All Articles in TiPb of the Iceberg

We’re coming up on MacWorld awfully quick now (TiPb will be there, natch) and so the rumors are flying. Expectations have been decidedly lower than in years past due to the absence of his Steveness, but there’s one persistent rumor that just won’t go away: the iPhone Nano.

The universal response to these rumors has pretty much been “Meh.” Engadget wants to know what the deal is. Macrumors thinks that it’s just case makers riding Apple rumor coattails. Gizmodo doesn’t believe either.

The rumor won’t die, though, so: what if it were true? What would an iPhone Nano look like?

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Recently our friends at sister site TreoCentral pointed us to this snippet: Apple was seriously interested in purchasing Palm back in 1997.  This is interesting for all sorts of reasons, but chief amongst them for me is this: Had the deal gone through, we might have seen the iPhone not only come to market earlier, but possibly seen it prevent other smartphone manufacturers (like RIM) from being able to compete.  It’s an interesting ‘what could have been’ scenario: just as Apple was killing off their Newton line, it would pick up the Palm Pilot and add functionality to it at presumably a more rapid pace than Palm did.

It’s also notable that even back in 1997, the powers-that-be in Apple recognized that they would need to transition from a strictly-computer company to a consumer products company:

A perhaps little known fact: in the Summer of 1997, Steve Jobs called Eric Benhamou, 3Com’s CEO (the company owned Palm). “Give me the Palm and come and join my Board of Directors. Only Apple can make Palm a true consumer brand.” Nothing happened. Apple’s foray into the product segment had to wait ten more years.

Of course, neither Apple nor Palm were in a position to really get things moving quickly at that time.  Palm would have to wait until their first (of many) convoluted ownership shakeups sorted itself out and Apple itself was still in the midst of redefining itself for the Steve Jobs era. The parallels between Palm now and Apple then are also fun to think about — both in dire need of a turnaround, both written off by much of the industry, and both have/had Jon Rubenstein playing a key role in revitalizing hardware.

I could go on and on playing “What If?” but instead there’s something else that this little snippet brings to mind: Palm got something right with the original Palm Pilot way back in 1997 and I really wish Apple would take a closer look at that 1997 tech.

Read on to find out what Palm got right way back in the mid to late 90s.

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[Here's a bonus TiPb of the Iceberg for you this week, courtesy of the humongous news coming out of Apple's Quarterly Conference Call]

Tuesday’s news that the iPhone has been selling well stupendously well, in case you weren’t paying attention, was really big. It’s tough to express how big. Some of the bullet points:

• They exceeded their sales goal of 10 million iPhones in 2008 already, with the holiday season still ahead of them
• They sold nearly 7 million iPhones in three months.
• They sold more iPhones than RIM sold BlackBerrys (yes, that’s the proper plural spelling)
• Based on revenue from iPhones, Apple was the #3 cellphone maker last quarter, behind only Nokia and Samsung.
• They achieved all this in 15 months.

Now, there are caveats to these numbers: there was pent-up demand for the iPhone 3G so these numbers almost surely won’t hold; RIM’s sales were depressed because of delays releasing the BlackBerry Bold. Don’t let these caveats mislead you, though, what Apple did with the iPhone 3G in the past three months is unprecedented in the mobile industry, it was pretty much unprecedented in any industry.

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(“Unique” by Hamed Masoumi, licensed under Creative Commons)

[Introducing TiPb of the Iceberg, our new, bi-weekly column from TiPb Senior Editor, and all-around Smartphone Expert, Dieter Bohn.]

The recent news that development house Tap Tap Tap is breaking up has me thinking about the App Store and developers again. Partially it’s because Tap Tap Tap has previously been mentioned here at TiPb as an example of developers raking in the cash and as an example of developers being open about how much they’re making and what they think of the industry. The break-up is interesting for a few reasons in this context.

After the break, some ruminations and thoughts on the State of the Apps from this layman’s point of view. Warning: as you can see from the title, this post includes hackneyed references to the Long Tail

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