Search results for: “palm v”

  • Palm Vx

    When I started agency life I still had a trusty Filofax that had my contacts I had built up from DJing, working in the oil industry and being in college written in barely legible text on address sheets or plastic sheets stuffed with business cards. It had a reassuring heft to it like it contained both the old and new testaments of the bible. In my first 12 months working at the agency, my contacts were further swelled by journalists, suppliers, clients and colleagues stuffed into two Rolodex frames and 99 numbers on the SIM of my then new Ericsson PF 768 mobile phone.In addition to all this, I also had built up a database of over 200  industry contacts on ClarisWorks running on my by now ancient Apple PowerBook. This presented me with the kind of problems that businesses sorted with CRM software. A second problem that I had was making all this data portable. The solution to all this was the Palm Vx.
    Palm Vx
    The only device that was compatiable with my Mac was the Palm series of devices and flush with cash from my first year’s bonus. I got myself a Palm Vx from Expansys. In many respects despite its lack of an always-on wireless connection, the Palm Vx was the benchmark I have in mind when I look at smartphones.

    At its core the smartphone lives or dies by its personal information manager and its ability to sync with your computer for your contacts and calendar. When I used a Palm Vx, I never had the machine brick when I loaded too many contacts on to it, it never endlessly duplicated or corrupted contacts and it didn’t freak out when you scheduled events more than three months ahead.

    Unfortunately the same can’t be said for subsequent devices I owned including Palm’s Treo 600 and 650 phones, or the succession of Nokia devices I owned up until my E90 communicator gave up the ghost and went to the great Carphone Warehouse in the sky.

    The Vx was primitive, which was one of its main strengths:

    • Its screen which showed 16 types of grey was easy to view in direct sunlight
    • It’s electroluminescent backlight allowed you to view it in a darkened room and still have enough battery left to last you a week
    • It didn’t have an app store, but then there wasn’t any productivity sucking software and you could find new applications with your search engine of choice
    • It had to use a stylus for all but the most basic items on the resistive touchscreen, but Palm’s original single stroke handwriting called Graffiti once you got the hang of it is faster to use than the soft keyboard on my iPhone. Unfortunately a long-running patent dispute that went on until 2004 meant that Palm had to move to the inferior Graffiti 2 based on a product called Jot
    • It did allow you to sync your desktop PC’s inbox with your device so you could go through your email on the commute home, but you wouldn’t be bothered by the always connected aspects of push email. Push technology was a big thing then so if you got tired of clearing out your inbox you could read highlights from Wired.com or CNBC via the AvantGo service which sucked in content via your PC that you could then browse through offline at your leisure; in many respects an RSS reader before RSS became well-known
    • Location-based software before GPS was a subscription service called Vindigo that provided recommendations on restaurants, clubs and bars, and shopping. It also had maps that provided turn-by-turn instructions from a look-up table of  directions and was updated by syncing via serial port or USB connected cradle
    • Wireless connectivity was an IrDA infra-red port which was pathetic. I once tried to use it in conjunction with my Ericsson phone to surf the web but it was too much effort to keep both of them lined up. It was perfectly fine though for exchanging business cards electronically. I remember being at a Red Herring conference during the summer of 2000, demoing Palm devices and spent half the time beaming business cards with consultants and lawyers. It involved a curious ritual akin to an animal courtship display where two people would hold their devices in front of each other and move them closer or apart until their contact details had been exchanged. But it seemed to work better than any solution since. Moo cards are now my common currency of information exchange instead

    It was the industrial design of the Palm V and Vx that feels the most prescient parts of the product in many respects. Some of the decisions in this were forced on the designers by the hardware specifications. Palm used to use AAA batteries in their earlier devices and held the OS and resident apps in ROM. ROM was expensive at the time so the V and the Vx had everything in RAM which meant that there always needed to be a power supply which meant they had to use a lithium-ion battery. Since the battery wasn’t designed to be user serviceable the case was hot-glued together. This allowed the industrial designers to make the device much thinner so that it could be slipped into a set of jeans or a shirt pocket and weighed in at a paltry 114g, some 20g lighter than my iPhone without its case.

