All Articles Tagged palm

Not evil twin to Phone Different Week in Review, not an invasion by Fake Steve, this Week in Schadenfreude brings you all the feel-better news you need about the smartphone world outside Apple’s current media dominator. (Who knew there was such a world? We were just as surprised! Inelegant, interface challenged, keyboardy, crashy, single-touchy place — best not to linger…). Join us as we mock review the big news from last week at our sister sites. Everybody loves sibling rivalry!

RIM/Blackberry Likes Outages So Much They Start Scheduling Them!

CrackBerry.com brings word that RIM once again gave some tough-love to Blackberry addicts in the form of a NOC outage on March 22 from 2AM to 6AM EDT. Sorry, no email for the after-after party, Lin-Lo! But it’s not just the Hollywood scandalrati who’ll suffer. 2AM EDT translates into late night on the west coast, early morning in Europe, and midday in Asia. Giving a nation of Jet Lee’s the DTs? We’d start running now, Lazaridis!

WinMob Treo 800 Delayed Until… Er… Hello?… Little Help?

According to WMExperts.com, the two long suffering mobile platforms that suffer longer together, Windows Mobile and Treos, will not see the new high-end model drop until sometime later this year. Why? Who knows, but we can offer some hypotheticals:

1. This baby will be rocking the new OS, which is still running just a tiny bit behind schedule as Microsoft wants to make sure users enjoy VistaMob every bit as much as its big desktop brother.
2. It was shown at a Gatesnote, and as such is contractually forbidden to hit the market for at least another year. (Hi, Surface!)
3. Bono now owns the place and spent enough time in Cupertino to inject himself into every little feature discussion. “Jaysus, needs more red now, dunnit?”

And in No Other News

Yeah, sorry, nobody much covers other smart phones in these parts. Nokia probably did something in Scandinavia but we can’t read Norfinwedish so who knows? It’s not like they’re being sued by a thousand year old lady or are — yet again — beating, stomping, hammering, pummeling, and slapping around the dead horse that is N-Gage, right?

This. Is. iPhone JEOPARDY!

Welcome everyone to the smartphone space where competing CEO’s answer in nothing resembling the form of a question. Lucky for us, however, they’re quick on the buzzer and their bold, bodacious pontifications, more often than not, come right back to bite them on their assets.

“Why We’re Not Worried about the iPhone” for 100

Previously on iPhone Jeopardy, smartphone innovator and Folio-smasher, Ed Colligan of Palm/Treo fame jumped on the iPhone launch:

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Strongly put. Let’s go to the judges…

“Initial iPhone buyers were 10 times more likely than other new phone buyers to have previously owned a Treo.”

Ouch! The correct answer seems to have been “Who are the Mac guys who walked in with a far more than a descent phone and dug into my lunch?” Better luck with Nova!

Daily Double-Talk

Next up was famed Microsoft CEO, monopolist, and internet dance phenom, Steve Balmer who went for the steal:

“You can get a Motorola Q for $99. [...] [Apple] will have the most expensive phone, by far, in the marketplace.”

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

Really? Survey says!

The struggling American electronics company Motorola is considering breaking itself up through a sale or flotation of its poorly performing mobile phones business.

NPD’s figures make Apple’s Sept. quarter iPhone sales look even more stellar. Apple sold 1.12 million iPhones last quarter, representing 27% of NPD’s U.S. smartphone market and 3% of the overall Q3 cellphone market.

D’oh! The correct answer looks to have been, “Who was hardly the most expensive and grabbed even more mindshare than their impressive first-year market share (not to mention dominating customer satisfaction reports) while companies I mentioned prepared to flee the space?” No bonus points for lack of bold ActiveSync licensing predictions. Come back next time with WinMob 7, b’okay?

Final Jeopardy!

Now we have current smartphone market leader RIM’s business “pusher”, and outage-plugger extraordinaire Mike Lazaridis taking “Post SDK Over-Reactions” for a thousand:

“Talk — all I’m [hearing] is talk about [the iPhone's chances in Enterprise]. I think it’s important that we put this thing in perspective.” [...] “Apple’s design-centric approach [will] ultimately limit its appeal by sacrificing needed enterprise functionality. I think over-focus on one blinds you to the value of the other.” [...] “Apple’s approach produced devices that inevitably sacrificed advanced features for aesthetics.”

Final answer? Okay, pens down and no peeking!

Well, what do you think? Will RIM’s success just keep on multiplying, or did the Blackberry Boss just gamble it all away?

Find out next time on iPhone Jeopardy!

After a week of using the Treo 680, I have to say that it’s pretty much the same as I remember it. I used the 680 as my primary phone for about half a year, and I’ve reviewed it twice already. I won’t claim to be the most knowledgeable 680 user out there; that honor would certainly be bestowed to many, many users in our forum before I would even enter consideration for it. I’ve had a lot to say about Palm OS, generally favorable I suppose, but there are caveats. I’ve said as much in the TreoCentral TreoCast, but I’ve never had an opportunity like this one to really distill thirty podcasts and a few dozen hours of listening into a manifesto of what’s good and what’s bad about Palm OS, and what I really think about their Linux venture, and why Palm is on their current path.

