“Palm is poised to make what some analysts are calling its last stand at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show, where it is expected to introduce its long-awaited Linux-based operating system,” Ryan Kim reports for The San Francisco Chronicle. “Code-named Nova, it will power a new generation of smart phones and potentially other devices.”
“The stakes are high for Palm, which risks permanent irrelevancy or worse if it can’t generate some buzz and momentum around its combination of hardware and software,” Kim reports.
“The new system will replace the aging Palm OS platform, which continues to run on smart phones like the Palm Centro, a brisk-selling but low-margin device. Palm also will continue to sell hardware running Windows Mobile software,” Kim reports.
“Palm has its work cut out for it. In its most recent quarter, Palm sold 599,000 smart phones, down 13 percent from the previous year. Apple, meanwhile, sold 6.9 million iPhones in its most recent quarter,” Kim reports.
“‘There’s no momentum behind Palm,’ said analyst Pablo Perez-Fernandez of Global Crown Capital. ‘There’s really no room for Palm. If you ask new developers if they want to write for a marginalized company or a company like Apple, the answer is obvious,'” Kim reports. Plus, the “new Nova products aren’t expected to premiere until mid-2009, which means more pressure for Palm in the short term.”
Full article here.
Cue the fat lady.
We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in. – Ed Colligan, Palm CEO, November 16, 2006, laughing off the idea of Apple entering the smartphone market.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]
There’s always a chance at a government bailout….
well, it wasn’t the PC guys that walked in either, it was Steve!
Hey!
Where’s the ‘competition is good” clown squad?
This is what happens to ‘competition’ that charade as tough guys –
they get beat to a pulp. When you invest real money into companies like this, you’ll find out the hard way. This article
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/china.htm
speaks on the real problem facing us – laziness.
I bailed out from Palm 6 years ago when I had a Sony Clie which was better than Palm’s own brand – and waited forever for their ‘new OS’. Palm simply hasn’t been trying – it’s time to pay the piper. Unfortunately, a lot of employees will lose – as management usually ties up their own finances in neat bundles – then bail – while the rest split nothing. It happens too often.
Wandering Joe:
Cooligan was trying to be sarcastic; the way he said it was supposed to be insulting to Apple (they AREN’T PC, after all; they’re Mac…).
I used to be an enthusiastic Palm user. I went through about four different Palm devices. What Newton promised when the world wasn’t ready for it, Palm delivered at the right moment. Grafitti was intuitive and simple. Devices were the right size and there was a good reason why they sold well and attracted high numbers of developers. There were tons of very useful software for the Palm platform.
There is only one reason why Palm failed after such early success. They didn’t continue to innovate. Having a couple of Apple guys come up with initial design obviously launched them straight into the orbit, way past Windows CE. Since Palm isn’t (nor it ever was) Apple, they just sat there, adding minor, insignificant tweaks to the Palm OS. In 2002, they were probably the most popular Christmas gift gadget. And look at them today… Just sad.
Palm is truly caught in a squeeze and I feel sorry for their technology gurus. When Apple’s iPhone came out, many felt that would kill the Palm devices but I think it was more undercapitalization. The current Palm OS is, in many ways, superior to the Apple iPhone system. For one thing, you can cut, copy and paste. Data may be shared by multiple applications. A search of the device will bring up everything from calendar events to notes to contact records.
When Apple started releasing software through their App Store, that was the end of Palm’s hopes for viability going forward. Palm devices don’t have the mind share of the Blackberry. And they don’t have the coolness factor or the application store of the iPhone. I do hope their technology geniuses find a way to express their considerable talents elsewhere.
As mhollis stated above, the Palm OS is still — to this day — a superior OS to the iPhone in MANY ways:
— Cut, copy, paste.
— Global search of the entire phone (notes, emails, contacts, calendar, 3rd-party apps, etc.).
— Bidirectional synchronization of notes to the Mac and back.
— Ability to directly sync to 3rd party applications, such as FileMaker Pro and Pocket Quicken.
— Ability to view and EDIT Microsoft Office documents.
— Ability to email more than one photo at a time from the photos application, and without it hanging the entire phone while trying to send one photo.
— Ability to install 3rd party email applications and calendar applications that don’t have the limitations of Apple’s calendar & email applications on the iPhone (such as Apple’s multiple inboxes and Apple’s “one signature for all email accounts” limitation). And without the bugs of Apple’s calendar & email apps (one quick example off the top of my head: calendar colors on the iPhone do not stay the same when syncing via USB.)
— Ability to select contacts to dial by typing the initials of the contact on the keyboard.
— Much more, too.
MacBill’s list proves the point that you can have all the features in the world and still be in the dark ages…
Mac
MacDaily
MacDailyNews
MacDailyNews Take:
MacDailyNews Take: Cue
MacDailyNews Take: Cue the
MacDailyNews Take: Cue the fat
MacDailyNews Take: Cue the fat lady.
Now that Palm has let the cat out of the bag I can relate what my sources inside Palm have told me.
All Palm softwares are being ported to Linux, a UNIX Operating System. Palm’s new OS will be on par with Apple’s iPhone OS.
For developers it will not be difficult to port iPhone Apps to Palm OS. Now think of what 5,000 Apps available at the Palm App Store will mean to Palm smart phones.
Mid 2009? It’s only 6 months away.
