Rubénerd!

So HP are doing another run of TouchPad hardware. Was this all an elaborate marketing stunt?

I was on a roll when I made these graphics

In macroeconomic terms, dumping refers to when a company floods a new market with products at unprofitable prices in order to establish a presence. Foreign companies flush with cash are able to sustain this long enough to drive local businesses bankrupt, and are then able to own the market and set the prices. Most free market economists consider dumping to be the only valid reason for protectionism, unless they're Libertarian.

While it's tempting to think HP have done this with the TouchPad, it fails on three counts. No wait, four counts, I'm not Discovery News!

1. Despite the firesale of devices, TouchPads still only count for a tiny fraction of the tablet market. Granted people who own Palm devices give the brand exposure, but there simply isn't enough of them for it to be considered a "flooding".

2. While it would be a masterful stroke of genius to let people think a product is dying only to have it brought back with artificially increased marketshare, we've seen no evidence that HP's marketing departments are savvy enough to have created the concept and pulled it off.

3. There's also no evidence to suggest HP's revolving door executives are creative or forward thinking enough to have instigated such a plan. Mr Apotheker was the former CEO of SAP, so we know where he stands on consumer devices.

4. I've read reports the reason why they're manufacturing more devices is due to their hardware suppliers having quotas or obligations to fill, or they have excess inventory. I'm not entirely sure that makes sense either, but it seems more likely than HP suddenly learning how to do marketing.

In Soviet Tablets, web OS-s you

While I'm all for looking deeper into the meaning behind corporate decisions and doublespeak, in this case I really am willing to believe HP retired Palm hardware due to a lack of sales. I've lamented this many times here given my belief webOS was the best mobile OS ever developed.

A bit late to the party, but reading this in PC World Australia pretty much confirmed my fears.

In case you missed it, HP overnight launched three new devices based on Palm's webOS platform; a TouchPad tablet, a Pre 3 smartphone and a compact Veer smartphone. Sadly, none of these slick-looking products are likely to make it down under.

And how does Ross Catanzariti know this?

Brad Swiney, PR Manager, Personal Systems Group, HP Australia: "HP will not be launching these WebOS devices in Australia at the same time as the US and at this early stage cannot speculate on local pricing. Specific region and country availability details have not yet been announced, however HP will first be targeting markets where WebOS is currently available."

No webOS devices are currently available in Australia or Singapore, meaning that we can assume no new devices being launched here or there anytime soon. Still, he didn't explicitely say they wouldn't be launched at all, so there's room to be optimistic, maybe?

You know what? No, there isn't

Palm, or HP, or whoever you are, can we have a chat?

I've been a loyal user of your devices since I was first given a Palm IIIx in primary school. I had absolutely no practical business use for a PDA, but I loaded it up with software and even tried my hand at writing some of my own. I got so fast at Graffiti I even started writing the glyphs in my school notes by accident. It was a reflex!

My first smartphone was a Tungsten W, a device that married the ease of use of the classic Palm platform with a full QWERTY keyboard and the maddening design decision to only include a speaker and microphone in the hands-free cable. Still, it was better than anything else.

Since then I inherited a Palm V, I got a series of Treos, and finally an adorable little Centro which I use as my secondary phone for my foreign SIM cards (pictured on the far right in this photo taken in 2008 or something!)

webOS

When a GSM Palm Pre was first announced, I was extremely excited. A friend of mine from the States had let me try his unit and in my opinion webOS blew the iPhone OS (still called that at the time) and Android out of the water.

Unfortunately, you quickly demonstrated your apathy for the markets that myself and my father (who also wanted one) resided, and gradually I lost patience and got an iPhone 3G. It was a great phone, so much so that I caved and got a 4 last year as well.

With the announcement of the TouchPad once again I see a device I would prefer to use over a similar Apple product, but if I were to ever get a tablet computer it would probably be an iPad. I could go to the trouble of ordering one from the States, or getting a friend to post me one, or jumping through another series of hoops, but what's the point when Apple not only acknowledges the existence of my market, but is actually willing and happy to have my money! Heck even some Android makers do too, to be fair!

I'm ready to call it quits Palm, or HP, or whatever you are. Despite still wanting to be, it should not be this hard to be your customer/fanboy! Oh well, se a vida e.

Its official, HP is buying Palm. Cue the link to my previous post about Palm nostalgia and a sad face. From the HP press release:

HP and Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALM) today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which HP will purchase Palm, a provider of smartphones powered by the Palm webOS mobile operating system, at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash or an enterprise value of approximately $1.2 billion. The transaction has been approved by the HP and Palm boards of directors.

As I said to @FrankNora on Twitter, it's not exactly the end to my favourite tech company I was hoping for. HP used to be a fantastic company (I've ALWAYS wanted an HP 16C), but now their consumer product divisions are the epitome of dull, uninspired mediocrity that characterises much of the PC industry right now.

Granted Palm will now survive instead of going bankrupt, but how they'll fare in the kind of environment where product design and quality are shunned in favour of race-to-the-bottom pricing remains to be seen.

HP claims they bought Palm for their WebOS which I admit is fantastic (and needs hardware worthy to run it, which the Pre and Pixi weren't), but how much of it was just so they could get their warchest of patents? If they do release new hardware, I really hope it looks like something Palm would make and not an HP abomination!

Update

@DDsD on Twitter made the observation that HP was listed as a Windows Phone 7 partner with Microsoft. I wonder what this aquisition will mean to this; they could pull an HTC and make phones for every OS under the sun or they go and ditch Microsoft completely. If the latter is the case, will HP still retain their premier positioning at the Apple Microsoft stores in the US?

I've been so frantically busy with all the scanning and throwing away of junk here I haven't had the chance to blog for a while, so I figured I'd quickly weigh in with my own proposal for who should buy out Palm. I reckon mine is just as good as any.

Was thinking about the situation with Palm I discussed this morning when a Robbie Williams song came on the radio, and I thought it was apt.

"I don't miss you, just who you used to be…"

I think it's safe to say we all saw it coming. Well, either this or bankruptcy. It makes me sad.

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation.

Pointless nostalgia

The first PDA I ever had was a Palm IIIx. I was in primary school at the time and I really didn't need one, but I was already obsessed with computers and my dad figured it was cheaper to get me one of those for Christmas than a fully fledged laptop. Perhaps it was because we were growing up in tech-obsessed Singapore, but it was common for lots of kids my age to have such business oriented gadgets! I was the only guy in my circle with a Palm though, everyone else had those Microsoft Palmtop thingys.

The Palm IIIx had 4MiB of memory for data and applications, which was double that of the cheaper Palm III. Amazing, right?! It used volatile memory, meaning if you didn't replace the AAA batteries within a few minutes of them losing a charge, your data was wiped. It sounds bad, but the HotSync software made it so easy to backup and restore that I only lost stuff once. It had a 2-bit black and white display (no, not even monochrome) that was incredibly sharp, and it used the same new inverted backlight as the sleeker Palm V. And the Graffiti writing system was awesome.

I loved that little PDA, I loaded it up with all sorts of little applications and had it as a backup entertainment device right up until I started university a few years ago and a roommate of mine "borrowed" it then moved out. I never saw it again :(.

The Tungsten W

As the Palm IIIx was my first PDA, the Palm Tungsten W was my first smartphone. I was in late high school and the idea of having a full colour PDA that doubled as a phone sent tingles of excitement down my nerdy spine. For some reason the design department thought it was a good idea to use the aging DragonBall processor and require the use of a hands-free cable to place calls, but other than those it was a fantastic device.

