Palm’s product disconnect
I was noticing something odd recently. If you read the reviews of Palm’s latest offering, the 755p, you’ll find that they are all glowing reviews. But if you read the comments on PalmInfocenter and Palm’s own blog you’ll find that there’s a lot of Palm hating going on. What’s up with that?
Here’s my thinking. Taken in a vacuum, Palm’s offering is pretty good. The PalmOS is long in the tooth but it gets the job done and it’s technical limitations affect power users mostly - the general consumer doesn’t much care about multi tasking and reviewers aren’t going to witness crashing in the day or two they gently play with their demo models. The UI of PalmOS is still pretty good - everything is easy to use and quick to navigate around. The screen is beautiful and all in all it’s a pretty good smart phone. I know I love my 650 dearly and the 750p being almost no different is a nice machine too.
And that’s the problem. For palm’s existing users the trek from the Treo 600 to the 755p was a frustrating one with many intervening models but almost no intervening innovation and even a huge step back in the case of the 700p. The company has been sitting on it’s laurels doing absolutely 0 in terms of anything interesting in it’s product line - ignoring the plaintive calls of it’s decreasingly fanatical userbase to add in any of a raft of features, simply rereleasing the same phone over and over with more or less trivial hard and software changes.
It’s been able to get away with this because of the sad state of affairs that had existed in the smartphone industry. Very little was going on on that front and the Treo 600 was so far ahead of the pack that everyone was playing catch up. Unfortunately for Palm, they’ve all now caught up and with the introduction of the iPhone everyone is actually doing good work in the space. WinMob 6 has been getting rave reviews and the handsets are starting to look really good. The Helio Ocean looks awesome - if it was a GSM phone I’m pretty sure I’d already have one. Let’s not even mention the iPhone, vaporous as it is.
Palm has its work cut out for it. It made a huge blunder with the 700p and seems intent on ignoring its entire userbase that bought into it. The promised ROM patch to fix glaring problems will come out after the end of life for that one. Way to treat your customers! With RIMM (RIMM?!) rumored to be releasing a new version of the Pearl that includes Wi-fi, GPS and a 2 megapixel camera, the weakness of the 755p is really underscored.
I pin all my hopes on the big announcement from Hawkins. It seems that Colligan and his merry crew can’t get their heads out of the ground and it’ll be up to the founder to see if he can save the company again.
