Palm Pre (via Sprint) stands confident to outsmart iPhone and the likes

You definitely need a second thought if you think iPhone is the most sophisticated mobile phone on hand. Did you say HTC Touch? Not even this one! Instead, Palm stands a great chance to provide these supposed techie-gadgets a sturdy contest for sure at CES ’09. Well, Sprint alliance enables Palm to introduce its new lustrous Smartphone dubbed as Pre. It has a wholly new interface and Palm WebOS makes it exemplar hardware sculpt.

Technical Specifications: A 3.1-inch 320 x 480 multi touch display with a silver center button, a full QWERTY keyboard, TI’s new OMAP CPU, EV-DO Rev, 802.11b/g WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth with A2DP and 8GB of included flash storage, 3 megapixel camera with LED flash, microUSB plug and 3.5mm headphone jack.

Pricing & Availability: Palm Pre will be released in the US exclusively via Sprint by the first half of 2009, but there’s still no word on exact release date and projected pricing.

[Via: Unwiredview]

Palm Centro finally announced by AT&T

As if you didn’t know already. Well, the Centro is officially on AT&T and it’s going for $99 with a 2 year service agreement. Want the hard specs? Quad-band GSM/EDGE, 1.3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, QWERTY keyboard, microsD slot, and support for AT&T’s push-to-talk app. No word on BlackBerry Connect, but we’re guessing the average businessman won’t be dropping any coins on the Centro, so it doesn’t really matter now does it.

[via BoyGeniusReport]

Run the Palm OS on your Nokia Internet Tablet

We all know that Palm OS 5 (aka Garnet) is getting a bit ancient in terms of mobile technology given that it was released back in 2002. However, there are still some applications from the thousands available for the Palm OS that many of us like to run, yet we want to also have the latest and greatest hardware. There are a couple of ways you can have the latest in mobile tech hardware and still run Palm OS applications. There is StyleTap for Windows Mobile devices (and soon for Symbian devices too) and now the Garnet Virtual Machine for Nokia Nseries Internet Tablets (including the 770, N800, and N810).

The Garnet VM Beta for Nokia Nseries was created by ACCESS, who is the company that bought PalmSource. You can now run virtually all your favorite Palm OS applications on the Nokia Internet Tablets and I can’t wait to try out a few of my favorite apps. They would appreciate it if you could fill out their compatibility survey when you try applications so they can continue to improve the product. Sound is not support for the Nokia 770 device due to a missing set of libraries on that device.

Thanks to the guys at jkOnTheRun for the heads-up on this news.

Press shot of the Palm Centro leaked

Less than 5 minutes fresh in my RSS reader, Gizmodo has the scoop on the Palm Centro, a device that is meant for the youth market. Having recently been in college and still frequently attending parties at universities I can attest to the increase in BlackBerry Pearl ownership. Is the Centro a few years late? Yes.

Idea: Palm should push Foleo as a blogging tool!

Just a few days ago I wrote about 4 things I would like to see in Palm Foleo. Then an idea popped to my mind - Palm should push Foleo to bloggers!

Nowadays, most of us have or can afford a laptop. However, even though I have a small laptop I would want an even smaller one without paying a hefty premium (who wouldn’t). In that sense, Palm’s “mobile companion” should fit nicely for blogging purposes only.


Basically, I think that most bloggers need some simple app for managing images (resize, crop and such things), and a browser with full AJAX support and tabbed browsing. When I write something, usually there are at least 3 tabs opened in a browser. If Palm could deliver this, I would be happy to jump on board.

The processor speed and available RAM is what matters the most. We don’t want to go back to old hardware, rather we need a dedicated blogging computer which could run on a slower processor, but is much lighter thus easier to carry around. And then… I can easily imagine Palm partnering with Six Apart, WordPress and possibly even Blogger. What a great marketing channel that would be for Palm. Damn with the corporate users — we are the ones which want more freedom!

Could Palm actually make this happen? What do you think?

Palm Treo 750 to get Windows Mobile 6 upgrade next week

Good news if you’re a Treo 750 user, Windows Mobile 6 will be available for you to download as early as next week. The announcement will be made at the Microsoft TechEd conference. Will covered the leaked ROM a few days ago, so it is nice to see official news about it today.

[Via: istartedsomething]

How the iPhone will change computing

This is a computer, not a phone, says Fortune's David Kirkpatrick. Finally, we'll be able to surf the Web anywhere we want.