    The need for a ‘picture frame’ around the screen provided the designers with a way of making the device feel nicer in the hand by making it have rounded edges. It wasn’t that far off the iPhone in terms of size, but felt nicer to hold. When I first got my iPhone 3GS the device felt too wide in my hand. The product design encouraged premium brands like Burberry and Jean Paul Gaultier to make Palm V cases (which is a bit nicer than the silicone rubber jacket most people have on their iPhone. I used to have a slider case by a company called Rhinoskin made out of laser cut titanium plate that was indestructable.

    At the bottom of the Palm V and Vx was a connector that Palm continued to use on the M500-series devices. This connector meant that lots of companies made great accessories. A company called OmniSky sold a GSM modem that the PDA slotted into, ThinkOutside made the best folding keyboard I have ever used, again using the connector at the bottom to connect with the PDA. I once wrote a by-lined article on the train back from London to Liverpool without any at seat power and with both the keyboard and the Palm Vx slipping into my jacket pocket when I reached Liverpool Lime Street. Something I just couldn’t do with the iPhone due to its greedy battery life and the bulky keyboard accessories currently available.

    Looking back on it, the Palm Vx was the high point of of Palm the company. Missed technological opportunities, numerous management issues, poor quality product and software engineering together with wider market technological progress meant that the company and the PalmOS developer eco-system was a shadow of its former self by the the time the company was sold to HP.

  • Palm | HP portable devices

    I decided to jot down some thoughts on the demise of the Palm | HP portable devices business. I am not going to say whether it was the right or wrong thing to do mainly because other people have been doing that already.

    HP and the mobile device

    HP was arguably the original modern mobile computing device manufacturer, coming out with the HP-35 scientific calculator back in 1972. The company had a long history of being a pioneer in mobile computing; so the move away from mobile devices is actually putting an ending to a long line of devices.

    Compaq had a set of handheld computers in the mid-1990s called Aero. These ran DOS and Windows 3.1, being the predecessors of devices like the ASUS eeePC netbook.

    HP developed a number of PDA devices in the early and mid-1990s including the 95LX, 200LX, 100LX and the OmniGo 700LX which allowed a Nokia 2110 to piggyback on the PDA with a specially molded section on the back of the case.

    The Jornada series of devices was a range of Microsoft Windows-powered PDAs were launched in 1998 and had a number of achievements including the first Windows Pocket PC colour touchscreen device and a UK-only GSM smartphone. The Jornada brand was phased out following the merger with Compaq.

    The iPAQ succeeded Compaq’s Aero line in 2000 and the HP Jornada line after Compaq had been acquired. The last iteration of the iPAQ range was in 2010.

    The Palm range of devices were first launched in 1996, the operating system was tweaked and prodded over the next decade to power various different devices including the iconic Palm III, V and Treo range of smartphones. Ultimately it eventually came up with the webOS after repeatedly fumbling its future.

    This is a long and rich history of engineering innovation for which the Touchpad and Pre don’t stake up as worthy successors.

    Things I never got when the Palm acquisition was first announced

    I wrote up some bullet points of things that I didn’t fully understand when HP originally announced the Palm acquisition:

    • Is HP overpaying for the company? There isn’t that many people interested in Palm and analysts had set a target share price of zero. Is this price as much about emotion as assets?
    • Why is the Palm WebOS going to live up to HP’s faith in it?
    • Much was made of Palm’s cloud services technology in the webcast, but how many extra servers or services will it actually sell for HP?
    • SKUs. I was alarmed at the amount of proposed device variants HP was envisaging in the future on the call with possible support in differing form-factors for Microsoft Windows, Windows Phone, Android and WebOS in personal devices

    With the benefit of hindsight:

