Guest post by Palm recently announced over $500 million in losses, but then we all knew Palm wasn’t too hot on the market these days despite their efforts to sell Windows Mobile devices. Palm is hoping to make a comeback, however, with new smartphones sporting Nova in 2009.The new Nova OS, developed by Palm itself, is reportedly going to be debuted at CES in January, though Palm hasn’t exactly confirmed this. The goal of Nova is to “bridge the gap between Research In Motion’s (RIMM) BlackBerry devices, oriented to work and e-mail, and Apple’s iPhone, oriented to fun,” aiming for the “fat middle of the market,” since people’s work and entertainment lives in the 21st century are more and more gravitating towards one another.
Loses. Palm Loses. Not Looses.
Sheesh.
Damn. And here I thought Palm was cavalierly throwing money at the general public for the holidays.
That would make them a bunch of loosers – and as we all know, *Noone like loosers.
*Peter Noone, that is.
I’ve been a Palm user for a long time. I really liked Palm OS – it was simple and reliable. But they let it stagnate and it just can’t compete with modern smartphone alternatives.
I’ve also always liked Palm hardware. The Treos have been awesome, and I really like the keyboard on them – the iPhone touch input is much slower and less reliable and slide out keyboards add significant bulk.
So when I lost my Treo 650, I decided to pick up an 800w. From a hardware perspective, this thing is awesome – Wifi, GPS, EVDO, keyboard, good screen, and compact form-factor. But Windows Mobile is painful. Crashes, abysmal battery life, general sluggishness.. it’s too bad Palm keeps fumbling with nextgen OSes.
I just hope they figure it out before they go under! An alliance with Nokia or Google wouldn’t be a bad idea.
Hmmm…. and here I just left the employ of a company that turned down being acquired by Microsoft for Search, mostly, and a lot of people were saying that’d be bad, getting in bed with the enemy or (which also didn’t happen) getting in bed with the biggest competitor, Google, which was prevented by threats of lawsuits. Or, how about Novell getting in bed with Microsoft in the OS business on the server/PC side of things with Linux? How’s THAT been working out? Sure, their Linux-based revenue has grown, but they’re still losing money with it, so…
Observation: it rarely makes long-term (or often even short-term) sense for business viability to get into bed with your staunchest competitors, because then you’ve got nothing to differentiate yourself, and they hold all the relevant cards worth holding. In other words, Palm likely has the best long-term chances by doing well, but on its own terms, and not that of their competitors. Otherwise, there will be nothing left of Palm but what’s recorded by tech and business historians, and a bit of Palm-branded hardware that some people refuse to give up until they’re dead, or their hardware is dead, whichever comes first
yeah, i adore my treos. I’m currently typing this on my treo 800. i really like it so far. has everything i want in a phone for the most part. i wasnt really lookin forward to WM but 6.1 pro is decent. can be a little sluggis at times. Only time it has crashed it when i was doing to much at once and ran out of memory. WM doesn’t handle that very gracefuly
I hope palm survives. I’ll be really sad if the Treos disappear. its been the only line of smartphones I’ve liked using. And I’ve used quit a few.
oh, i have an 8gb MicroSDHC card and a Redfly.. i rarely drag my laptop out anymore. Just use my phone. lol.
For me it was the T5; the perfect balance physical buttons, virtual input space and maximized screen area on a chassis shape that just seems right. The Lifebook was a thicker chassis and the Treo’s crippled the screen by using half the hardware space for a button pad. Add to that the features that peaked in the T5 and slowly got dropped after like flashdrive mode and it became very hard to replace. Eventually the N800 and later N810 came along but until then, I could find nothingthat compared to my T5.
I remember everyone running around with there new first and second generation iPods telling me; “what do you meand you don’t have an iPod, they’re awsome.” Too which I’d reply; ‘this plays music, video, text documents, keeps my todo/calendar/contacts, does SMS out my phone through bluetooth and allows me to install interesting programs like Bluejacker.. why on earth would I limit myself to something that can only play music?” – to be honest, even the iPod Touch wouldn’t suite my needs like the T5 and my N810 both can.
Here’s hoping Palm can do something to regain a foothold in the market they created. I don’t think could give me something better than Maemo5 on the next Nokia tablet but for the years that they where the vendors meeting my needs (Palm Vx, Palm ???, Palm T5) I wish them well.
I’m with you. I also have a Treo 800w and looked great on paper but turned out to be junk. Crashes, without a doubt the worst audio of any dumb or smartphone on the market, battery life that makes it a “no go” for business users and half functioning GPS.
With Sprint discontinuing the 800w and replacing it with the Treo Pro in a couple of weeks it I will give the Treo Pro a chance as my brother has one and it fixes all the 800w problems and adds several features. The cruel joke on the Sprint Treo forums is the 800w was the test model for the Treo Pro.
It was a mistake to move to Microsoft’s OS. The Palm OS versions crash much less. They just needed to release an update to their OS to make it more appealing for smart phones. Maybe they should just adopt Android and port all their applications to it. Being a G1 phone owner I would love that since I like the applications that come with Palm. The applications that come with the current G1 phone are a little skimpy
Correct, I have a Blackberry and I had a Windows OS powered device before and it locked up for no reason at all.
I hope Palm can get back on its feet using the Palm OS and focusing on it and abandon the MS one solution for the planet solution.
The palm OS, for me, is still better and offers what I need from a smartphone. Well, except for GPS. I’ve tried windows mobile and hated the sluggish, error prone UI and no free ssh app. I’ve used the Blackberry and miss the time when the device shined as an email device.
Even so, google maps, pssh, Activesync compatible Versamail, hundreds of good palm third party software, and not least of all an adequate phone application and excellent reception on Sprint means I will probably continue using the 755p or centro, even buying off ebay till they run out.
Edited 2008-12-21 01:51 UTC
I don’t understand Palm: they spent $10 Mil. developing the Foleo and then blow it all off. With a lower price and a full-featured Linux OS, they could have made the first Netbook. But no. They decided to kill the project 2 month before Asus came out with the eee PC. The rest is history…
I don’t think yet another Linux smartphone is going to do much good. Android is gaining momentum and might soon become the leading alternative to Windows Mobile.
I hear that. The way I see it, Palm OS itself wasn’t fundamentally flawed. If they:
* Integrated support for a good 3D graphics chipset from Nvidia or similar.
* Reskinned the UI completely with support for shadows and tranparency etc to bring it up to spec with todays expectations.
* Added support for 3G radios and beyond.
* Retained the speed and zen of Palm OS.
Then they would have had a winner.
Seriously, with a 10 – 15 mill budget you could hire a team of 40 good coders for 2-3 years… surely enough to achieve those goals.