Two weeks ago, I asked Steve Jobs if he was surprised by the growing frenzy about his upcoming iPhone. (I happened to be talking to him in a social situation.) He told me he wasn't really surprised that the device has captured the world's imagination, because even two years ago, which was one year into the project, he and his colleagues realized this was what a phone had to eventually become. He did concede that he didn't necessarily expect the world to get it so fast, however.

The iPhone launch: Special report

As I wrote in January, I never before saw a technology announcement that immediately captured the imagination of everyone from my boss to my 14-year-old daughter -- both of whom immediately announced that they wanted an iPhone. And the much-noted frenzy has continued, culminating today in the phone's final release.


So are you worried about the extraordinary expectations for the phone, I asked Jobs? "Not really," he replied, "because it's actually even better than people expect!" That is an extravagant claim, but my reading of the early reviews from people like Walt Mossberg and David Pogue leads me to believe it isn't much overstated.

But in the innumerable articles comparing the iPhone to existing phones from other suppliers, several fundamental points are being missed. For example, in an article in The New York Times last week a Nokia (Charts) executive was quoted saying, ludicrously, that the iPhone "is an evolution of the status quo." According to the article, "he said Nokia already sold high-end phones with a wide range of functions." Such statements make the speaker appear desperate, and ignorant.

It is unconvincing to compare Apple's (Charts, Fortune 500) iPhone to the features of existing phones. Unlike pretty much everything else on the market, the iPhone is not a stand-alone device. It only makes sense to use in conjunction with a computer. You can't even activate it, for pete's sake, without going into iTunes on your PC or Mac.

Why the iPhone is so slow

The iPhone's connection to the computer initially will, for most people, just enable them to synch their address book and phone numbers and put their iTunes music on the phone's built-in iPod.
But longer-term there will be capabilities far beyond other phones. No other phone has such a tight connection to the user's computer. There may ultimately be few limits to what kinds of data and applications can be shared between the phone and the computer. Once that easy-to-synch connection exists, it can be exploited with great creativity.

And that occasional tethering to the computer for a painlessly-easy update -- think of it, perhaps, as a digital fueling station -- is not the only way the iPhone differs from everything Nokia, Motorola (Charts, Fortune 500) and other old-school cellphone competitors have on the market.

The iPhone is, as Mossberg pointed out "a true handheld computer." This is a radical statement.
While Palm (Charts), Nokia, Research in Motion (Charts), and others have aspired to such a device, they have failed to deliver it. Yet it is what people want.

The single biggest factor in this true-computerhood is the nature of the web browsing experience on the iPhone. When a web page appears, it is a true web page, easily manipulated by Apple's revolutionary user interface. You start by seeing the same web page you'd see on your computer, but in miniature form. Then you can easily blow up the portions you're interested in by tapping or doing the weird but cool finger-spreading motions which every other handheld device maker no doubt will immediately start trying to imitate.

iPhone mania at flagship store

It is impossible to explain why the iPhone has so completely captured the world's imagination. But I think one major reason is that many of us who routinely use the web today instinctively feel we ought to be able to do so everywhere. Until now that has been impossible.

The iPhone appears to be the kind of solution we have been waiting for. And the early built-in features, like Google (Charts, Fortune 500) maps with real-time traffic information demonstrate just what kinds of potential there is in real Internet features on a portable device.

To hear Jobs talk, the iPhone is almost an extension of the Mac. I told him that as a Mac user I was concerned that the company's work on the iPhone would distract attention from the steady improvement of OS X, the Mac's operating system. To the contrary, he replied. Since the iPhone uses OS X as its fundamental software underpinning as well, its existence will in fact help OS X to evolve even faster, he said. I hope he proves right.

So am I rushing out to buy an iPhone? No. Another thing Jobs is masterful at is the iterative improvement of Apple's products. I would rather wait to have the initial inevitable bugs ironed out and certain basic flaws corrected -- like the absence of a good speakerphone, silent vibration capability, and video recording.

But, like half the audience at a tech panel I moderated last week who raised their hands when I polled them, I want an iPhone.

iPhone Could Hurt Palm, Nokia, Moto; Poised To Tie RIM

If sales of Apple's iPhone can match the device's pre-launch hype, it's liable to hurt Treo smart phone maker Palm the most and affect BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (NASDAQ:RIMM) the least, analysts say.


Apple's AAPL combination smart phone, video iPod and mobile Web browser will appeal mostly to well-heeled consumers at first. That's a market now served by high-end smart phone maker Palm PALM.

"Palm will be taking the hit going forward," said Paul Carton, an analyst at ChangeWave Research.

Palm already is reeling from bad news. Its sales hit a wall last year, and its user satisfaction ratings have dipped, Carton says. ChangeWave's surveys of tech-savvy consumers and corporate IT buyers also show a pronounced drop-off in planned purchases of Palm phones, he says.

The surveys also show RIM RIMM increasing its smart phone market share among corporate buyers and holding its lead among consumers.

ChangeWave's surveys of corporate tech buyers show RIM increasing its market share in smart phones sales to 65% in the next 90 days from 61% last quarter. At the same time, Palm's share looks to drop to 19% from 22% last quarter. And Apple is expected to grab 9% market share, taking sales from Palm, Motorola (NYSE:MEU) (NYSE:MOT) MOT and Nokia (NYSE:NOK) NOK.

Among tech-savvy consumers, Apple is poised to tie RIM in sales of smart phones in the next 90 days. Apple and RIM each got 26% share of planned smart phone purchases in the next 90 days in the most recent ChangeWave survey. Palm's share is forecast to fall to 10% from 14% last quarter.

Motorola and Nokia also are forecast to see market share declines in consumer smart phone sales, ChangeWave says. The share of smart phone buyers looking to get Motorola devices is expected to fall to 5% from 14% last quarter. Nokia's share is projected to drop to 3% from 8%.

RIM targets corporate and enterprise markets with its BlackBerry devices, which emphasize e-mail rather than voice communications. A successful iPhone launch would put a damper on RIM's recent efforts to expand into the consumer market with phones like the BlackBerry Pearl and Curve, says Avi Greengart, an analyst with research firm Current Analysis.

RIM's core business of providing secure e-mail devices to corporate and government customers is safe, Greengart says.

"It's hard to imagine corporate IT departments giving out $600 MP3 players for any reason other than a reward for a job well done," Greengart said. While the BlackBerry is seen as a business tool, the iPhone is seen as an entertainment device, he says.

The iPhone goes on sale nationwide Friday evening with models costing $500 and $600, depending on storage capacity.

The first wave of iPhone buyers will be made up of tech early adopters and Apple loyalists, analysts say. But it's the follow-on buyers who will determine whether the product is a hit.

That second wave of buyers will wait for word-of-mouth reviews and for a chance to touch and feel the iPhone themselves.

The product has been demonstrated in TV commercials and Web videos, but hasn't been available in stores for potential buyers to give it a test drive.

"There's only a handful of people without the word 'Apple' on their business cards who've actually used this," Greengart said. "It is one of those things where you've got to touch it to believe it."

The iPhone features a multi-touch user interface that Apple and early reviewers have described as revolutionary. It doesn't have a hard button keypad like most cell phones. Instead you use your fingers on a glass touch screen for dialing, tapping out messages and navigating. Users scroll and zoom in on Web pages with their fingers, and flick through album cover art to find music.

Potential follow-on buyers will be influenced by the reaction of early adopters to the touch-screen interface as well as the speed of AT&T's TT Edge data network.

Early reviews have criticized AT&T's Edge network as slow. But the device also can access the Internet from much faster Wi-Fi hot spots. AT&T is the exclusive wireless carrier in the U.S. for the iPhone launch.

"A lot of people will wait on the sidelines" until the price of the iPhone drops or until it's available from carriers other than AT&T, said Michael Greeson, an analyst with the Diffusion Group.

In the meantime, cell phone makers will have to respond to the iPhone with high-end products of their own, he added.

"It raises the bar on the Nokias of the world," he said.

Originally published in the June 28, 2007 version of Investor's Business Daily.

Copyright (c) 2007, Investor's Business Daily, Inc.

Palm Hire Ex-Apple Hotshot Designer

We still can’t work out if they’re going to be bought out or not, but the New York Times is reporting that Palm may be planning their answer to the iPhone after hiring former Apple computer engineer, Paul Mercer.

Mercer joined Apple in 1987 and was the lead designer of Version 7 of the Macintosh finder before founding a software tools firm called Pixo which was involved in designing the first version of the iPod user interface.

Described as, “the best of the best in this space,” by Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster, Mercer recently worked for Samsung to design their Z5 MP3 player, which went on to be a monster hit in South Korea.

New York Times