    • Unless HP manages to parlay Palm’s intellectual property assets into a patent war chest either through an auction or successful legal action, it is unlikely to make its money back on the Palm acquisition and its Palm | HP portable devices. There isn’t likely to be licensing revenues from other manufacturers that would make up Palm acquisition. Whilst, the current uncertainty around Android may make manufacturers open to looking at an alternative operating system; but why take on webOS when both Palm and HP couldn’t make it work properly? It’s not like both these brands didn’t have a good reputation and heritage in building mobile computing devices, also in order to license the operating system HP would have to maintain and continue to develop it. What would that road-map look like and why would HP continue to develop consumer-facing software given its renewed focus on the enterprise
    • I never did find out how webOS was going to live up to HP’s leap of faith in the operating system because it evidently didn’t pan out, hence HP withdrawing it’s Touchpad and Pre devices

    The value of the Touchpad and its implications for the webOS

    Many of the eulogies for the Touchpad and the Pre point out that webOS was good software held back by Palm | HP portable devices hardware chops. This was the same criticism leveled at the original Palm Pre; so it begs the question why didn’t new owner HP try and deal with the performance issues second time around? I suspect that the leadership of Palm knew that the original Pre sucked, which why it was kept out of journalist hands for so much of the launch period.

    Given the resources of a large company like HP, I would have thought that the former Palm engineering team and their new HP would not have wanted to continue making poor performing products; and instead would have looked to draw a line under everything with a superior device.

    Yet when you look at the price that the remaining Touchpad devices are flying off the shelves in the US: 99 USD, this tells you a lot about the perceived value of the product.

    The 99 USD price point is some 220 USD below the tear-down price of the HP Touchpad. The tear-down price is a conservative estimate of the total cost of a Touchpad to HP. Now you can allow for the fact that the product has some discount priced in because HP was withdrawing from the market, but even Nokia isn’t taking that kind of bath with its Symbian handsets.

    So a fair amount of this discount must be due to the device experience provided by the webOS software. The risk versus rewards offered to users by this operating system far outweigh the intrinsic value of the hardware on which it runs. I would have to question why anyone would want to license webOS? You can find more more related content here.

    More Links

    HP | Palm deal thoughts

    HP: What Léo Apotheker’s Decisions Mean | Monday Note

    HP gave up on cool webOS devices but promises webOS PCs and printers | VentureBeat

    HP TouchPad Carries $318 Bill of Materials – Teardowns at iSuppli

  • Palm troubles

    First of all some disclosure: I worked on the Palm account at my agency some ten years ago now and got to work with some of the smartest people in mobile device technology, notably the company’s chief competitive officer Michael Mace as an occasional media spokesperson back when his pictures had him with a Magnum PI-style moustache.

    At the time I worked on the account the company was riding high on the PDA boom, but the seeds of its current problems were sown back then.

    Even after working on the Palm account, I was a Palm customer. I had a Palm Vx which I used to death (quite literally) and spent a fortune on accessories including a Rhinoskin titanium slider hard case and a ThinkOutside portable keyboard. After that  I had a number of other Palm devices: a m515, a Tungsten3, a Treo 600 and a Treo 650.

    The last device left such a bad taste in my mouth because of an address book full of duplicates and corrupted data that I migrated to Nokia E-series devices, which provided a superior experience to the Treo 650 despite serious software stability issues.

    The company has been buffeted by critics over the years, many of them well-meaning.

    With the arrival of Jon Rubenstein to give it flare and product smarts and a matching injection of new money into the company, there was every chance that Palm could reinvent itself.

    Unfortunately it didn’t, and the company is now reaping the fruits of mediocre labours.

    To be honest the signs where there that the new product line wasn’t great and I wasn’t surprised:

    The communications-related signs are particularly damning as they indicate that at least some insiders at the company may have realised that the product despite the hoopla was not ready for primetime.

    Palm Pre

    The second good sign of a bad device is when after a decent amount of time virtually no one that you know owns one. I only know one person: the fashion-forward Rise co-founder Paul Allen; however on this occasion the Palm Pre has turned out not to be a fashion classic and more like a gadget equivalent of MC Hammer’s parachute pants.

    Interestingly, in his letter to Palm employees, Rubenstein puts much of the weight of corrective action on working short-term tactics with carrier partners to create demand push with no clue about what execution improvements in terms of product redesigns and quality improvements (if any) would be coming to shore up a poor customer experience. More gadget related content can be found here.

