http://www.osnews.com/story/8742/Palm-based_Smart_Phones_vs_The_Others Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 06:04:17 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Not looking to be argumentative but user-friendly interaction is pretty much a person-by-person thing. There are some interfaces that are better than others, and of course smartphones, like PDAs, like computers all have their uses, and it's better to bunch them into categories, rather than palm vs the world.

examples:
Blackberry - Their forte is push e-mail, they are not there for SSH, for extensive web browsing, for games, or for utilities

Symbian - Even though symbian has been around for a while there are several versions out there, Series 60, Series 90, Series 80, UIQ, EPOC. Even though all are the same OS, applications are mutually incompatible, which produces a problem of the application barrier. I use a P800, love it, I play music on it, play games, check my mail, use it as a phone, SMS and a browser. It does what it does well, but I would not expect much more from it. It is a good mix of phone and PDA.


Palm and pocketPC - These two OSes have been around for a while and do not have the problem of the application barrier. There are a ton of applications for them. If you are looking for something that is more of a connected PDA than a phone - these are the devices for you. Mon, 01 Nov 2004 20:28:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? sorry but you article is seriously biased towards the US.
In europe palm OS phones are virtually non-existant. There are a few smartphones, but the vast majority are symbian - with the most popular from sony and nokia.
Don't believe me? - see the following link http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/27/pda_market_q3_04/

in short symbian has over 50% of the worldwide market, MS smartphone ~20%, and palmone ~17% (with almost all the palms sold in the US, and largely PDAs not phones)
It also shows symbian market share growing at 200% compared to 33 % for microsoft, and an almost non-existent 3% for palm.
Care to rethink your article? Mon, 01 Nov 2004 20:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Dave, that may be so, but it doesn't mean that we should hew to it here. Europeans are interested in simpler solutions than we seem to be. In the USA, the Palm OS is at least 75% of the market in PDA's.

While Symbian phones are coming out in greater numbers, I don't see too many people actually buying them. Why should we be limited by the simpler preferences of Europeans?

Europeans also want a simple music player. One without any other functions. Should we be bound by that as well?. Should Apple remove all of the other functions from it's iPods just to suit the European buyer?

There are different markets, and manufactures can play to all of them.

I have a Samsung i330, and it's been an amazingly useful device. I'm waiting for the new i550 to come out. Then I'll compare it to the Treo 650.

The fact is that you can do far more with the Palm OS than any other phone type device. The MS CE devices are simply too big and clumsy for me.

I hardly see a Symbian phone as a universal device. It's much too limited. The same is true of the MS Smartphone, though somewhat less so.

The main problem is that Palm has not pushed the OS aggressively enough to phone makers.

Hopefully this will chance as they say they are committed to have it out on less expensive phones soon. Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? the treo 650 still uses Palm 5 not Palm 6 (Garnet)... Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, 5.4, to be exact. Mon, 01 Nov 2004 23:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? the difference in market share between symbian and palm in europe might have something to do with availability (symbian is available from a lot more vendors while palm is not) and price. There are some mid-end phones with symbian, most palm OS phones are quite pricey.

Don't count on symbian monopolizing the market in europe or on palm doing so in america.

You'll see palm OS in lower priced phones with smaller form factors in the near future. That will help in europe and elsewhere. The European phone makers (yep the ones who own symbian and refuse to use anything else) are going to have their lunch eaten for them by upstarts from Korea and china (its already happening (samsung, LG)). Korean, chinese, and other upstart phones vendors will not pursue symbian only. They will use, palm, linux, windows to stand out against a symbian oriented field in europe.

Likewise i am sure symbian will gain some ground in the US. Mon, 01 Nov 2004 23:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Yes, that's pretty much what I said above. The NY Times, in their Monday business section has a roundup of leading movies, software, Cd's, etc. In the hardware section they rotate once a week on a monthly basis. This week it's cell phones and PDA's. The numbers have changed again.

Cells

24.4% Samsung
21.8% Nokia
17.2% Motorola
16.1% LG Electronics
06.6% Kyocera

Samsung has come from almost nowhere a year ago, and has steadily, month by month gone up in share.

PDA's

66.6% Palm
19.7% HP
07.3% Sony
04.3% Toshiba
00.5% ViewSonic

While the #5 spot has always been up for grabs, Palm's share has been steady. Sony, which used to be #2 has stopped selling new model Palm PDA's here in the states, so their share is down. Hp is up a little. Mon, 01 Nov 2004 23:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? And do not give me advice.

If I had the money I'll have all those devices as well, I hate this people that think they're cool because they get all the latest toys.

I will buy all those things if I had the money for god sake.

And I do suscribe like the rest of the europeans that machines which try to do too much usually does not excel at anything.

Does anybody know of any combination of digital camera and something else which is good at being both? Tue, 02 Nov 2004 00:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have a Treo 600. I do remote administration on it. It's slow and painful - you get a small screen, a slow link (although you can pay for a faster one) and a thumbboard. You can scrape by using ssh, doing simple stuff in bash and even some editing in vi, but forget about Terminal Services over a wireless link... I wouldn't be ditching that home DSL line yet.

