Tams Palm

Whenever yours truly gets a book pitch on “social impacts of handheld computing”, experience has told me to just blacklist the publisher – in 99.9% of the cases, the content is written by an organization who wants to leech money off mobile users by talking them into believing some kind of nonsense and paying for a “cure”. However, Marshall Cavendish is a reputable printing house…which is why I gave their book the benefit of the doubt.

David Thompson is a well-known author for self-help books. The intention of this work is to make you communicate more effectively using mobile email.

He achieves this by telling the fictive story of an employee working at an airline. He gets a “magic BlackBerry”, which then makes him think about the way he has communicated with his peers and managers in the past.

Topics covered include things like relationship flexibility, when to call rather than reply and the ever-famous “waiting-before-replying”.

As already said above, the book is very easy to read. Its layout furthermore emphasizes key passages:

If you do a lot of mobile email, definitely slip this book into your next Amazon order. Even though it won’t tell you much new, the 10$ are a small price for overthinking your messaging habits…

Fate sometimes takes strange turns. Compaq originally wanted to license Palm OS, but ended up white Windows Mobile instead – only to become the arch nemesis of Palm with its once-famous iPaq handhelds.

HP gobbled up Compaq, and now went for Palm. Every true mobile head should thus be able to take a look at the shot below showing the two handheld brands on one site:

Given that the iPaq line is now almost out, take a last good look via the URL below:
http://www.cellstores.com/template/simpleautocontent.aspx?pageid=8481& …

Ever since the infamous Palm IIIc hit the road, overclocking Palm-made devices was “cool”. When the Pre hit the road, it also was overclocked to the 800MhZ range (a cool 33% improvement) quickly.

However, some never have enough – the latest bit of madness takes the box to 1.05 GhZ:

As the kernel has not been released as of this writing, the post ends here…

HP’s intention to take over Palm has been out for some time – while the companies had already agreed some time ago, they have not been able to clear all regulatory hurdles so far.

This has now changed according to HP. Their full release goes as following:

HP today announced it has completed its acquisition of Palm Inc. at a price of $5.70 per share of Palm common stock in cash.

The combination gives HP significant headway into one of technology’s fastest-growth segments with Palm’s innovative webOS platform and family of smartphones, plus a rich portfolio of intellectual property from the smartphone pioneer.

HP’s global scale and financial strength plus Palm’s award-winning webOS experience, as well as its acclaimed Pre and Pixi smartphone product lines, enhance HP’s ability to participate more aggressively in the highly profitable, $100 billion smartphone and connected mobile device markets.

“With webOS, HP will deliver its customers a unique and compelling experience across smartphones and other mobility products,” said Todd Bradley, executive vice president, Personal Systems Group, HP. “This allows us the opportunity to fully engage in growing our smartphone family offering and the footprint of webOS.”

Under Jon Rubinstein, former Palm chairman and chief executive officer, the Palm global business unit will report to Bradley. Palm will be responsible for webOS software development and webOS based hardware products, from a robust smartphone roadmap to future slate PCs and netbooks.

“With HP’s full backing and global strengths, I’m confident that webOS will be able to reach its full potential,” said Rubinstein. ”This agreement will accelerate the development of this incredible platform with new resources, scale and support from a world-respected brand.”

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Not much to add here…

Governments have used “frequency auctions” to fix up their leaking budgets at the expense of the wireless market for quite some time. So far, carriers usually decided to just “suck it up” and charge their customers more – but what if no one would show up to bid?

This seems to have happened in Jordan, as Mobile Business Briefing reports the following:

Jordan’s Telecommunications Regulatory Commission has announced that it did not receive any applications for 2.5 GHZ band licences by the 27 June deadline,

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As of this writing, not much further information is available. However, I can but hope that the carriers coordinated this and keep their firm stance…

Don’t ask me why, but it looks like ganging up with Access Co. isn’t too good an idea. The company’s self-esteem has apparently shot through the roof after the PalmSource takeover; resulting in, well, excessive amounts of staff attitude. The boys have found themselves pressured by Operas superior technology for some time; and were furthermore unable to reap significant revenue from their super-expensive purchase.