Shortly after I got the Tungsten W, Palm bought Handspring and replaced their Tungsten smartphone line with Handspring's Treo. In many ways the Tungsten was the superior device, it was slimmer, had a cleaner and more elegant design, the QWERTY keyboard was much easier to use, it had a much smaller antenna with the same phone call quality and reception and the screen resolution was 320x320 instead of the crappy 160x160 the Treo had.

The end of Palm's fortunes?

I started losing interest in Palm shortly after they bought Handspring. I have no hard numbers to back this up from a business standpoint, but personally, all their decisions from around that time didn't seem to make much sense. In no particular order:

• they divested themselves of their software division
• re-branded themselves with the clumsy PalmOne trademark
• changed their names back again
• started developing the Folio concept, then canceled it
• started selling Windows Mobile versions of the Treo...

When Palm announced their intentions with WebOS, I was excited about Palm again. When the Palm Pre came out and everyone said it was slow as molasses, my temporary re-interest (is that a word?) waned and I got an iPhone. Then they came out with the Pixi which was even slower than the Pre.

As I've enumerated many times on Twitter, I looked forward to Palm releasing a new smartphone with much faster hardware that could run WebOS well, because the OS had such potential. I wanted to love Palm and to have another one of their devices, I really, really did. Instead it seems they have no interest in doing that, but rather selling themselves off to the highest bidder.

I'm not an MBA nor do I know all the reasons behind their decisions, but it seemed Palm in the 2000s was run by people who simply had no idea what they were doing, much like Microsoft has been sinking since Ballmer has been CEO. It was almost as though Palm's board went out of their way to make sure it failed, because nobody could make that many bad decisions. Well, other than Microsoft under Ballmer.

The future

Pundits say Palm is worthless and nobody in their right mind would want them. While its executives have successfully gutted the company and reduced it to a shell of its former self, I suppose their warchest of patents would still be worth something.

What I'd love to see is WebOS released as either open source, or available for licencing if Palm gets sold. If I could get a Android phone, wipe the firmware off of it and put WebOS on instead, I'd be a really happy camper. It won't happen though, for political and technical reasons.

Goodbye Palm, I grew up using your devices and it was nice knowing you.

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.

My iPhone with the original screen cover and my Palm Centro phone next to my original iPods.

I love my 16GiB iPhone 3G. it's the single greatest gadget I've ever used. I know as a supporter of free and open source software and open standards I'm not really supposed to like it, but it's just gorgeous and a real pleasure to use. The entire experience is fantastic.

This patent Apple has been rewarded scares me though. We need competition to keep Apple on their toes, and this will only hamper such efforts by scaring away potential competitors. I guess that's the whole point though right?

Before I was an iPhone guy I was a Palm guy; aside from Apple I think Palm have been the only folks who could design a usable mobile phone interface. I still have a Palm Centro I carry around with me too to put my Australian SIM card in when I'm in Singapore, or vica versa. I can't help but think Palm's design of a touch screen device with icons representing different applications taking up the whole home screen was done before Apple for some reason... say a decade before Apple?

I'm not Bill Kurtis.

The airport scare iPhone episode!

I caved and bought an iPhone; the reasons why I was disappointed with Google Android; sophisticated text messages from my sister; the LG Secret mobile phone; snapping Australian Medicare cards; New Zealand Australia Centrelink migrations; Gordon Brown's Labour speech in the UK; palindromic numbers; distrusting spell checkers with gibberish; fancy new embedded Rubenerd Show cover art; compressed graphics looking crap; antihistamines; the term podcast; my take on the Andy Kaufman situation on The Overnightscape; my dad setting off security at Adelaide Airport; the iPhone keyboard; the TwitterFon iPhone Twitter client; I love the Objective-C programming language; fond memories of the Palm Tungsten W and Palm OS; basing your opinion of devices just from spec sheets; practical use for GPS and Safari; and hallucinogenic throat lozenges!

Music for this episode performed by Chris Juergensen from Magnatune.com.

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 33:00 15.2MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.