Also, there are no SD wi-fi cards available for the Treo 600 (or, more properly, no drivers; recall the TreoCentral bounty), and palmOne has stated that they don't yet have drivers for the 650, although they're developing it. I doubt that the Treo will ever work with the SanDisk wi-fi card, since SanDisk aren't keen on writing Palm OS drivers. Tue, 02 Nov 2004 02:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Oops, the TreoCentral bounty was for Bluetooth drivers, not wi-fi. My bad. Tue, 02 Nov 2004 02:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I personally don't think a phone that is capable of SSH is a really strong or broad selling point. I'm techno geaky myself but the last think I would ever want to do would be sysadmin stuff using a phone to type a lot of stuff in.

I think a smart phone is a neat cool idea but I can't justify the price they are charging. $600 is just too much for a phone. I was quite surprised to find that my normal Nokia was a perfectly good contact manager.

I think that when smart phone screens go really high res this will enable more applications like mobile maps. But the keyboard will still be too small for serious typing.

Smart phones are probably where all phones are headed. But not because they are especially useful to most people. It's more an issue of technology push.

- Andrew Tue, 02 Nov 2004 02:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have a 600 and perform administrator functions on a w/2000 server. What remote software is the author using? Tue, 02 Nov 2004 02:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Almost all Nokia phones use Symbian now so a huge number of people in US as wellas europe use symbian.

Another point and this is not just to you but to the author of the article is that it is Sony Ericsson and not Sony that makes P910, P800 e.t.c. It is a joint Venture of Ericsson and Sony Mobile Divisions.

Palm has called them their most serious threat.

I also was interested to know how many procent of people do even half the stuff the author do with your Treo? If it is even more than 5% I would think that Symbian makers would care.

For majority of the users the exterior and interior design is the most important issue and a Treo brick with a PDA interface is not just good enough.

And on application side, the best pda browser Opera has been available just for Symbian since 2 years. They released it recently for pocket pc. Tue, 02 Nov 2004 08:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? hello everyone
I have used Nokia 6600 and SonyErricsson P800 (I only use myself Nokia 6610i as I feel that students really don't need smart phones)
But however I can say that Symbian OS is much more tightly integrated, however is somewhat vulnarable (recent virus threats prove that) Also Symbian has lots of free software available (which is opposite to what author has said) however it is spread wide accross web which palm softwares can be found at one place, however my experience with Palm software (I was using old PalmIIIxe for a while) is that almost 50% of software is free & 50% is commercial.
Also this side of world in Asia PalmOS, Microsoft Windows Mobile Edition based phones are almost inexistant (only Motorola makes 'em that to very expensive) which Treo are non-existant here.
So for smart phones the only real & affordable option is Symbian based phones. Tue, 02 Nov 2004 12:47:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? * Europeans in general, tend to be more design conscious (read: generally have a more refined aeshetic and ergonomic senses) - subsequently, selling square brick PDAs masquerading as phones is unlikely to be a successful enterprise. Case in point MS based PDA cum Phone devices seem to have very small penetration - and they are unequivocally ugly.

* European markets tend to be significantly more quality conscious and less fad driven.

* I have only ever seen Palm based phones outside Europe. Palm does not enjoy world domination.

* According to every review I have seen, MS baseed phones have unacceptable battery performance - relative to MS based solutions. Proprietary solutions (which Motorola, Nokia and most other manufacturers have and use) usually are the best on this score because they have so little baggage.

* From a technical viewpoint, the Symbian OS is vastly superior to WinCE or whatever it is called this week. Motorola does have Symbian phones but in a parochial fit of peak seems to have decided to be a bit of everything, but leaning towards being MS centric these days.

* That there is increasing competion from asian manufacturers is not news in the mobile telecoms branch, or any other industry is not news. The global economy and all that. Many manufacturers are well placed to meet these competitive forces.

* There is plenty of Symbian software available.

* The Nokia 9210i is probably the remote admin's preferred alternative - SYmbian of course.

* I owned 3 different Motorola phones - they all sucked big-time.

* The SPV sucked even bigger time

* My Nokia 3310 still works just fine.

* For the record, before you start calling me euro trash or similar, I am not european.

ciao all Wed, 03 Nov 2004 17:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Another interesting issue is that Palm has always made PDA's and more recently they started to make smartphones. On contrast, Nokia, Ericsson and all the others have made phones and now they are adding PDA'like capabilities to their phones. So I would say it's not fair to compare the number of apps that are available for Palm and Symbian.

But Symbian is gaining more and more each day. And more and more apps are written for it every day, as new interesting devices start to appear (see the new Nokia 7710, scheduled for the next year).

And, btw, Putty is available for Symbian also :-). Even though it is a pain in the ass to try to use it on something else than Nokia Communicator.

The software is there, you just have to be pacient enough to look for it. Wed, 03 Nov 2004 19:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments