A Look at Palm's Latest OS | Hacker News Reader

A Look at Palm's Latest OS

gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com

47 pointsdonohoe43 comments

Palm/HP is in a tough spot, but it's possible for them to go up with a bit of luck.

They need mindshare, solid hardware, and apps. The 3 are codependent. Good hardware and apps help mindshare, and having market interest and a good phone attracts app makers. If they mix their timing just right they could come in at third place behind apple and google.

They are doing good things right now on the app front. More and more good iPhone games are coming to WebOS. HP is having a lot of their software engineers spend a bit of time writing for WebOS as a sort of 20% project.

If they can get an exciting headset (not just good, exciting), and a marketing campaign that puts it in enough impulse buying hands, then win those users over with webOs + good app selection, they have a chance.

However, if they release a half hearted handset with little marketing, their base wont' expand and it will slowly but surely fall into obscurity.

Yeah, I love my Pre, but the hardware already feels dated. It's crazy how much progress is being made in mobile devices every year now, reminds me of desktops in the mid 90s. You buy one and feel like it's out of date a month later.

What really killed them was launching exclusively on Sprint. With hardware evolving as fast as it does, by the time it made it to Verizon and AT&T it was just no longer compelling. While I actually love Sprint, there are a lot more people on Verizon and AT&T.

I really think market share will take care of any lack of apps. More advanced hardware, a more attractive design, and a better marketing campaign would take care of that. I think HP has a real shot, though maybe my love of WebOS has me biased.

As difficult a situation as Palm is in, I was reading that article thinking Nokia is in far worse shape. WebOS remains just a promising also-ran next to iOS, Blackberry, Android, and presumably WP7, but MeeGo doesn't even rate mentioning, and Symbian is a walking corpse.

90% of potential cell phone customers aren't looking for a smartphone, they don't currently have any sort of phone and guess who makes all the cheap waterproof rugged phones.

hint - the next billion customers don't live near Apple stores.

You'd be surprised. Worldwide mobile phone ownership is up to 5 billion[0]. Meanwhile, much of the first world has already transitioned to smartphones.

If you wanted to jump on the cheap phone trend, you're ten years late. Whatever margins existed once are now gone. Nokia, the king of cheap phones, just fired their CEO and replaced him with a software guy from Microsoft. Apple, HP and Blackberry know exactly what market their fighting over.

[0]: http://www.poder360.com/article_detail.php?id_article=4704

That doesn't mean that smartphones can't get better & cheaper, displacing some of the feature phones. Smartphones are ~26% of the entire market, I'll give you the source for that tomorrow.

The source is Mobile Business Briefing.

Is that five billion individual owners? That's pretty impressive! Current estimates put the whole world population at just under 7 billion.

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html has it at about 6.8B, and a Google search on "current world population" turns up similar figures.

Last stats I saw showed that for W Europe the average user had owned >5 handsets.

You are wrong - the next billion (or two!) live next door to China, from where we are seeing the emergence of the first sub $200 (full, unlocked price) phones this month [http://www.priceindia.in/tv/spice-mi-300-price-%E2%80%93-che...]

That price figure is going to fall way, way lower once the Android supporting Mediatek chipsets enter full production [http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semicon...]

I predict $100 Mediatek-powered Android smartphones by summer 2011, flooding the Asian market.

What about the Asian market more than 10km from the coastal cities?

The same market that has one Nokia1100 per village in Africa aren't about to buy $100 smartphones for each of their kids.

That particular market is snapping at Nokia's heels as well. While its sales have stagnated, new contenders have risen very fast in the ultra-low cost market

[http://toostep.com/debate/two-year-old-micromax-becomes-indi...]

Good luck getting Android to run fast on a low-powered 100$ device.

You might need luck if you assume that the industry is standing still and chips and batteries aren't getting cheaper and more powerful...

Sub-$100 Android devices that "run fast" are inevitable. The only question is how soon.

hint: you don't make much money selling dumbphones, no matter market share.

I recently needed a second phone for work and bought a cheap Symbian phone, and I have to say was very positively surprised. Half the price of the cheapest android phone, MUCH better battery life, really easy to use for calling and texting, yet still has wifi, GPS, browser etc if you ever really need them. In fact I'm starting wonder to if cheap symbian phone plus iPod touch (or Android equivalent) isn't a better overall solution than buying the latest high-end smartphone.

It looks like Nokia is the next to die after Microsoft's demise three years ago.

I think the biggest battles in the smartphone market are yet to come.

I have an iPhone 3GS and I love it, and while the iPhone is considered the best smartphone yet I see multiple problems with it ...

