Jeff Hawkins and his Treo 600 are on the cover of Business 2.0 this month, with the headline "How Palm Got Cool Again". The article chronicles the last few years at Palm, Handspring, and now PalmOne. It reinforces recent stores that point out how important it is for any PDA company to effectively move to the pdaPhone space, or get overrun by the likes of Nokia and Motorola in coming years. The story reminds us how young our industry is, as it goes all the way back to the ancient days of 2001 to timeline event that led to Handsprings entry into the pdaPhone market. This is a great, and timely story. You'll have to by the magazine to read the full story, but I've included some interested quoted statistics here when you hit Read Full.
Business 2.0 is quoting IDC with interesting worldwide statistics on PDA and Smartphone marketshare. These do present a sharp contrast to recently reported US numbers.
which struck me today when I was reading an interview with Nokia's CDMA general manager, in which he remarked only the US requires AGPS receiver inclusion in phones, which drives up our wireless handset cost significantly.
Ah .. yes those days were good... I had the first Visor Phone and an engineer Jarvis at HandSpring... a super guy let me test it for them for a long time... I looked so coooollll back then. The first of the Palm/PDA/Phones and a color screen.. man I was in Heaven. seriously I would give any thing for that Visor Phone now cause it NEVER crashed .... amazing. Just that at time Cingular was the carrier and I don't want to go there today. Yes, Palm One has come a long way and they deserve the credit and rightly so. Kudos to PalmOne!!!!
PS:- I still wear a HandSpring T-Shirt proudly!!!.
From the looks of those charts, and from reading the article, PalmOne is going to have a tough time keeping itself cool. Some of the compelling thoughts that I recall...
* Palm (now PalmOne) has a history of hitting a home run, and then floundering for the following years... they just hit a home run with the Treo 600.
* PalmOne's winning horse is the lone Treo 600... while their big mobile phone competitors will be releasing a plethora of competing products in the next 12 months... in most cases several per company.
* Microsoft is rapidly sucking up PalmSource's marketshare, while both are minimal players in the worldwide Smartphone market.
As for the aGPS thing, I have to agree. the 7135 has waGPS, and no sign here anywhere close to me of it being activated any time soon, if ever, as shown by your map, sigh. yes the e911 is working, but I was told when I bought the thing that waGPS would be available soon thereafter for private use...*grumble*.
As for the OS thing, if you have ever played with a Symbian machine...they have their perks, but it still looks like it was a phone OS before it was a PDA one...(most of the units are physically limited by comparison), so it has a way to go. Palm should still get/keep busy...license/market/share/whatever. Opening up the 600 for more than just Sprint would be a great idea, and a kick in the teeth for all the other smartphone makers to get with it. Apologies if it already is, I have yet to see it.
I got stuck with Microsoft on my desktop, and I'd really prefer not to go through that again...sigh...enough is enough already. I got REALLY worried when even the PalmReader (an ebook reader) mysteriously became the more generically named "e-reader" on the PDM website. Sigh, it's even NAMED ereader.com now . Palm is NOT going away any time soon, the consumers (us) will hopefully benefit from this type of competition.
Hey 'Verge, think you could "Converge" those two graphs? *grin*
Last edited by Copasetic : 05-26-2004 at 03:01 PM.
* PalmOne's winning horse is the lone Treo 600... while their big mobile phone competitors will be releasing a plethora of competing products in the next 12 months... in most cases several per company.
{snip}
But, at Mobile Showcase 2004, a large Clue was dropped regarding a new design on the Treo (Shall I call it the Treo 7?) which is more modular iand easier to reconfigure for different carriers.
Remember, because of the cumbersome FCC approval process, the real customer on PDAphones is the carrier, as that's who the vast majority of PDAphones are sold through. The carrier tells PalmOne what features they want to buy, and then PalmOne designs it, gets FCC approval, finds an OEM to make it, and delivers it to market.
The PalmOne Engineering VP I spoke with told me of the new modular design for the next Treo line. That means it's real easy to upgrade when, say, ATTWS-Cingular rolls out EDGE or Verizon rolls out 1EV-DO. Drop in a new radio, and you now have a Treo 71x, or whatever they will really name them.
Do you realize there's STILL no EDGE or 1EV-DO PDA-phone? None.
PalmOne looks to be on the right track to fix that.
Originally posted by johnbartley Do you realize there's STILL no EDGE or 1EV-DO PDA-phone? None.
Huh? Do you have a Kyo 7135? Treo? Samsung? If it is CDMA and says 3G it should be just fine, so I don't understand (unless you mean streaming movies, heh). EvDO is a cost saver for us end users, as it works *with* existing 3G technology, as a "data only" (hence the "DO") companion to CDMA2000 1X (this means no TXTing or phone calls while it's active). Otherwise, the changeover should be almost completely transparent to the user community (maybe a firmware upgrade). According to Verizon, even pricing won't change over existing 1X-RTT rates (yeah right). I cannot comment on the other offerings and their compatibility: CFDM (Nextel); Not sure about Cingular/AT&T; EV-DV (Sprint). *Note* Sprint has pushed back the faster EV-DV (Data+Voice) in favor of a sooner release of EV-DO. But this may be good news out of the gate for Sprint users as well. And if GSM carriers like Cingular can't get their "own" UMTS (like CDMA with different frequencies) out in time, they may be stuck with the slower EDGE technology (it's only 100K or so as of this writing), but I'd think it would be cheaper, which for me in the middle of nowhere I'd ALWAYS prefer cost over bandwidth (how much does your PDA really need? One of the problems these carriers face now is frequency space, and what's available (what's left).
EvDO has been in testing since February in a few US cities, and Richmond Virginia is one of them. It's so transparent that my former boss lives there now, and said he "Just called them up, and poof!" That was all it took. The $4 Billion that VZW has set aside for the upgrades will all be on their end.
Hmm no more hotspot worries, since they all want us to have broadband phones, wheee
Jeff Hawkins and his Treo 600 are on the cover of 
. Palm is NOT going away any time soon, the consumers (us) will hopefully benefit from this type of competition.
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