Some less than stellar news about Palm is being reported by Kevin Kelleher over at GigaOm.
The latest grim plot twist came last week when Palm reported its fiscal second-quarter earnings. Smartphones sold to consumers fell 4 percent from a year ago, before Palm even debuted the Pre. A costly ad campaign sank gross margins to 25.6 percent from 27.9 percent a quarter earlier.
You know who should acquire Palm? 3Com! :)
In all seriousness though, I only left high school a few years ago and while I didn’t have any pressing need for a PDA I grew up tinkering around with a Palm IIIx while my friends used Game Boys and have fond memories of it. I still reckon Graffiti is the closest anyone has come to an accurate, reliable and speedy on screen character recognition system.
I have no doubt Palm engineers (even if they’ve all changed since then) have the gutso, imagination and talent to produce amazing hardware and software, but much like Microsoft they suffer at the hands of less than competent marketing folk. Hope the company can get its act together.
As a matter of disclosure, I’ve long since switched to an iPhone but my dad’s still holding out for a Pre in Singapore, when they decide to ship them here (second strike against their marketers). Keep the fires burning Palm.
I had huge Palm envy for many years; I’d always dreamed that one day we’d get a city wide mesh network and there would be a Palm handheld device to connect to it. Unfortunately, the mesh network died rather than grew in Canberra as wifi became ubiquitous (although I’ve seen some amazing success in other parts of the world) but 2009 is the looking like the year where I finally got consistent mobile data access via GPRS.
I got a Palm Zire 72 and loved it to pieces (the blue paint has fallen off due to a manufacturing defect in the first batch). It’s a shame that Palm have had so many problems in the last few years… like abandoning the Foleo just before the netbook market exploded :P
With sufficient setup, it could act as a USB storage device and an mp3/video player. But setup = shareware licence fees and buggy upgrades. I tried to pull it out and get it on the Internet but it wasn’t compatible with modern 3G phones and I’d have to buy a 3rd party addon to use SDHC cards. I tried bluetooth PPP on the Freerunner and a normal Ubuntu tutorial worked!
That’s where WebOS should be taking Palm – make everything tweakable as a FOSS system and hopefully you regain some 3rd parties from the iPhone as well as making the Palm hackers happy to be back. It was looking good for a while (Konami cheat code to get root shell, friendly instructions) but then jwz had all those problems, not just with app store culture. So probably another iteration (maybe the Pixi?) before WebOS has a chance of being dandy.