     - piss-poor battery life ... yes, I recharge it at night but there are days 
       when I forget about it ... the other Symbian-based smartphone I have 
       can last for 3 days - basically I'm not using the iPhone as a phone 
       (too unreliable)

    - no replaceable battery

    - the UI paradigm is lacking in areas Microsoft / WebOS / Android seem 
      to address ... those app icons are taking valuable screen estate without 
      much usefulness 

    - valuable applications aren't properly integrated with iOS ... I have the    
      following apps: Skype, YMessenger, Twitter and Facebook; and none 
      of them are saving contact info in my iPhone's contacts. This is one area 
      Windows Mobile 7 seems to be addressing

    - the notifications are really fucking disruptive ... it 
      interrupted my TowerMadness game multiple times :)

    - for developers you need OS X / Xcode for development, 
      and this can be a PITA. WinMo7 probably has the best developer tools 
      available.

    - iOS has Game Center, but Microsoft has the XBox console market and 
      XBox Live upcoming in WinMo 7. Depending on their implementation, 
      the XBox Live integration can be groundbreaking.

    - WinMo7 will probably have the best Office integration you can get on a 
      smartphone.

And I don't own an Android phone, but I see lots of fragmentation problems and poor management of the marketplace.

Bottom line being: lots of areas where iOS / Android could be improved, lots of room left for competition.

Don't count on Microsoft / Nokia being dead, yes big corporations are rigid and have a hard time changing directions, but they still have lots of resources, lots of talent and the duty to reinvent themselves when the shit hits the fan.

HP/Palm have one possible advantage: bundling for the enterprise. Give away a Palm phone with each purchase of a PC by corporate accounts.

Apple essentially does this in the consumer market. MacBooks and the iPod Touch get bundled together during back-to-school season.

Not a bad idea. Of course, corporate phones require significant support and build-out of infrastructure, whereas a consumer device just works, but RIM made a similar move with their buy-one-get-one-free offer in Spring 2009 for Blackberries, and it apparently helped to boost their (consumer) market share by 15%:

http://news.cnet.com/blackberry-curve-outsells-the-iphone-3g...

I don't think the enterprise cares about cost; they care about control. For example, my work blackberry requires a 10 character password (that's not qwertyuiop, apparently), and they disable changing the wallpaper, ringtones, use of the camera, and sending text messages.

Why? Because it's a checkbox, and clicking it seems like work. ("Yes boss, I did do a lot of work today. I ensured that nobody can steal our intellectual property by disabling the cameras on all the blackberries!" "Great work!")

I have a Palm Pre.. I got one early on, was a huge fan, but now I fully believe the platform is dead. All you ever hear about is iPhone or Android. That aside, the Palm experience totally sucks. It would be amazing if the phone didn't freeze on me while trying to view a webpage and listen to an MP3 at the same time. No, that's asking too much

I don't understand, this article is talking about the future of Palm devices. You don't think a faster OS and newer hardware will fix a couple of freezes when multitasking?

The question is "who will they fix them FOR?" If the parent poster's experience is typical and nobody cares about this OS, improvements to it are irrelevant.

Personally, I'd like to see Palm OS stay in the fight. I like the stack UI concept they discussed here, and anyway, competition is always good.

I have a Pre plus, uptime is in weeks (out of updates, I had to reboot it only once in 6 months), and the interface is really far ahead for multitasking, and I multitask a lot with it; mp3 + web + contacts + an app or two all the time, and it rarely hiccup if ever.

Umm, don't mean to burst your bubble but the iPhone could do all that from day 1, sans "multitaskin"g. Is this word now becoming as meaningless as "bricked"?

Wow, apple fanboi? I was talking of the fact that my Pre plus is fine, not commenting on what other platforms do or don't.

That, and I despise Apple Walled Garden anyway so the qualities of the iPhone are moot. And iOS 4 multitasking sucks, ergonomically. They messed up, even multitasking on jailbreaked iPhones 3.x was better, though far from as neat as the WebOS version.

The idea is to link windows by task, rather than by the application that runs them.

To me, this is a profound idea. It's the same thing that "Code Bubbles" does for developers.

http://www.cs.brown.edu/people/acb/codebubbles_site.htm

Great OS, but it came to market too late. Not to mention WebOS was half broken when it was released. It STILL does not have voice recording capabilities, which eliminates a ton of app-potential. I love it...but it is too little, too late, Palm.

The palm pre has an app called zocoder that can act as a voice / sound recorder

The apis have changed a lot, perhaps since you last looked?