  • Palm for sale

    The Good Morning Silicon Valley newsletter carried a story about Palm’s largest shareholders asking the company to sell out to another player while its fortunes are still on the rise. This raises concerns about Palm’s roadmap and vision if even their largest shareholders don’t believe them.

    Why sell out?

    Palm has a number of challenges to overcome:

    • Maintaining relationships with distribution channels which are different and distinct for both the Treo and PDA ranges
    • Palm needs a new OS that will have it ready for the next ten years. It could have done with that new OS in the year 2000
    • Innovation and localisation: in order to keep its head above water in the PDA market Palm needs to innovate, Pocket PC manufacturers can leverage reference designs and even sell devices at a loss to support service businesses in the enterprise. In the cell phone market, Palm needs to localise the device to meet each carriers needs.
    • Make like Dell: Palm not only needs to get better at innovation and localisation, it needs to innovate operationally; something that had a positive transformative effect on Apple. Dell is a by-word for a slick logistics chain that keeps cost down and allows for user customisation at the order stage
    • One-trick pony: when HP goes into business it is looking to sell everything from a HP9000 Superdome high-end computer to an iPaq and the services to support it. When Nokia speaks to carriers it can sell them everything from all the kit to run a network to budget phones for PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) customers
    • Convergence: cell phones now have PDA functionality and so do iPods, Palm has unsuccessfully tried to make a convergence play with the LifeDrive and seems to have a crisis of ideas
    • Get big or get out: As can be seen from the MP3 player market, where there is a hot, competitive sector size wins because it can bring economies of scale to bear. Palm could not have taken the gamble that Apple did in terms its forward contracts for flash memory to role out a flash-based LifeDrive even if it had the vision to do so.

    Who should buy?

    A lot of the heat in this discussion centres on Research In Motion, Nokia and Apple.

    Research in Motion has never had the best product design and user experience, Palm could help them.

    Palm’s pen computing experience could be invaluable to Nokia.

    Apple is the collectively the player considered by technology pundits the people who can make a market work and has the expertise and chutzpah to make change the game devices work. Palm could bring carrier relationships and expertise.

    Why buy?

    Palm has a strong brand its name has been a by-word for PDAs for a long time. The Treo has made a name for itself amongst early adopters and has proven itself to be more adaptable than the Blackberry. Its product design has made it a success that has saved Palm up to now. However, much of the crown jewels within Palm (its distinctive look and feel) marched off with PalmSource acquisition by Access and even then there was a lot of work to be done to assure the future of the PalmOS as a modern platform.

    • If Apple wanted to build a Palm-like device it already has much of the expertise needed, arguably the best product design team in the world and it could license or buy the PalmOS software from Access. It even has the talent to build its own OS over Darwin. However, this would necessitate a hell of a lot of work during the time that the company is migrating its hardware and software to the Intel platform and rolling out new entertainment services. This means that a Palm-like Apple device is probably not likely
    • Research in Motion could poach a few of the Palm design team and licence the PalmOS software, but it has bigger issues as competitors are using the NTP case as an excuse to eat the companies lunch. In addition, services and software are more lucrative so there is already some industry signs that RIM are looking to move away from being a hardware player
    • Nokia has some of the best mobile phone designers in the world, the user experience of its Symbian phones rivals Palm. It makes sense only as a way to eliminate competition, but it would be more profitable to tempt key staff away and watch Palm nose-dive into wherever dead companies go

    Conclusion

    OK, first of all there is the question of whether Palm needs to be sold: probably not, but a shot of energy, vision and cajones in the management team wouldn’t go a miss and this shareholder action may be the boot in the backside that they need. Bottom line is that this question can get kicked back and forth for a long time to come, what’s more its an emotive area so don’t expect a consensus soon.