Emblaze’s ELSE was thus considered a “silver bullet” for the company by many onlookers. If the box would sell well, it would make the platform viable – but it apparently never made it onto the road last but not least due to lack of public interest. An official press release from Emblaze finally announces that the device is indeed EOL’d:

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ELSE’ management have since invested considerable time and effort to secure a
partnership for the sale of the First ELSE mobile devices. While there was
encouraging interest in the device by potential partners, management was not
able to confirm a deal on terms acceptable to Emblaze to proceed to the
production of the device.

Due to critical delays in deliveries and the current status of the project, the
board has now decided to cease any further investment towards manufacturing of
the First ELSE mobile device and to concentrate efforts only on licensing the
ELSE Intuition platform and technology in order to realize its potential
upside.

…

For me, this sounds a lot like the Palm/PalmSource split – let’s see whether they or Access will be the first to go down….

Traditional Palm OS handhelds were famous for their swift start-up – a stock Tungsten T managed to start from cold in less than a minute, and didn’t bug the user too much.

On webOS phones like the Pre, the process is more difficult. The process starts by making you pick a country, language and region:

Next, the SIM card must be unlocked:

When this is done, you have to accept the webOS license agreement.

Afterwards, its time to create your Palm Profile:

And accept another set of licenses:

With that out of the way, the machine boots up and shows an introductory video. Some key scenes are pictured below:

Even though the process definitely is slower than the one we used to know from traditional Palm OS devices, it nevertheless is acceptable. The only – but major – nuisance is the requirement that a valid SIM be installed during the entire process…

Don’t ask me why, but I sometimes feel that the folks at Palm’s are slowly but surely starting to get that having developers behind you is precious.

In an email sent out to developers a few hours ago, Palm makes two crucial announcements. The full email is below, with emphasis added by yours truly:

Palm Eliminates App Submission Fees

These are exciting times for Palm and our developer community. The Hot
Apps promotion that we kicked off back in February is about to end
with over 400 developers receiving a share of a million dollars. We
recently launched the Summer Half Off promotion-a 50% discount for
nearly every app in our catalog that was funded by Palm; developers
still get their full earnings for each sale, but customers get half
off. And we’re just getting started.

In July, we’re launching the new PDK Hot Apps promotion-another
million dollars to developers, this time focused on the C/C++ apps
that were excluded from the original Hot Apps promotion.

And we have one more program change that will benefit all developers.
When we launched the developer program, we introduced a $50 per app
fee to submit apps into our catalog. Effective immediately, we’re
waiving this fee and refunding to all developers any $50 fees
collected in the past. If you’re one such developer, you will see a
credit in your PayPal account in the near future.

Thank you for being part of the webOS community. We will continue to
evolve the Developer Program as together we build an incredible
application catalog for customers

At Tamoggemon HQ’s, we are delighted – now help us port Qt and we’re set to go!

Even though the EU is not popular with all of its inhabitants, mobile heads can’t complain too much about their treatment. We have been granted governmentally mandated roaming pr4ice reductions some time ago…and the next reduction is on its way.

Mobile Business Briefing reports the following:

…The maximum permitted charge for making a mobile call while abroad will fall to £0.32 a minute and the rate for receiving calls to £0.125 a minute.

… operators will be obliged to apply an automatic EUR50 cut-off limit on accounts if the customer has not stipulated their own limit … send customers a warning when they reach 80 percent

…

Not much to add here…

P.S. In Austria, Orange has started to offer aggressive roaming tariffs. Hutchison has done so for some time on its network…

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Lars Aronsson

OLED screens have always been a special area of interest for yours truly – a few years ago, they were considered a “silver bullet” for all issues which plagued the industry back then.

HTC has since started to deploy OLED technology on many devices. AndroidCommunity now reports supply problems:

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HTC has plans to keep using the AMOLED technology from Samsung, but they are also going to use Sony’s Super TFT LCD displays as well. According to HTC, there is no discernible difference between the displays from Sony and Samsung, and they are expecting the differences to slide under the radar.

But, they obviously need to tell customers about the difference. Unfortunately, there’s no word on how they plan on doing this, as the details haven’t been quite worked out yet.

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Given that Samsung is currently running an extremely aggressive promotion for its bada platform, the company could very well be interested in limiting display stock to a competitor…

P.S. I have to admit that I am not too impressed with Samsung’s Super AMOLED technology, as it suffers from the dreaded “uneven pixel size” issue which leads to “boxy” images. Furthermore, good LCD systems can easily compete with OLED’s – look at the images in the two tests below:
Nokia N85 – OLED screen test
Nokia N86 – OLED screen test

P.S.2 Having one device with screens from two different manufacturers is not too uncommon. Palm did it with its entire HVGA lineup…

Whenever a takeover takes place, some employees leave. Don’t ask me why, but it looks like Palm is too stupid to cover it up with some leaks.

Thus, they have to live with reports like the one below. TechCrunch reports the following:

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On her Facebook profile, her current employer is listed as “Consult Until-I-Find-Another-Job Consulting, LTD”, with a description reading:

I respectfully declined the opportunity to join HP after its acquisition of Palm, so am looking for my next career adventure.

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Given that HP once had an excellent PR team in Europe, I can well understand her leaving over fear of competition (PR people tend to be extremely catty, I work in such an environment myself) – I am not one bit concerned.

Mark/Space’s “The Missing Sync” has taken the place of Palm’s Hotsync on the webOS – given the always-on nature of the operating system, Palm decided to omit provisions for a classic desktop sync.

The boys have just written in to inform us that thgey now also sync notes and tasks. Unfortunately, you have to use a custom app of theirs to store the notes and tasks on the phone:

Los Gatos, CA – June 28, 2010 – Mark/Space(R) released a significant update to their popular PIM and media synchronization software for webOS phones such as the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, The Missing Sync(R) for Palm Pre. Version 1.2 adds phone-to-desktop synchronization of notes and tasks – between a Pre or Pixi phone and Windows PC or Mac computer.

To achieve synchronization of notes, Mark/Space developed a full-featured notes app, Fliq Notes. Fliq Notes provides note taking, editing and management features – far more than the Notes app included on a Palm Pre. Notes are synchronized between Fliq Notes and Microsoft Outlook on a PC, or to Mark/Space Notebook (included with The Missing Sync) on a Mac. The Missing Sync for Palm Pre works with Fliq Notes to perform the sync over a Wi-Fi network.

Tasks synchronization is performed using Fliq Tasks, a slick to do management app developed by Mark/Space for webOS. With Fliq Tasks installed on a Pre or Pixi phone, tasks can be synchronized wirelessly – over a Wi-Fi network – with Outlook on a PC or iCal on a Mac.

Version 1.2 also adds a built-in ringtone editor to the Windows PC version of The Missing Sync for Palm Pre, a feature currently available in the Mac version. Easily create ringtones from music and other audio files.

In addition to notes and tasks synchronization, The Missing Sync for Palm Pre syncs contacts and calendars via Wi-Fi and music, photos, video, ringtones, documents and podcasts fast using a USB cable.

…

Either way, hit the URL below to find out more:
http://www.markspace.com/products/pre/index.html

Apple has frequently removed applications from the store in the past. Amazon did so with an ebook and got an outcry…which is why Google originally planned to retain the kill switch in the Android OS for the absolute emergency.

Given that mobile phone security becomes more and more of a topic, the situation has arisen. A blog post by a Google Engineer reads as following:

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Recently, we became aware of two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes. These applications intentionally misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads, but they were not designed to be used maliciously, and did not have permission to access private data — or system resources beyond permission.INTERNET. As the applications were practically useless, most users uninstalled the applications shortly after downloading them.

