by Convergent on 11-06-2009

Today, November 6, is the day that Verizon is releasing the Motorola DROID and directly targeting the tremendous growth of the Apple iPhone with AT&T. Verizon has been preparing for this day with a heavy offensive of ads targeting the weakness's of AT&T's 3G network, as well as areas of feature weakness in the iPhone. Can Verizon slow down the iPhone? Time will tell, but I believe this is gearing up to be quite a battle.

So how did this start? Motorola has been a mainstay in the mobile handset space for many years. They have traditionally had heavy competition from Nokia, Samsung, and other traditional device manufacturers. The PDAPhone (or Smartphone) market, has been largely a small niche play for the carriers, and Palm, Microsoft (mostly with HTC), and RIM... [Read More]

by Convergent on 06-03-2009

The AdMob network delivers ads to mobile websites and recently concluded a study of the ad traffic being delivered across different PDAPhone platforms. They found that even though the Apple iPhone lags in overall marketshare, it is dominating the mobile web traffic. This is a critical point in the adoption of the device in the market, because much content is funded by ads, and the iPhone seems to be a sweet spot for ad delivery. To the user, this could mean more low cost content for the iPhone platform.

The report found that PDAPhones accounted for only 12% of total mobile devices sold in 2008, but so far this year 35% of the mobile ad requests are coming from PDAPhones. The iPhone, capturing only 8% of the PDAPhone market generated 43% of the mobile web requests and... [Read More]

by Convergent on 03-14-2009

I've been at this PDAPhone thing now for about eight years and have been through a lot of devices and platforms. I think I've tried just about everything at least once... Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, etc. As some may know, I've moved to an iPhone late last year (from an HTC Tilt) and have been pretty happy with it. I have a number of things I wanted to do reviews on, but I've been so busy that I've not had time to write them (the way I wanted to), so I thought it would be fun to through up a "What's in your pocket?" article and summarize some of my favorite iPhone stuff.

Lets start on the outside and then work in.

The one thing that I've struggled to find the perfect solution on was the question of how to carry and protect my... [Read More]

by NewsGuy on 03-12-2009

After a couple of years of slow bleed, Palm seems to be hitting on all cylinders right now. Their stock price is up. They are in the news every day. They've got a couple of products in play and a brand new platform about to roll out that their base has been clamoring to get for years. My question is... are they overplaying their hand? Apple created more hype before the iPhone launch than probably any PDAPhone in history, and they've largely delivered on the hype and reaped the rewards. Palm will have to execute perfectly over the next couple of quarters or they could be done. This is not a time to stumble.

What brought this thought to mind is today's announcement from Palm and Sprint of the Palm Pre pricing model. It appears that you will not be able to get a Palm... [Read More]

by Convergent on 03-06-2009

Many of our pages on PDAPhoneHome are now causing a Google initiated warning to show up saying the site is not safe. I've been working to try and resolve this problem for the last week or so and have been getting very frustrated with Google. I am not the only one. Their support forum is filled with webmasters complaining about the way they've handled this. In our case, it turns out that they uncovered some threads from 2003 and earlier that had problem iframes added to the posts. For those of you that have been around here for a while, you'll recall that we got hacked very severely back then. Well there are some remnants from that attack that were lingering in text in posts. I have taken the steps to make sure that can't happen again, and apologize for the inconvenience.
[Read More]

by NewsGuy on 03-06-2009

Apple's iPhone has been wildly successful at selling application software, and more importantly Apple has been successful at inserting themselves into the revenue stream for applications. Up until the iPhone, the common model for PDAPhone users was to buy the device and then buy their applications from an independent reseller (like PDAPhoneHome's store) or directly from the application developers. This model offered a great deal of flexibility for the device owner, and has been great for the third party software stores. But the problem with this model was that the most powerful entities in the development of new devices (carriers and device/platform developers) were left out of the revenue stream. The carriers cared because they were missing out on revenue that they get from other... [Read More]

by Convergent on 02-25-2009

At some point in the future we will look back at Microsoft and evaluate how the company did under Bill Gates vs. Steve Ballmer. I'm sure many Apple fans are a bit worried about whether Apple will have the same problems when Steve Jobs moves on. Microsoft seems to be falling more and more into a defensive posture lately, on many fronts. Chief among them is Windows Mobile, particularly when up against the iPhone.

Now Ballmer is trying the approach of dismissing them as basically being hype. This is pretty amazing, given that the Apple iPhone has turned the whole mobile industry on its head. Its clear to me that Apple has done more in a year to get the PDAPhone into the mainstream than Microsoft has done in the eight years prior. Microsoft could have owned and... [Read More]

by NewsGuy on 02-19-2009

Way back in the day, there was a company called Compaq that made IBM compatible personal computers. In fact, they invented the "compatible" market and paved the way for the PC industry as it is today. Absent Compaq, there would be IBM and Apple making proprietary personal computers. So its fair to say that Compaq had a major impact on the market. Then Compaq made PDAs that they called iPaqs, appropriately enough. But Compaq's life ended when HP bought them, and since that there has been what I would call an inconsistent strategy for mobile devices. HP has made some PDAPhones, gotten out of the market, gotten back in the market, etc. Through it all, they've not really been much of a player in the market, hardly showing up on market share comparisons.

In... [Read More]

by NewsGuy on 02-19-2009

It has been reported in a recent article at CNBC that Sprint will have exclusive rights to sell the Palm Pre in the United States through 2009 (and possibly longer). This is a bit of a departure from the strategy of Palm in years past. When Palm launched the very successful Treo 600, they set a new standard for PDAPhones makers in that they were able to do a global launch with very little lag. There were CDMA and GSM versions of the Treo 600 available at nearly every major carrier around the globe. The Treo 600 went on to make a major impact on the market.

It seems that for the last year and a half, almost every move in the PDAPhone space is something designed to copy or react to Apple's wildly successful... [Read More]

by NewsGuy on 02-17-2009

I have become a big fan of the Apple iPhone since I move do the iPhone 3G about 5 months ago. The one area that it is a bit lacking is serious email. Its email client is pretty good, but it lacks the robustness of a Blackberry for doing corporate email. If you've ever used a Blackberry, you know what good mobile email is and the iPhone isn't it. Up until now, the Android platform which is much newer, has had a similar place in the "serious email" space.

SEVEN, a global leader in mobile email and messaging software, has announced the availability of their mobile messaging solution for the Android platform. SEVEN is the first Android solution to address both personal and business mobile email—along with calendars and contacts—on one intuitive and integrated... [Read More]