    If a ‘for sale’ sign went up, Palm may get a buyer, but I would expect the purchaser to come from the Far East rather than the established tech players named. I would also expect them to buy if or when the company is on its knees. Ningbo Bird, Haier, Lenovo, BenQ or HTC for example already know how to make phones, if they want cute industrial design they can buy it in as necessary from IDEO, frog design or their ilk. If the company did tout around for a buyer, you could expect the business to drop as carriers and enterprise look for alternative ‘safer’ suppliers. If the business isn’t on its knees when the for sale sign goes up, it may be by the time the deal is signed.

    The crown jewels: the PalmOS software is already available to whoever wants to licence it at a discount to Windows Mobile, the value would be in the carrier relationships and the brand recognition of the Palm name.

    UPDATE: Palm Addicts ran this piece in full, you can find it here. More related posts here.

  • Dogfight by Fred Vogelstein

    The story Dogfight tells feels much more recent than it now is almost two decades on, and yet so far away as smartphones are central to our lives. Back in the mid and late 2000s Silicon Valley based journalist Fred Vogelstein was writing for publications like Wired and Fortune at the time Apple launched the iPhone and Google launched Android. He had a front-row seat to the rivalry between the two brands.

    Dogfight

    And being on the ground in Silicon Valley would have meant that he would have had access to scuttlebutt given in confidence of anonymity as well as official media access.

    But he’s probably best known for being part of the story itself: Fred Vogelstein wrote about his experiences with Microsoft’s PR machine for Wired back in 2007.

    The fight

    Original iPhone - The Motorola ROKR
    The Motorola ROKR E1 I was given, but eventually threw out.

    Dogfight starts some time after Apple had withdrawn support for Motorola’s ROKR phone, which was able to sync with iTunes for music downloads. This particular track of Apple’s history isn’t really documented in Dogfight.

    The book goes through two separate but entangled story strands. The first is Apple’s development of the Apple iPhone and iPad. At that time Apple in the space of a decade had gone from almost going under, to having the iPod and iTunes music store, together with a resuscitated computer range thanks to the iMac and Mac OS X.

    The Google of this era was at its peak, search had become a monopoly and the company was overflowing with wondrous and useful web services from Google Earth to Google Reader. What was less apparent was that inside Google was chaos due to internal politics and massive expansion. Into this walked Andy Rubin who had built and designed the Danger Hiptop, sold exclusively on T-Mobile as the Sidekick.

    T-Mobile Sidekick2 w/ skin

    The Sidekick had been a text optimised mobile device. It featured email, instant messaging and SMS text messages. His new company Android had been acquired by Google to build a new type of smartphone that would continue to provide a mobile audience for Google services.

    Dogfight’s style

    Dogfight is undemanding to read but doesn’t give insight in the way that other works like Insanely Great, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Accidental Empires did. Part of this might be down to the highly orchestrated public relations campaigns happening at the time.

    Instead Vogelstein documents developments, from video recordings, marketing materials and court documents. Some of the things covered were items that I had largely forgotten about like music labels launching albums as multimedia apps on the new iPhone ecosystem. This was doing in software with what the Claudia Schiffer Palm Vx or the U2 autograph edition iPod had previously done in hardware.

    U2 iPod (front)

    Google’s decision to ‘acquihire’ the Android team to build their mobile operating system, wasn’t examined in depth. Yet there are clear parallels with the Boca Raton team in IBM which came up with the IBM PC a quarter of a century earlier. Vogelstein kept to the facts.

    It’s a workman-like if uninspiring document. And that mattered deeply to me. Part of the reason why I went into agency life was because I was inspired about the possibility of working the technology sector. This inspiration had been fired up by the chutzpah and pioneering spirit portrayed in older technology of history books. Some of them were flawed characters, but all of them had an energy and vibrancy to make the world a better place.

    Wired magazine issues had a similar effect. Yet in Dogfight Vogelstein brought neither of those influences to the table, instead he was writing an account that will probably only read by academics citing his material as a contemporary account in a future thesis.

    Dogfight isn’t the Liar’s Poker of the smartphone world, it isn’t even that illuminating about the nature of Silicon Valley.

    This is probably why Vogelstein hasn’t had a book published since Dogfight – he’s a reporter, not a writer. You can find more book reviews here.