Pretty much all PDA Phones need WindowsMobile5 and above to be relevant... Whether it's Palm, HP, Dell, whatever. I tried a Windows Mobile Dell Axim in 2004. *sigh* Rubbish compared to the heydays of HandSpring and what an awesome though simple PDA it was. And the Windows Mobile crashing about once or three times a day, mmmm..... sucktastic.
Windows phones are truely bad.
I haven't yet seen one review of a Windows phone that was better than lukewarm. Most are downright negitive.
Really? I thought they were dropping their Access Linux Platform licence at the end of the year and forking PalmOS v5 (again) because Access haven't hit their development milestones.
If there's an example of a company that had a market pretty much to itself and then totally blew it all by themselves then Palm is it. Their OS was ok back in 1999 but needed a modern replacement so they buy the hottest OS company going - Be - badly manage their hardware, screw up the OS through mismanagement and piss off most of their technical staff who all go back to Apple.
Meanwhile they split the company, give each half of it a stupid name, sell their remaining OS to a browser company with a browser nobody uses or cares for and then buy back their own company name. And then they launch Palm devices running Windows!
Really Ed, it's not the 'PC guys' who don't get it.
Yeah, it's sad. I'm holding on to mine as long as I can.
Its possible that he is just brushing off Apple, but it seems that corporate executives (and politicians) all spin PR propaganda and FUD to support their agenda or best interests, even though they know its not the truth. They claim that everything they're doing is the greatest thing and the other guy is a loser.
There's nothing else they can say. It isn't that he doesn't have a clue.
Whenever a company comes out with a competing product, and someone from the first company is interviewed, they have to say that.
Even if they believed otherwise. What could he say? "Apple does a great job, and we're really concerned that they might kill our sales."
That statement, or anything remotely like it, would do the job for Apple before the product came off the assembly line.
Sony Ericsson makes some sweet phones. I would think that Apple would have a multimedia Ipod phone like the w810i and then a PDA Apple Style. The problem is that SE phones trail Nokia and Motorola by quite a wide margin. I would spend up to $400 on the multimedia one and maybe $500 for the PDA. A lot of my friends who have a SE phone are not using their Ipod as often because they can load a 2 or 4 Gb memory card and only carry one device. Obviously it is not as good as an Ipod but combining 2 products can work if done right. apple would probably have to partner with a mobile handset firm to lower costs unless they are going for broke. If it's Motorola then I would not buy it...
Totally. SonyE makes some good solid phones with attractive, vibrant user interfaces and fairly solid OS experience, Symbian is good, ya. Even their non-Walkman phones are now pretty moving all into playing mp3s and AAC as well. None of that "Oh, sorry, you got to convert to this ATRAC3 F*KIGN RUBBISH"......
The sad thing is who is going to take the next step and take on WindowsMobile PDA-phone? Nokia's moving strongly on smartphones, but integration with Outlook and Windoze or MacOSX .... hmmm.... messy....
Yet some people still need it and use it ... Those that don't want to wrangle mobile and laptop separately.
There's that typical idea that in order to (wrongly) have vertical compatability within an institution, Windows must be used at all levels. Actually, the programs used in Palms have shown better compatability than MS's own. But, that doesn't seem to matter.
well, i just had to do a hard reset of my treo 700p last night and reinstall all my software. it crashes at least once a day and it is extremely unresponsive switching between apps. if you ask me, palm hasn't even done that great of a job making a phone after "suffering through" those years. some companies have it and some don't. palm doesn't. it's inexcuseable for a $400 phone to take more than a second to switch between a mail app and the phone app.
i think a lot of people are generally dissatisfied with their smart phone experience and there's a large market there waiting to be captured. overall, the sidekicks 1 & 2 that i had were a much more "apple" experience. they worked flawlessly and responsively. in the end, they just weren't powerful enough (or have evdo) so i switched.
please apple, save us from "smart"phone hell. i can only hope it'll work with verizon since i'm tied into a plan now.
Palm has a bigger problems right now then Apple coming into the market. Who do everyone think Palm biggest rival is right now? Lets be honest, it is not Nokia, Motorola or SE. They are in different markets. Palm is praying that their Treo line can be profitable. However, they have gone from market leader to market follower in a few short years. I agree Windoze Mobile doesn’t work. I have not much of a choice considering my requirements. Just to add salt, currently their biggest rivals are HTC and Gigabyte. These are the people who produce the other Windozes Mobile devices in the market (majority of them) and sell under different names like O2 and whatever else. Gigabyte is doing the GPS thingy while HTC is doing the “everything including the kitchen sink” approach. “PC Guys” right…. Even without Apple entering the market, they are already in trouble. But don’t get me wrong, I still love my Palms. Started with a Palm III, then a TRGpro, following up with a IIIc and IBM c500 & Palm m505. Good OS, Good PIM software.
All I have to do now is to link their software with my lousy reset every day Windoze Mobile HTC Hermes.
well, i just had to do a hard reset of my treo 700p last night and reinstall all my software. it crashes at least once a day and it is extremely unresponsive switching between apps. if you ask me, palm hasn't even done that great of a job making a phone after "suffering through" those years. some companies have it and some don't. palm doesn't. it's inexcuseable for a $400 phone to take more than a second to switch between a mail app and the phone app.
i think a lot of people are generally dissatisfied with their smart phone experience and there's a large market there waiting to be captured. overall, the sidekicks 1 & 2 that i had were a much more "apple" experience. they worked flawlessly and responsively. in the end, they just weren't powerful enough (or have evdo) so i switched.
please apple, save us from "smart"phone hell. i can only hope it'll work with verizon since i'm tied into a plan now.
I've had to do a few soft resets, never a hard one. I did find a progran that was causing some of those needed resets, and removed it. Apparently, it didn't like the newer OS.
It still switches far quicker than Windows Mobile apps do, and it reqjires far less "clicks" to get anything done. Reports of the Windows products have them crashing far more.
I'm not familliar with the Symbian phones, but Aegis seems to had problems with some of the newer ones.
sure, i agree that for what i need it for, the treo is the best solution. but i also had mp3 players before the ipod that were the best solutions for the time. the treo, even if it weren't crashing or lagging on app switches, even in its ideal form as it is, is still not a great user experience. not even close. the sidekick was actually a much better user experience, it's just much more limited than the treo. if apple can ipod-ify the smart phone market then look out world. i think there are a lot of people out there who like what they have because they haven't seen anything better.
There's that typical idea that in order to (wrongly) have vertical compatability within an institution, Windows must be used at all levels. Actually, the programs used in Palms have shown better compatability than MS's own. But, that doesn't seem to matter.
Good point. But it still remains that an Apple SmartPhonePDA would have to have high compatibility with Office and Outlook, maybe LDAP (??) and stuff.
I believe that this CEO honestly doesn't get it. Look at all the players in the cell phone market. Have any of them in all of their market research and R&D come up with a phone that people truly "love"? No. But people "love" their macs, and they "love" their iPods. I think they'll "love" their iPhones too.
While there is a grain of truth, I think it's just spin. But it's true that you can't simply expect instant success without a lot of work, but it's also true that you can't spin bat guano into silk and pretend that Palm is doing great these days.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AjayBot
And by PC guys, I think they meant personal computers, ie mac & windows & linux & (insert here)
But first things first, the interview segment was about Apple. The Windows and LInux phones are already established in the market and are pummeling Palm's share of smart phones. Not only that, Apple isn't just a PC company with just PC guys. They are a consumer electronics and media distribution company too. Heck, they had some experience making PDAs too. The real reasons why the Apple PDA division was ended is a topic of too many threads, I won't go into it.
I happen to like PalmOS, and it's been very reliable for me, but apparently sometimes the hardware isn't. My Tapwave has been working without reliability problems. I had an m100 that lasted a lot longer than any individual iPod that I've owned so far, even my first gen nano's too new to say whether that will change it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DCQ
Am I the only one who thinks this Apple cell-phone idea make little-to-no sense? Like the movie download thing, this seems more analyst-driven rather than consumer-demand-driven.
If you don't think there's a notable consumer demand then I think you are playing ignorant. It's one thing to say that it won't dominate the market (mobile market is too huge to dominate), it's another to say there's no notable demand. Because of how big the mobile market is, even a tiny sliver would be huge for Apple. I seem to recall several surveys that suggest that there's a good market for an Apple phone. I won't say I will buy one, but I'd like to see it.
Quote:
Frankly, I was skeptical of the iTunes movie thing...still am.
I suppose grossing $4M in the first couple months isn't enough to convince you? It's a pretty good start, especially considering that the starting library is pretty small. For several reasons that I won't go into, I won't buy any iTunes movies, heck, I almost don't buy from iTunes at all, but I have to admit that the sales do seem to be going pretty well, a little better than I would have expected.
I'm not familliar with the Symbian phones, but Aegis seems to had problems with some of the newer ones.
Yep. The new Symbian OS 9 phones like the P990 are much buggier than either Palm or Windows IME which is totally the reverse of the situation from Symbian OS7 which was rock solid. Like not resetting ever kind of solid no matter what you did.
Pity too as overall UIQ 3 (the interface on the P990) was pretty good. Memory handling seems to be the biggest problem as it has the entirely stupid idea that if memory is too fragmented or there's not enough to run the app you've just switched to, it reboots, with a nice message saying the phone has restarted in order to improve performance. It even did it mid call on me once when an email came in in the background. That's ridiculous.
In the previous phones they also used 'Execute-In-Place' so nothing had to be copied from ROM to RAM to run it. Even though the new phones have more RAM, when you're running a few things you've got less. Couple it with the crappy memory handler and it's a recipe for disaster.
Palm's problem is they're still running a 68K OS in emulation with no memory protection and no preemptive multi tasking. It's like trying to run modern applications on an SE/30 and OS7.
Meanwhile Microsoft just announced Windows Mobile 6 and that now does intelligent memory handling where by they don't close an app down if you click close. They keep it around in case you need it so it's quickly there again and only switch it out if you need the ram for something else. I imagine that'll speed things up a lot.
And that's how Microsoft are winning, gradually improving, whilst their competitors fsck up.
That said, the only two smartphone platforms growing are Symbian (over 75% of the market) and Windows Mobile. Symbian runs on 100 million phones currently but those are mostly OS7. They'll have to improve OS9. Everybody else is shrinking.
So yeah, it's time for Apple to ride in on the shiny white horse and save us smart phone villagers from a life in servitude to crappy phone OSs.
If you don't think there's a notable consumer demand then I think you are playing ignorant. It's one thing to say that it won't dominate the market (mobile market is too huge to dominate), it's another to say there's no notable demand. Because of how big the mobile market is, even a tiny sliver would be huge for Apple. I seem to recall several surveys that suggest that there's a good market for an Apple phone. I won't say I will buy one, but I'd like to see it.
"Seem..." "suggest..." "tiny sliver..." "won't say I will buy one..." ---> and you're defending the iPhone?
Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffDM
I suppose grossing $4M in the first couple months isn't enough to convince you? It's a pretty good start, especially considering that the starting library is pretty small. For several reasons that I won't go into, I won't buy any iTunes movies, heck, I almost don't buy from iTunes at all, but I have to admit that the sales do seem to be going pretty well, a little better than I would have expected.
That's $4 million in revenue, not profit. And my guess is that Apple gets to keep, at best, $400,000 out of that. And for that, they have to pay for engineers working on the DRM, lawyers working on the EULs, multiple high-level negotiations with multiple studio execs, people working on the compression, servers, bandwidth, credit card companies, customer support... And for that, customers pay almost DVD prices for a) sub-DVD quality (lower esolution AND lower bitrates), b) no ability to burn DVDs, c) no extras, d) no commentaries, e) no alternate language tracks.
"Seem..." "suggest..." "tiny sliver..." "won't say I will buy one..." ---> and you're defending the iPhone?
Yes. I generally do like Apple products but won't commit to buying a product that I haven't seen, which is why I said that. What I am saying is that the phone market is huge. There were a few stories that said if Apple grabs a few percent of the phone market, they would match their iPod revenue. I think Apple would be stupid to not get into it somehow.
Quote:
That's $4 million in revenue, not profit. And my guess is that Apple gets to keep, at best, $400,000 out of that. And for that, they have to pay for engineers working on the DRM, lawyers working on the EULs, multiple high-level negotiations with multiple studio execs, people working on the compression, servers, bandwidth, credit card companies, customer support... And for that, customers pay almost DVD prices for a) sub-DVD quality (lower esolution AND lower bitrates), b) no ability to burn DVDs, c) no extras, d) no commentaries, e) no alternate language tracks.
It's another option. I would never say that iTunes movie is equivalent to the DVD. With the iTunes version, you can have multiple copies of the movie playing at the same time.
Would you say that the iPod is analyst driven because it doesn't feature a radio tuner and voice recorder? It's the same general idea.
Comments
Pretty much all PDA Phones need WindowsMobile5 and above to be relevant... Whether it's Palm, HP, Dell, whatever. I tried a Windows Mobile Dell Axim in 2004. *sigh* Rubbish compared to the heydays of HandSpring and what an awesome though simple PDA it was. And the Windows Mobile crashing about once or three times a day, mmmm..... sucktastic.
Windows phones are truely bad.
I haven't yet seen one review of a Windows phone that was better than lukewarm. Most are downright negitive.
Really? I thought they were dropping their Access Linux Platform licence at the end of the year and forking PalmOS v5 (again) because Access haven't hit their development milestones.
If there's an example of a company that had a market pretty much to itself and then totally blew it all by themselves then Palm is it. Their OS was ok back in 1999 but needed a modern replacement so they buy the hottest OS company going - Be - badly manage their hardware, screw up the OS through mismanagement and piss off most of their technical staff who all go back to Apple.
Meanwhile they split the company, give each half of it a stupid name, sell their remaining OS to a browser company with a browser nobody uses or cares for and then buy back their own company name. And then they launch Palm devices running Windows!
Really Ed, it's not the 'PC guys' who don't get it.
Yeah, it's sad. I'm holding on to mine as long as I can.
Its possible that he is just brushing off Apple, but it seems that corporate executives (and politicians) all spin PR propaganda and FUD to support their agenda or best interests, even though they know its not the truth. They claim that everything they're doing is the greatest thing and the other guy is a loser.
There's nothing else they can say. It isn't that he doesn't have a clue.
Whenever a company comes out with a competing product, and someone from the first company is interviewed, they have to say that.
Even if they believed otherwise. What could he say? "Apple does a great job, and we're really concerned that they might kill our sales."
That statement, or anything remotely like it, would do the job for Apple before the product came off the assembly line.
Am I the only one who thinks this Apple cell-phone idea make little-to-no sense?
Yes!.
I brush off the existence of Palm
ROFL
Sony Ericsson makes some sweet phones. I would think that Apple would have a multimedia Ipod phone like the w810i and then a PDA Apple Style. The problem is that SE phones trail Nokia and Motorola by quite a wide margin. I would spend up to $400 on the multimedia one and maybe $500 for the PDA. A lot of my friends who have a SE phone are not using their Ipod as often because they can load a 2 or 4 Gb memory card and only carry one device. Obviously it is not as good as an Ipod but combining 2 products can work if done right. apple would probably have to partner with a mobile handset firm to lower costs unless they are going for broke. If it's Motorola then I would not buy it...
Totally. SonyE makes some good solid phones with attractive, vibrant user interfaces and fairly solid OS experience, Symbian is good, ya. Even their non-Walkman phones are now pretty moving all into playing mp3s and AAC as well. None of that "Oh, sorry, you got to convert to this ATRAC3 F*KIGN RUBBISH"......
The sad thing is who is going to take the next step and take on WindowsMobile PDA-phone? Nokia's moving strongly on smartphones, but integration with Outlook and Windoze or MacOSX .... hmmm.... messy....
Windows phones are truely bad....I haven't yet seen one review of a Windows phone that was better than lukewarm. Most are downright negitive.
Yet some people still need it and use it ... Those that don't want to wrangle mobile and laptop separately.
Yet some people still need it and use it ... Those that don't want to wrangle mobile and laptop separately.
