Poor Palm.
UPDATE: Ben Combee writes in to drop the word that Barron’s was an oversimplified version of the truth. The sync problem seems to be intermittent and crops up only over time under a lot of email load - discovered over the past 6 months during stress testing. Read Ben’s comments for more. This is another story that apparently not news worthy for the official palm blog - seriously, they should just hire Ben to be their PR guy.
UPDATE 2: Ed Colligan responds to Engadget’s open letter. Nothing happens.
There’s been a lot of Palm bashing going on these days, but can you blame? It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Not that I’d shoot fish in a barrel, but it’s that easy. The latest is the delay on the Foleo - should have launched like now but will be delayed till September/October. I first read it on engadget. I don’t really have much to add, search for “Foleo Delayed” to get what I would have said. But I just wanted to highlight something I thought was odd - this quote from the original Barron’s piece:
The product was supposed to hit Palm stores this week, but was delayed when software bugs were detected. These apparently included an inability to synchronize the Foleo with most models of the Treo, in particular the nominally high-volume Treo 680.
Um… isn’t the whole point of this that fancy syncing that this is supposed to do? Like that’s the selling point (if there’s a selling point at all)? How do you discover that it doesn’t sync with any phones until the week of launch? I suspect it’s things like this that make the 700 fiasco possible…
I mean, I don’t know what from what, but if the quote above is true, that’s really, really sad.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:11 am
I can’t talk much about when we’re launching yet, but I can say that the comments in Barron’s are a major simplification of what’s been happening this summer. We’re not stupid; we’ve been working on lots of complicated sync issues on lots of phones for the last year, including testing with a wide range of Treo devices. The issues haven’t been “it doesn’t sync”, but more like “after syncing large numbers of emails over a four day time period, the operation fails 25% of the time and cannot restart without resetting the device.” We’ve been doing lots of stress testing, and sometimes that finds problems that have been hidden for a while or problems that are really hard to debug because of the need to setup a reproducible case with instrumentation.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:19 am
Ben, ahh, thanks! I was just off thinking more about this issue and was going to send you an email - it just felt like something was off about the situation - didn’t make sense that something so major was wrong. I’m sorry to hear about the problems - life must be a little hectic over there!
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:53 am
Bravo. I had a ton to say about Ben’s comment, so I moved it over to my blog, which needs to wake up from its Summer break anyway.
You Can’t Cheat an Honest Palm Engineer
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:29 am
I just want to make clear that that wasn’t an actual 100% accurate description of a specific problem we’ve found — it’s more of a composite of a whole range of bugs that we’ve been finding and addressing over the last six months.
And yes, life has been VERY hectic. :)
August 23rd, 2007 at 4:07 pm
[...] seen anything vaguely resembly PR come from any Palm source except for what I’ve seen Ben Combee doing. Which is exactly (amongst other things) what Palm needs to be promoting. They need to [...]
August 23rd, 2007 at 7:14 pm
Ahh… Thank God for Ben! I wish Palm would directly release this info… A situation like this is unfortunate, but is understandable. I can’t wait for the Foleo!
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Yes indeed! Palm has a bit of a corporate communication problem. At least we’ve got this back end communication going on!
August 24th, 2007 at 1:26 am
[...] Combee is a Palm software engineer and is quite active on the Internet. Combee recently responded to the criticism that Palm should have figured out Treo compatiblity problems by now. "We’re not stupid; [...]
August 24th, 2007 at 7:37 am
[...] doing something they need to be telling their users something, anything to keep them believing (Ben Combee is trying, but it’s an uphill battle for one engineer to tackle with zero support from the company). [...]