Correction, the app is called zcorder

http://www.precentral.net/zcorder-brings-voice-recording-web...

It can't record phone calls though, but I imagine that was some sort of security precaution on the part of palm.

I don't think it came to the market too late. It had a lot of potential to be a solid #3 competitor in the mobile space behind Android and iPhone. I think their main problem was their crappy hardware they put the OS on.

I'd say it came to the market too late to not have huge marketing behind it. I bet we'll see Windows Phone 7 which is far later do much better (at least in terms of market share/units shipped). Yeah, crappy hardware hurt badly, too.

But it did have tremendous marketing behind it. I saw those very creepy Palm commercials all over the place. Hell we had a huge Palm banner hanging in Downtown Denver for like 6 months.

I think Palm suffered from a serious issue with brand identity. It just seemed like people weren't sure what those phones were supposed to be exactly. Were they blackberry competitors? After all, they had a really crappy keyboard. iPhone competitors? The form factor would suggest otherwise.

True, good point. I amend my earlier statement to be "huge good marketing".

Also, I assume that Windows phones will be on (nearly) all carriers, whereas Palm was (and is?) stuck on Sprint in the US. That's worked out OK — though we'll never know how much better it could have possibly gone — for Apple, but for various reasons, including lateness to market with a broadly desirable smartphone, I don't think that's been as feasible for Palm.

Palm's on Verizon and AT&T now, as well as a bunch of other carriers outside the US.

Don't forget RIM and Blackberry in that list.

I don't think he is. According to comScore Palm managed to not lose market share in the last three months while Microsoft, Apple, and RIM lost a collective 5% to Google. In the long run and with HP now behind it I think that webOS certainly has the potential to become #3.

RIM has most of it's market in enterprise's and that certainly won't be easy to crack so in the short run I expect that RIM will remain top of the heap. But in the 5+ year horizon HP certainly has the relationships with enterprises through it's server sales to get their foot in the door and start shifting that mindset.

Apple will always have it's core (pun intended) of ardent supporters, but most of them already have the iPhone. The fact that they lost market share in the second quarter demonstrates that.

Android has such a diverse set of hardware vendors using it that it is destined to eventually take the top of the market.

In the short term 2-4 year horizon I don't see anything really changing except Android continuing to inch it's way up the ladder. In the long term iff HP/Palm manages to get some great hardware out it could move up as well but they really need to execute to make it happen.

*disclaimer: I have carried a Palm branded product since the Palm Personal (1995 IIRC) and currently carry a Palm T|X and a dumb phone. My preceding comments might be colored by my loyalty to the brand but I still haven't jumped to the Palm Pre yet.

ComScore info here: http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/9/c...

I also see this as being a three horse race. Android will eventually end up in the #1 position. Apple #2. With RIM, webOS, MeeGo and Win Mobile 7 vying for the third position.

Even now Blackberry Enterprise Server installs are falling. It won't be a single player that take RIM down, it will be the all the majors have good enough exchange and security support.

I liked what I have seen so far of MeeGo but I am afraid it will only been seen as a less popular alternative to Android and will have the low market share to match.

Until the changing of the guard, I just don't any new successes out of Microsoft. Besides it will be the next version of Windows Mobile that gets all the effort. There is a MS cycle enter market with a product better than all their competitors and capture a large market share, stagnate, half-hearted release, start picking things up, and release something good again. E.g. IE6 was better than everything else at the time, IE 7 was lipstick on a pig, IE 8 was basically a rewrite to have a better foundation, and IE9 might actually be good. This pretty much mirrows Windows Mobile 4 - 7. I see Windows Mobile 7 at the IE 8 level.

Palm was some really interesting stuff and with the money of HP behind them I really don't see why they couldn't be number 3.

Are you sure the past tense is appropriate? HP just spent a bit over a billion dollars to buy webOS; I'd be shocked if we don't see a major push next winter at the latest.

I think it would be better to say it was incomplete. What shipped worked quite well and did what it was supposed to do, but there was a lot more functionality that should have been there (voice dial for example). As meowzero says, their real problem was the quality of the hardware, it is probably the most fragile phone on the market.

It's timing to market was just fine. But two issues killed it, IMO:

1) The SDK took way too long to come out. I was ready to do some dev work on it. But by the time it came out, I had passed on it. SDKs must be ready at device launch, and the app store must ship with the device.

2) The advertising was horrible. The Pre should have been a huge seller with Sprint customers, but many didn't even know about it.

Looks like they reinvented HyperCard for 2010. I love it.

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