“Is Apple serious competition?: Palm CEO Ed Colligan seems downright nonchalant about rumors that Apple may introduce a mobile phone to market in the coming year,” Sarah Jane Tribble and Dean Takahashi report for The San Jose Mercury News.
Tribble and Takahashi report, “Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector. ‘We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,’ he said. ‘PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Palm CEO Ed Colligan is in for a rude awakening.
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Just remember those words macman. I find it ironic to say the least that senator Rangel wants to institute the draft again. Hopefully your young enough to have to go. His age limit is 42!
I’m an early adopter and like most, early adopters I’m very tech savvy. Having used Palm PDA’s from the original, current crop (Treo, yada, yada), various cell phones/”smartphones” (misnomer) I can say there is a huge opportunity for Apple to take this market. Why? All the fore mentioned are shit.
Consumers will flock to Apple if they do what they do: make high tech simple, functional and cool.
Rock on Steve!
One more thing®: Palm is dead; they have been dying for years. And what RIM started, Apple will complete.
My wife has a Treo and we both hate it. It’s a crappy phone and a crappier PDA.
It won’t take much to outdo the Treo and MS powered smartphones.
A rude awakening indeed.
I too have Windows Mobile on my Motorola Q. The hardware is great, but the software sucks. I use exchange to sync with my work email. The thing syncs maybe half of the time on schedule like it is supposed to. Most of the time, I push a button and wait for the command to go through. I have to restart it at least once per day. The only reason people put up with this is because it is supposed to work with exchange. So I use put up with the shitty software because I’m locked in by exchange. Microsoft considers this a success.
The Palm TREO???? OMFG!!!!! It is one of the worst phones I’ve ever had. RF signal was so bad, I swear you needed to stand next to a GSM tower, and hope the moon was in the right phase to work. The Palm OS crashed so often, that I eBAyed the POS to some moron who wanted it.
As for Windows Mobile, it’s a yawner. It does sync very well with Exchange, so I can’t complain there. But it crashes a lot.
The Symbian systems (Nokia and Sony Ericsson, mostly) were actually worse than Windows with the only advantage is that is the anti-Microsoft.
I expect that Apple will do better.
As for Rangel and the draft, his point was that the poor and ethnic minorities are doing all the fighting for the rich and white. And they aren’t signing up for this loser war in Iraq, so the Army, especially, is running out of soldiers. So Opie, typical right-wing, uneducated babble from your ilk.
I don’t like the draft, but I don’t like rich white guys in Washington not sending their sons and daughters to war. Of course, this rich white guy served 6 years as a Navy Officer, so I guess I have some standing over a young putz like opie who probably is still in diapers, and hasn’t done anything to serve his country. Typical Republican White Trash.
I’m really looking forward to Apple entering the phone market, but in the meantime, those of you looking for a really good smartphone that just works with your Mac, check out the Nokia E61. I’ve owned Palm handhelds since the first Palm Pilot (I think 5 or 6 models in total), and I have been a big Palm fanboy for a long time, but the Nokia E61 is the phone that finally allows me to ditch the dinosaur Palm OS forever.
The E61 has WiFi, quad band GSM, bluetooth, qwerty keyboard, nice large hi-res screen, WebCore based web browser (that’s the engine Safari uses), pop3/IMAP/blackberry/MS Exchange email support, and it syncs addresses and calendars with Address Book and iCal via iSync. No extra software needed on your Mac at all! You can even install additional Symbian S60 applications via your Mac and BlueTooth. There are a lot of great apps for the Symbian S60 OS. I’ve found apps to replace everything I used to use on my Palm TX for it. It even has support for BlueTooth GPS devices out of the box. Battery life is amazing on this thing too, and there are lots of great themes that can be easily installed via BlueTooth.
The Nokia E61 is the must have smartphone/PDA for anyone who’s a real gadget nut like myself. If you don’t need/want the Wifi, there’s also the E62, which is pretty much identical except for the lack of WiFi.
Apple contends that this sector designs phone not for the expressed purpose of people to people communication but to maximize profits. In other words, profit determines design.
A perfect example of this is Microsoft operating systems and Zune. Their first though was, “How can we quickly maximize profits from the suckers who buy our junk?”
But Apple thinks differently. What moves phone design is how best can Apple engineers and designers optimize communication between two or more people.
Bottom line, Apple is going to market a stunning communication device that will attract people.
OK people, let’s not hyperventilate. Of course he’s concerned, but as the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company, he has to act in a manner that will reassure stockholders. What did you reasonably expect him to say? “OMG!! The iPhone is approaching fast! Stock up on canned food, bottled water and batteries! We’re doomed! Doomed, I say!”
Any executive worth his salt would be taking the threat of competition very seriously, but absolutely would not be urging stockholders to man the barricades. Their stock price would crater if a company exhibits public panic. They may very well come to the conclusion that they are in fact doomed, but they can’t just come out and say it.
I’d almost consider this vaporware except that apple never announced an iPhone. speculating is fun, but wake me when it actually happens and I’ll buy one.