If the new Palm devices with Nova are not available until mid-year, you can kiss Palm goodbye.
Another reason why having your product release schedule held hostage to someone else’s convention is bad. Look at Palm, their Hail Mary pass is intercepted by CES. They have to announce something that is not ready, not shipping and not in people’s hands. It’ll be a bloodbath until the new products ship. Who would buy any of the old stuff, unless they could be upgraded to the new OS, and if the old devices weren’t made with the new OS in mind, how well will they even work?
No matter how good Nova is, it’s too little too late. The major loss of mindshare happened when the Foleo was stillborn. The start of the fall happened when Palm put Windows on some of their devices. Talk about confusing your customers. Their only hope now is to be bought by MS, and get rebranded as Zunernova.
That quote by Colligan just *never* gets old…
I especially love it every time it’s used in conjunction with ‘beleaguered Palm’.
Gregg Thurman “For developers it will not be difficult to port iPhone Apps to Palm OS.”
Laughable.
No one who even understands even vaguely what programming is, would believe a word of that statement.
You can’t seriously have posted that with a straight face?
I used Palm Pilots for years, and I loved them. My iPhone is just so much cooler and easier to use. Finger beats stylus any day.
Yes, my old Palm can still do some things my iPhone can’t …. yet. The iPhone is the future; the Palm is the past.
Yes, we’ve all heard Palm is going Linux. Isn’t that what Jon Rubinstein argued with Scott Forstall and Bertrand Serlet at Apple about for the iPhone? Linux vs Mac OS?
The question is, will it be “on par” with the iPhone OS X? Hard to believe.
Porting may be relatively easy, but you still have to execute on the ecosystem. How easy will it be for customers to buy apps? Will the pricing even be the same? I mean, developers are willing to keep prices low at the iPhone App Store because they have lots of potential volume, but what will Palm have? They sold less than 1/10th of what Apple sold last quarter.
Look at the Android phone, apps are not increasing at the same rate as the iPhone AppStore did. (Now there’s an interesting comparison. I wonder why noone has done an analysis of the rate of growth of both AppStores?) Why? Perhaps, the installed base of Android phones was nil, when their AppStore launched, while the installed base for iPhones was close to 10M, when Apple’s AppStore launched. What will Palm’s Nova installed base be? Zero.
Amazingly, I still own some Palm shares!
You know, in France the Chevy Nova was horribly poor selling. That’s because “Nova” means “no go.” Looks like Palm is DONE!
KenC “Porting may be relatively easy”
So, you could “port” an XBox 360 onto, say an Atari 2600? It’d be “easy” right?
I’m sure it’d be “exactly” the same app on both platforms.
Jim: “You know, in France the Chevy Nova was horribly poor selling. That’s because “Nova” means “no go.””
http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/nova.asp
You couldn’t even get this thoroughly discredited urban myth right. It was supposed to be poor selling in Latin America.
If you don’t want to bother reading all about it, let me give you the short version.
Status: False
Gregg Thurman “For developers it will not be difficult to port iPhone Apps to Palm OS.”
BWAHAHAHAHAHA! Riiiiiiiight… clearly Gregg learned everything he needs to know about compatibility between completely different computer systems from Star Trek Voyager, in which a hologram character could be “downloaded” into completely alien computer systems and run without any modifications or compatibility issues whatsoever. Never mind the completely different display hardware, machine code instructions, system APIs, etc., etc.
@twilightmoon, yo, crap for brains, I was cutting the original poster some slack. I didn’t say porting apps would be easy. I have no bloody idea if it would be easy. I haven’t seen Nova, so how would I know? I put out the HYPOTHETICAL, it MAY be easy, but even so, it won’t help. Got it? Try to read posts in context.
I’d hate to see Palm tank as long as I can’t buy or use an iPhone in South Dakota! That would leave, what? The Storm and Windows Mobile… YUCK!
porting “easy” because both iPhone OS and new Palm OS have a form of *nix under the hood?
I smell a PR flack in the room. A story that works if you as long as you’ve never written a graphical program in your life.
Okay, for those that fit into that category…. technically, it probably would be true for a console based *nix app. But iPhone apps talk mainly to cocoa touch and core animation and… completely Apple grown proprietary. Porting completely non-trivial.
But hey it may be a great platform for console based *nix apps. It may become the smartphone of choice for *nix heads!!! They could sell in the TENS of THOUSANDS.
But hey, Palm always has its Win Mobile device business to fall back on.
Actually, I feel sorry for them. I’m sure they’ve got people killing themselves to get it out… and I don’t see how they can compete. Then again, that was Apple in the mid 90s…
But Palm’s REAL problem is they’ve lost too many of their fans. RIM can make lots of mistakes because (like Apple) they have a seriously dedicated users. Palm, I think, will go down as the Commodore of smartphones.
> Apple, meanwhile, sold 6.9 million iPhones in its most recent quarter
The magnitude of Apple’s achievement continues to amaze.
The iPhone has only been around for about 1.5 years. At any given time, there is essentially one model of iPhone (not counting minor variations such as color of case and storage capacity). That fact that Apple has designed a single device that is THE single choice for such a immense and diverse group of users around the world is the greatest achievement in consumer electronics.
Palm can’t even get 10% of Apple’s volume after decades in the business with many devices in its product line.