There's that typical idea that in order to (wrongly) have vertical compatability within an institution, Windows must be used at all levels. Actually, the programs used in Palms have shown better compatability than MS's own. But, that doesn't seem to matter.
i think a lot of people are generally dissatisfied with their smart phone experience and there's a large market there waiting to be captured. overall, the sidekicks 1 & 2 that i had were a much more "apple" experience. they worked flawlessly and responsively. in the end, they just weren't powerful enough (or have evdo) so i switched.
please apple, save us from "smart"phone hell. i can only hope it'll work with verizon since i'm tied into a plan now.
All I have to do now is to link their software with my lousy reset every day Windoze Mobile HTC Hermes.
well, i just had to do a hard reset of my treo 700p last night and reinstall all my software. it crashes at least once a day and it is extremely unresponsive switching between apps. if you ask me, palm hasn't even done that great of a job making a phone after "suffering through" those years. some companies have it and some don't. palm doesn't. it's inexcuseable for a $400 phone to take more than a second to switch between a mail app and the phone app.
i think a lot of people are generally dissatisfied with their smart phone experience and there's a large market there waiting to be captured. overall, the sidekicks 1 & 2 that i had were a much more "apple" experience. they worked flawlessly and responsively. in the end, they just weren't powerful enough (or have evdo) so i switched.
please apple, save us from "smart"phone hell. i can only hope it'll work with verizon since i'm tied into a plan now.
I've had to do a few soft resets, never a hard one. I did find a progran that was causing some of those needed resets, and removed it. Apparently, it didn't like the newer OS.
It still switches far quicker than Windows Mobile apps do, and it reqjires far less "clicks" to get anything done. Reports of the Windows products have them crashing far more.
I'm not familliar with the Symbian phones, but Aegis seems to had problems with some of the newer ones.
There's that typical idea that in order to (wrongly) have vertical compatability within an institution, Windows must be used at all levels. Actually, the programs used in Palms have shown better compatability than MS's own. But, that doesn't seem to matter.
Good point. But it still remains that an Apple SmartPhonePDA would have to have high compatibility with Office and Outlook, maybe LDAP (??) and stuff.
I believe that this CEO honestly doesn't get it. Look at all the players in the cell phone market. Have any of them in all of their market research and R&D come up with a phone that people truly "love"? No. But people "love" their macs, and they "love" their iPods. I think they'll "love" their iPhones too.
While there is a grain of truth, I think it's just spin. But it's true that you can't simply expect instant success without a lot of work, but it's also true that you can't spin bat guano into silk and pretend that Palm is doing great these days.
And by PC guys, I think they meant personal computers, ie mac & windows & linux & (insert here)
But first things first, the interview segment was about Apple. The Windows and LInux phones are already established in the market and are pummeling Palm's share of smart phones. Not only that, Apple isn't just a PC company with just PC guys. They are a consumer electronics and media distribution company too. Heck, they had some experience making PDAs too. The real reasons why the Apple PDA division was ended is a topic of too many threads, I won't go into it.
I happen to like PalmOS, and it's been very reliable for me, but apparently sometimes the hardware isn't. My Tapwave has been working without reliability problems. I had an m100 that lasted a lot longer than any individual iPod that I've owned so far, even my first gen nano's too new to say whether that will change it.
Am I the only one who thinks this Apple cell-phone idea make little-to-no sense? Like the movie download thing, this seems more analyst-driven rather than consumer-demand-driven.
If you don't think there's a notable consumer demand then I think you are playing ignorant. It's one thing to say that it won't dominate the market (mobile market is too huge to dominate), it's another to say there's no notable demand. Because of how big the mobile market is, even a tiny sliver would be huge for Apple. I seem to recall several surveys that suggest that there's a good market for an Apple phone. I won't say I will buy one, but I'd like to see it.
Frankly, I was skeptical of the iTunes movie thing...still am.
I suppose grossing $4M in the first couple months isn't enough to convince you? It's a pretty good start, especially considering that the starting library is pretty small. For several reasons that I won't go into, I won't buy any iTunes movies, heck, I almost don't buy from iTunes at all, but I have to admit that the sales do seem to be going pretty well, a little better than I would have expected.
I'm not familliar with the Symbian phones, but Aegis seems to had problems with some of the newer ones.
Yep. The new Symbian OS 9 phones like the P990 are much buggier than either Palm or Windows IME which is totally the reverse of the situation from Symbian OS7 which was rock solid. Like not resetting ever kind of solid no matter what you did.
Pity too as overall UIQ 3 (the interface on the P990) was pretty good. Memory handling seems to be the biggest problem as it has the entirely stupid idea that if memory is too fragmented or there's not enough to run the app you've just switched to, it reboots, with a nice message saying the phone has restarted in order to improve performance. It even did it mid call on me once when an email came in in the background. That's ridiculous.
In the previous phones they also used 'Execute-In-Place' so nothing had to be copied from ROM to RAM to run it. Even though the new phones have more RAM, when you're running a few things you've got less. Couple it with the crappy memory handler and it's a recipe for disaster.
Palm's problem is they're still running a 68K OS in emulation with no memory protection and no preemptive multi tasking. It's like trying to run modern applications on an SE/30 and OS7.
Meanwhile Microsoft just announced Windows Mobile 6 and that now does intelligent memory handling where by they don't close an app down if you click close. They keep it around in case you need it so it's quickly there again and only switch it out if you need the ram for something else. I imagine that'll speed things up a lot.
And that's how Microsoft are winning, gradually improving, whilst their competitors fsck up.
That said, the only two smartphone platforms growing are Symbian (over 75% of the market) and Windows Mobile. Symbian runs on 100 million phones currently but those are mostly OS7. They'll have to improve OS9. Everybody else is shrinking.
So yeah, it's time for Apple to ride in on the shiny white horse and save us smart phone villagers from a life in servitude to crappy phone OSs.
Steve?
This guy is smug, but Steve has the same attitude when someone mentions a "iPod Killer" music player.
Cellphone/Smartphones will be the end of iPods.
If you don't think there's a notable consumer demand then I think you are playing ignorant. It's one thing to say that it won't dominate the market (mobile market is too huge to dominate), it's another to say there's no notable demand. Because of how big the mobile market is, even a tiny sliver would be huge for Apple. I seem to recall several surveys that suggest that there's a good market for an Apple phone. I won't say I will buy one, but I'd like to see it.
"Seem..." "suggest..." "tiny sliver..." "won't say I will buy one..." ---> and you're defending the iPhone?
I suppose grossing $4M in the first couple months isn't enough to convince you? It's a pretty good start, especially considering that the starting library is pretty small. For several reasons that I won't go into, I won't buy any iTunes movies, heck, I almost don't buy from iTunes at all, but I have to admit that the sales do seem to be going pretty well, a little better than I would have expected.
That's $4 million in revenue, not profit. And my guess is that Apple gets to keep, at best, $400,000 out of that. And for that, they have to pay for engineers working on the DRM, lawyers working on the EULs, multiple high-level negotiations with multiple studio execs, people working on the compression, servers, bandwidth, credit card companies, customer support... And for that, customers pay almost DVD prices for a) sub-DVD quality (lower esolution AND lower bitrates), b) no ability to burn DVDs, c) no extras, d) no commentaries, e) no alternate language tracks.
Like I said, analyst-driven, not consumer-driven.
"Seem..." "suggest..." "tiny sliver..." "won't say I will buy one..." ---> and you're defending the iPhone?
Yes. I generally do like Apple products but won't commit to buying a product that I haven't seen, which is why I said that. What I am saying is that the phone market is huge. There were a few stories that said if Apple grabs a few percent of the phone market, they would match their iPod revenue. I think Apple would be stupid to not get into it somehow.
That's $4 million in revenue, not profit. And my guess is that Apple gets to keep, at best, $400,000 out of that. And for that, they have to pay for engineers working on the DRM, lawyers working on the EULs, multiple high-level negotiations with multiple studio execs, people working on the compression, servers, bandwidth, credit card companies, customer support... And for that, customers pay almost DVD prices for a) sub-DVD quality (lower esolution AND lower bitrates), b) no ability to burn DVDs, c) no extras, d) no commentaries, e) no alternate language tracks.
It's another option. I would never say that iTunes movie is equivalent to the DVD. With the iTunes version, you can have multiple copies of the movie playing at the same time.
Would you say that the iPod is analyst driven because it doesn't feature a radio tuner and voice recorder? It's the same general idea.