Treo, Palm, Love, Hate.
Let me start this off by saying my Treo 650 is the best gadget I have ever bought. To clarify “best”, it is the gadget that made me instantly forget how I could possibly have gotten along in life without it - it is a completely indespensible tool for me. I love my treo - when my first one broke (after just over a year of hard use - although it did suffer a bit of a long and lingering decline) the only question was whether there was a newer treo to replace it with.
Which brings us to the hate part. I hate Palm. What the hell is wrong with them? How many times can they release the same phone? 600? 650? 700? 750? Changing numbers and adding letters is only part of releasing a new product - the products themselves have to also be different. It’s been almost 4 years and all palm can do is cut off the antenna and increase the resolution on the screen. Good things for sure, but wouldn’t protected memory have been a better thing to work on?
So, I ask myself daily as I gaze at my 650, what happens to smartphones next?
First a little history according to Felix. The 650 is a great device, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. Palm frittered away a huge headstart on microsoft doing nothing, as far as I can tell, but sitting on their thumbs. Remember back in the day when you could laugh at WinCE and those monstrous phones? Well… WinMob is both a better name and a better os than it was (I still wouldn’t use it, but it works for many), has several really good looking handsets and has caught up to Palm in sales. Palm’s response to this? Let’s get the antenna off the treo’s!
I’ve been a Palm apologist for years. In the face of furious attacks on the wisdom of spinning off the OS, I stood steadfast (well at that time they had licensees!). On the future of PalmOS after being bought by Access, I bravely faced the storm (Access at least has a good product, Blazer, under it’s hat - it isn’t like PalmSource was doing anything by themselves). But now.. what has happened? iPhone.
The iPhone underscores just how little has gone on in the smartphone world - especially in the Palm section of that world. It inspires at least 3 or 4 of the seven deadly sins. While I’m not sure if it’s right for me - I do love my hard keyboard - I strongly suspect that if the iPhone can live up to a reasonable fraction of the hype, even if I can resist gen 1, I may not be able to resist the second generation.
The question for this post is how will this affect Palm. This is my thinking on it - Apple is going to eat the sidekick’s lunch completely, it’s over for Danger. Blackberry will still hang on for the most part - their fledgeling attempts to get into a consumer market will be crushed, but they are entrenched in the business market and that’s not going away anytime soon. Microsoft will persist, as it always does.
Now as to Palm, it’s just a matter of time. Palm isn’t entrenched in the business market, but it is primarily a business device with people who are big emailers as well as those who have very specific application needs. I believe that the iPhone will start stealing Palm’s appetizers immediately and begin moving in on Palm’s lunch fairly quickly. It is conceivable, although this may be the Palm apologist in me, that the threat of the iPhone will cause them to actually do something at work and start really improving their devices and software. It’s either that, or it’s over for Palm. In my mind, it’s kind of win-win.
