR

The problem with Palm was that (around the time of the T|T to T|T3) they should have repositioned the entire PDA line as mp3-playin', video viewin' devices. But Palm bungled the audio output on the original T|Ts and Zire 71 and then crippled the T|C with a mono headphone jack. Then they got everything right on the T3 other than the slider and the battery life. Now you have tons of PMPs flooding the market that have (at best) an FM tuner and a calendar or phone book app in addition to their multimedia functions. Palm has been missing the boat for ~5 years now in regards to multimedia.

A Zodiac 2, nice as it is, is a tad bit, lacking internal wi-fi and has SD slots hobbled with a maximum capacity of 2gb each. A TX with a 4gb SD card is nearly as good as an mp3/video player while having superior pocketability and PIM functions.

Palm should have pushed the Zire 31 and HARD as an mp3 player that did "other stuff". The Z22 should have an SD slot & headphone jack. ALL Treos should have A2DP or at least a 3.5mm headphone jack. PalmDesktop should have been seriously overhauled 4 years ago with built-in media functionality and online integration.

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

To joad,
Don't go all mental on me. Take a deep breath before you go off on your pre-programmed rant. I didnt write anything offensive, and when I wrote "poodles with pink ribbons" I knew I had to type an explanation because people like you have a mental block then go ballistic like a pitbul. Which explains why people like Gekko are unfortunately furious at the "liberal left".
I actually appreciate Ryan editing my post because I had no way to remove it and I couldnt be bothered emailing him. Then again, now with my explanation gone and your post I now appear as being homophobic; WHICH I AM NOT!

I am not commenting on this issue anymore. I wanted to clarify for fear if being badly perceived.

iPhone spec says: "Input method Multi-touch"

What is multi-touch? Did that even exist 3 years ago? Perhaps Palm could not have done the iPhone 3 years ago.

What is multi-touch? Did that even exist 3 years ago? Perhaps Palm could not have done the iPhone 3 years ago.

Multi-touch is nothing more than a gimmick. It's no big deal to simply tap an area of a screen once, but many iPhone users are quickly going to realize the folly of slip-sliding their greasy fingers all over their (initially)-pretty iPhone screens every time they want to do something. The Treo's D-pad is a much more intelligent design and a small D-pad could easily have been added to a 320 x 480 keyboardless Treo. Also, a full-screen Treo could easily have been shipped with a CLIE-style jog dial in order to facilitate faster navigation.

If you've ever used a laptop that has an IBM TrackPoint-like pointing stick and compared it to a typical laptop's touchpad, you'll understand why nudging physical buttons make more sense than moving your fingers around on a screen/pad. Palm's decision to include a pointing stick on the FOOLeo suggests that their designers are not quite completely brain-dead. Yet.

TVoR

Maybe Apple wants 3rd party devs to program a PIM suite.

Only if that suite runs within the limitations of their Safari browser. But not to worry, Steve knows what you "really" want.

http://tinyurl.com/yuwwtm
http://www.pikesoft.com/blog/index.php?itemid=190


Thinking about Vista? Think again: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
Want an alternative? Try this: http://www.ubuntu.com/ or http://www.mepis.org/

Yep. His Steveness can denigrate the stylus all he likes, but there are plenty of times when I'd rather use that than push my grubby fingers all over the screen. On a hot day, my Treo's screen can gets very tacky very fast. iPhone is going to exacerbate this problem. And people better hope that screen is more scratch-resistant than the iPod...

Vamp:
a) IR proximity detector which shuts down the screen when its close to your ear.

Nothing more than a (admittedly cool) gimmick. The only reason you'd need it would be if you were a stupid enough software designer to put touchscreen buttons at the top of the screen where your ear will mash them. Waste of power to have an IR sensor running all the time. (some will argue that it saves power by shutting the screen down, but since nearly every other phone on the planet already does that automatically after about 30 seconds or so, I'm not really seeing the savings.)

b) Ambient light detector (adjusts screen auto)

Again it's cool, but doesn't really add much - unless your device has such a small, puny battery that you need to save every spare erg of power...

b) accelerometer, auto landscape/portrait when rotating iphone.

Now that is useful. And cool.