Why should Palm be concerned? They were concerned when their shares felt from *four* digits to *two* within 1.5 years. Now there is no concern anymore, they are just waiting for a buyer (MS, Nokia etc).
.RO,
You forgot to list AAPL has a potential buyer.
Several years ago Palm bought all the intellectual property from Be Inc. (BEOS). Apple initially considered buying them instead of Next for their next gen OS which resulted in OS X. The purchase would not only remove a player in the smart phone market, but give Apple access to a great repository of code and ideas.
Steve should ask Dominic Giampaolo what he thinks of the idea. I think Dominic is now on Apple’s payroll, and I’m sure he would love to resurrect parts of his dead “baby”.
Life has a strange way of coming around full circle.
omg, are you kidding me
#1 windwos mobile is a peice, locks up, incompatible, needs rewritten software from release to release, unreliable, slow.. etc etc….
and PALM OS.. just because 99 billion people use the treo doesnt mean its good, its the same single threaded POSOS that it was 10 years ago.. its a complete joke to use, its seriously like its not really 2006 over at palm, they still think its 1992.. I jsut dont get it.. utter crap
I just hope apple gets on CDMA so we can see speeds of 800k or so.. you will need it for ichat video confernceing.
“Seriously, what did you expect him to say? “Dear shareholders. Dump all of our stock immediately because we have no way to compete with a rumor.””
uhm, no I would EXPECT him to say “hay guys why dont we try to come up with something that actually works”
tt,
Thanks yes. I really don’t like Verizon, but its also really all I’ve got access to. So yes, we need CDMA.
IF Apple comes out with an iPhone, I have confidence that they will be the first company to have everything work great. Some phones have had good cameras, or good chat, or good battery life, or good looks, or a nice GUI but I have yet to find a phone that has it all. I have faith that Apple wil be able to put it all together. They might have one new feature, which everyone will think is why they win market share. But the new feature will only tie everything the phone has together, in a logical way, to make a phone that JUST WORKS how people want. It’ll have good call quality, and good messaging/e-mail, and a nice music player. I can’t wait till MacWorld to see what else comes out. The iPhone will not be ground breaking, but it’ll tie together everything very nicely.
Wow. Lots of Posts.
MDN’s take is spot on.
Colligan: that’s exactly what the music industry said about iPod/iTunes.
It’s exactly what the movie moguls said about Pixar.
It’s what Microshaft and Dell have said about Apple.
Just know, when Steve Jobs sets his mind to enter an industry, he’s going to end up doing it better than you. Prepare to be pwned.
@not me:
Best Post. EVER.
Anything Apple could create would blow doors on the Palm Treo, which is a piece of junk. I have had to set these up for my bosses and they are always a bitch. Not to mention that the things kept turning off on him without him doing anything, and constantly lose wireless connections. After 8 months of frustration, we got him a Blackberry and he is completely happy now. Needless to say, Apple’s real competition will NOT be Palm, but Blackberry.
Pretty funny when you think about the names of the products being fruits and berries. You’d have to be NUTS to buy one!
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Remember Palm owns it’s well being to two very different companies.
Apple for it’s orginal software and Hamdheld for it’s Tro!
So what has Palm done lateley?
Not much…
Hey Zune Tang, good one. You’re almost as good as Sputnik. You’ve got the right attitude, just need a few more puns and turns on a word to flavor the sarcasm with more zesty understated humor.
Anyway, I’m certain Apple did design a PDA that was very close to being manufactured but decided at the end not to release it. Read Jobs quotes about the Apple PDA very carefully and you’ll see that. So Apple has plenty of experience, and maybe not with rev 1 but eventually, they’ll be coming after the smartphone market.
No iPhone, now shut the fsck up. – Steve Jobs.
The only way Apple could win with a iphone is if they threw everything in it but the kitchen sink, a flash based laptop handheld device of some sort.
It won’t be cheap, because Apple isn’t going to touch the low end market subsidized by carrier money. We will have to pay, but it will come with a ton of features and geniunely be very very useful.
It needs to almost replace the laptop in fuchionality.
Remember something children, there is a huge problem with heat in present day performance laptops. Sure Intel gave Apple some time with it’s cooler processors, but eventually time will catch up and a new device will be needed.
Flash based to reduce the obsolete hard drive, save battery life. Auto file backup to .Mac, it’s going to be a great innovative and very useful device.
Prepare to pay.
Make a phone that does not require a daily battery pull and you already got Palm beat
That’s funny. I just auctioned off my Treo 650 on ebay. As phone it was completely horrible. Not to mention the Palm desktop software still looks like it did five years ago. I went back to my Sony W600i until the Apple iPhone arrives.
If Apple just ordered up 12 million for the first shipments, even Microsoft will not be able to save Palm from ruin.
Apple scan offer a cell phone recycle program. Trade in your current cell phone and get $$ off on a new iPhone.
Macworld in Jan.?
If I were the Palm CEO I would not necessarily laugh, my question would be why should it matter.
If Apple said they were coming out with a Newton like iPhone, then all this ruckus would have relevance.
One is a PDA/Phone the other is an iPod that makes phone calls.
I wonder how much he’s laughing now?