When I say the King is dead, I don’t mean that the 680 is a bad device, or that there’s no reason to use Palm OS, or that anyone that uses it is dumb. Far from it, I think the 680 is pretty high up on my list. It’s still a good phone. If I thought Palm OS was dumb or not relevant, I wouldn’t do the TreoCentral TreoCast. It boils down to two things with Palm OS: the hardware and the software. The hardware will see updates. There will probably be more Palm OS GSM phones to come out. Better cameras, 3G, smaller form factors, the whole shebang. When it comes out, it will probably be a compelling upgrade for Palm OS users. But I don’t think we’ll see a significant software update for Palm OS in the next two years. While some may accuse that it’s unfair to say “the king is dead” alluding to Palm OS, it’s not accurate to say the king is alive, either. But still, there are always these persistent rumors about faked deaths and random sightings…

Read the rest of this entry »

The fourth annual iLounge 2008 Buyers Guide works for the iPhone and iPod, and is viewable online for smaller screens like the iPhone, iPod Touch, or laptops. If you prefer, for desktop viewing.

Verizon is lowering their data rates for feature phones in preparation for competition with the iPhone. Expect a snarky comment from Dieter on this one. Unfortunately, their smartphone data rates are still sky-high. And, you can add a Canadian roaming plan for just $20. The Phone they’re thinking about using to “compete” with the iPhone is the Samsung F700, though they might re-brand it as the U940. That’s some “brilliant marketing.” I don’t usually report on “iPhone killers,” but I’m glad to see the iPhone forcing prices down for everybody.

Rumors from AppleInsider indicate that iTunes 7.5 will be coming out in the next couple of weeks. This probably means that any iPhone updates with post-Leopard goodness require an iTunes update. This iTunes update will also bring support for the UK, German, and likely French iPhones. Oh, and it will include better duplicate song management. w00t!

Mark/Space, makers of many popular “Missing Sync” smartphone sync softwares, have announced their intent to release “Missing Sync for the iPhone” later this year. Their software will include Notes.app syncing, SMS backups, better call log management, and a migration tool to copy data from a BlackBerry, Palm OS, or Windows Mobile smartphone.

figure 1: The Orange Treo 680 is what I used before I got an iPhone. This and a featurephone, actually, for when I wanted to take a non-useless picture of something. I used both AT&T and T-Mobile.

Let me put on my Carnac the Magnificent hat and guess that you were on T-Mobile too. There’s an interesting survey report done by the NPD group recently that caught my eye, specifically because it names Treos. I still have love for Treos, but I’m off the wagon in terms of using one regularly at least until their Linux OS ships. But here are the fact nuggets that they report:

• iPhone owners were 10 times more likely to have owned a Treo
• iPhone owners were 3 times more likely to use a T-Mobile phone, such as the Sidekick
• iPhone owners were 3 times more likely to switch from T-Mobile or Alltel
• iPhone owners were no more likely to buy an iPhone if they had a Blackberry

They don’t break down the numbers for you much in the press release, but as always these reports are meant to be bought and sold by industry analysts and stock market guys and stuff. I’d like to believe that they have a breakdown of PalmOS and Windows Mobile in there, but they don’t specify in their press release. The only quote nugget is from NPD’s Director of Industry Analysis Ross Rubin:

“The iPhone’s Internet and media capabilities have resonated with consumers — especially those who previously owned Treos and Sidekicks. Its advanced operating system makes it competitive with smartphones for many tasks, while its sleek design and lack of expandability is reminiscent of fashion phones”

Speaking personally, I had a devil of a time with getting media on the Treo. It’s just not convenient to use it to consume media at all. You need the special headphones, you need to drag your files into which directory on the SD card again, or worse, you use Palm Desktop to do it. My loathing for Palm Desktop and Palm Conduits really knows no bounds. Even with the iSync conduits, it was still a pain. Oh, and my loathing for Blazer — that knows no bounds too. I wrestled with Java to get Opera Mini installed, juggled my 4-5 SD cards, trying to remember what was on which one, etc. I wanted to like Windows Mobile, but missed the screen resolution and couldn’t cope with the interface. Syncing on the iPhone is quick, easy, and seems to take much less time than anything on Palm Desktop would ever do.

The New York Times has a neat article on third party applications and how the iPhone is currently the only device on AT&T’s network that doesn’t support them. The article has some good things to say about Palm too, which I always welcome. The big gist of it is how Jobs’ quote from a January Newsweek interview doesn’t jive with reality:

“You don’t want your phone to be an open platform… You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”

Whereas the reality of the situation is that Cingular/ATT welcomed development on every single other phone they had on their network, whether it be Java/J2ME, PalmOS development, Windows Development, or Flash Lite / whatever. This is backed up by Mark Bercow, Senior VP of Development at Palm. Talk about your David vs. Goliath situations here; I feel like Steve Jobs’ famous reality distortion field just failed for a second or something. But, there’s another quote that the Times dug up that I’d forgotten about from his video conversation with Walt Mossberg at the All Things D conference in July:

“This is a very important trade-off between security and openness. We want both. We’ve got good ideas, and sometime later this year, we can open it up to third-party apps, and keep security.”

The more I think about this quote, the more I think he’s talking about widgets here. You only really have to worry about a widget’s security if there’s a browser bug or exploit, and HTML/CSS/AJAX is definitely open. He probably doesn’t want to open up a full native SDK until the software and hardware platforms are stable and proven, much like he did with the original Mac series. That is, if he wants a full native SDK available to the public at all.

There are a few other interesting tidbits from the article that I can’t help but mention:

1. Two-thirds of Treo owners have purchased 3rd party apps
2. Ten percent of Treo owners have purchased 10 or more 3rd party apps
3. AT&T has a website to get developers on all of their development platforms except the iPhone.

There’s a great article at UPenn that delves into the study of marketing and hype, geared directly towards gadget release. The you-know-what is the main thing under their microscope, as it goes into detail as to why it was pre-announced by 6 months. They cover how some companies really have their way with marketing and pre-releases and hype, and some others, well, how does one actually come out and say it, not have way.