The coolest things about the iPhone are its excellent-looking browser, the landscape screen and the wi-fi. All easily matched by competitors. The rest is just hype. Don't be fooled! It's not the Holy Grail of Phones. Not by a long shot.

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

Good analysis IMO. The cool factor is through the roof, but the reality is going to send a lot of Palm / HTC / SS / Sony / Moto switchers back home in a hurry. If all I want to do in the priority that I want to do it is hit squarely by this phone in OEM form, then it's outta this world. Otherwise, you had better stick to real (relatively mundane) Treo, HTC & Nokia etc smartfones.

List list of can't dos is very long on the iPhone. I hope that doesn't give Palm anymore bad ideas.

BTW, accelerometer was standard on my Kodak DC290 digicam in 1999. Loved that feature and it's nice to see Apple include it. Surely they'll allow turning it off tho. I lay in bed on my side often and read Scripture, web, docs, and or e-mail with my Treo in portrait. The iPhone would go L/S when I may not want it too.

Pat Horne

Sounds about right. But this is an Apple product, and like all Apple products It Knows Better Than You Do™. So don't worry, iPhone's screen switcher will be perfect. Don't question it. Go with the flow, baby. ;)

LiveFaith:
BTW, accelerometer was standard on my Kodak DC290 digicam in 1999. Loved that feature and it's nice to see Apple include it. Surely they'll allow turning it off tho. I lay in bed on my side often and read Scripture, web, docs, and or e-mail with my Treo in portrait. The iPhone would go L/S when I may not want it too

An amusing thought struck me as I was reading this. I had visions of iPhone users accidentally covering the IR sensor with dirt, grime or their fingers, frantically tapping at the screen, wondering why it wouldn't respond, getting more and more frustrated until they start yelling. To quote Seldom: Giggle.

It's unlikely to be so poorly engineered, of course, but the old maxim always holds: the more you put in it, the more that can go wrong with it.

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://www.palminfocenter.com/comments/8140/#113709

Palm's extracurricular Linux activities
cervezas @ 10/12/2005 11:47:34 AM #

Nothing definite, of course...

First, recall that we heard almost a year ago that Palm was working on Linux stuff from the same people who correctly stated they were working with Windows Mobile. This was even before PalmSource announced their Linux plans, in fact.

Fast forward to today: we've got a member of this community who appears to be within PSI talking about a Linux clamshell device they are aware of being developed within Palm. And we've got Palm showing up as a customer on Wind River's website (which doesn't mean they are customer for Wind River's consumer Linux platform, but it could). And we've got LinuxDevices.com saying they've been told that Palm is developing devices on a Wind River Linux OS... but seeming to get the "phone" part of that leak wrong, since it's in direct conflict with public statements by Palm executives.

Any one of these is easily discounted, but together they start to add up to a picture, especially in the current context of Palm's business.

Palm has finally made definite statements that they will replace Garnet with Palm OS for Linux once PalmSource has it ready. According to ITWeek, Ken Wirt said Palm is "waiting for PalmSource to port the Palm environment to Linux before moving away from Palm OS 5." But that doesn't mean that they couldn't have non-Palm Linux products along side their Garnet products for a period of time. And just because Colligan said there weren't any plans for (non-Palm) Linux or Symbian *Treos* doesn't mean they wouldn't consider a new Linux platform for a device that is not a phone.

Basically, I'm thinking that all this sounds like the first rumblings of devices from Hawkins' infamous "Third Business" coming on the wind. If it's as "disruptive" a device class as Hawkins claims, it wouldn't be surprising that Palm thought it would need a different kind of middleware than Palm OS will provide for Linux.

David Beers

I suppose to some extent that was part of the picture. But I do find that I'm truly tired of all of the bloat that comes from the "Wow! Look at this great new feature/program/function!" and "more is always better" mentality.

Why am I very happy choosing to run Linux on my dual-boot laptop instead of Windows? Because I find it to be more "lean", quicker to boot, quicker to shut down, and simpler to maintain (and more stable as well). In the form I choose to run it, it is simply "simpler". I don't think I'm being brainwashed into wanting something to be simpler. I'm choosing that with a very open mind.

(Of course you choosecan add as much bloat to Linux as you want to as well, so YMMV.)


Thinking about Vista? Think again: http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt
Want an alternative? Try this: http://www.ubuntu.com/ or http://www.mepis.org/