After the researcher voluntarily removed these applications from Android Market, we decided, per the Android Market Terms of Service, to exercise our remote application removal feature on the remaining installed copies to complete the cleanup.

…

As of now, nothing is known about these applications. Let’s see whether they will show up at one of the security conferences – if not, we could have our first black-hat targeting Android…

Don’t ask me what is going on at HP’s – after buying up the webOS, they have now acquired a rather small music streaming company called Melodeo.

TechCrunch reports the following:

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Similar to Apple’s Lala or Pandora, the Seattle-based Melodeo streams music to its mobile apps from the cloud. Melodeo’s main product line is nuTsie— yes, an anagram of iTunes. NuTsie’s flagship service (which is available on several platforms including Blackberry, Android and Windows Mobile) scans your iTunes playlists and allows you to access those playlists on your mobile device in shuffle mode. You can also look at other users’ playlists and discover songs through the company’s proprietary recommendation engine or nuTsie’s editorial playlists (i.e. Top 100 Reggae Songs, Top 100 90′s Songs).

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As of now, it is not known whether this will be integrated into the webOS. However, given the always-on nature of Palm’s new operating system…

Tomi Ahonen is a famous analyst – who, unfortunately, is firmly entrenched in the “mobile web” side of things. It thus is not too surprising to see him bash the iPhone’s App Store. As many of his points also apply to other stores, I have decided to take some parts of his article and comment on it below (he permitted it on the blog btw).

His first point looks at financials, and is pretty reasonable:

… the relevant number is that half of all paid iPhone apps get less than 1,000 downloads. The median point is under 1,000. Lets call it 999. That number times $1.95 per paid app gives the ‘most typical app’ the total revenues in its lifetime – the full two years of App Store existence – of $1,948 dollars. This is before Apple takes its cut of 30%, so we are left with $1,363 over two years or $682 per year. This is so ‘successful’ that half of all of the developers of the 164,250 apps – will actually earn LESS THAN THIS.

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Next up is download numbers. He ignores one thing here: things like the 100 million sold Tetris copies required hundreds and hundreds of contracts with carriers – while the iPhone head has to worry about but one distribution point:

So, most paid iPhone apps are games and some games can have ‘huge’ success, eh? Like the afore mentioned Angry Bird, the best-selling iPhone paid game app of all time with 4 million downloads at 99 cents ie earning 4 million (before Apple’s cut) and the previous champion, Bewelled 2, which had 3 million paid game downloads. You think that justifies your mission? That these numbers are ‘impressive’ for a mobile phone game? Sure. But I have some friends over there at Artificial Life here in Hong Kong, whose main business is in mobile, but not in making games for phones (they do TV-interactivity as their main business). They had a clever little game a few years ago, you might have heard of it, won many awards, called ‘V-Girl’ the virtual girl friend on the phone, in the form of an avatar. Like an adult age ‘tamagotchi’. These guys are not EA or any major game developer and this was not their main focus. They celebrated their 4 million paid download milestone – back in 2008. 4 million is nothing in the real world of mobile paid data services and apps. Nothing.

Take Tetris. Tetris sold 35 million game cartridges to the Nintendo Gameboy platform. Pretty decent numbers for a gaming platform. Guess how many paid downloads to mobile? Over 100 million. One Hundred Million. Paid game downloads (on Java obviously, not smartphones). And this is nothing in mobile. Nothing! Our numbers are huge. I want huge numbers. That – 100 million in Tetris – is nothing.

He finally goes on to state that creating iPhone-only apps for advertising is dumb. While this part makes sense at first glance, you should also keep in mind that the average iPhone buyer (aka not the one reading TamsIJungle) usually is one who is interested in luxury and “bling”:

But you get my picture. Take Hilton Hotels (the idiots). They developed an iPhone app to help busy travellers book their room service meal. An iPhone app to book a meal? And now limited to 3% of prospective clients? Why was this not done via a mobile Web (HTML) or WAP site? Is it somehow impossible to book room service meal on an interactive mobile website? Darn! Or take Walgreen the US drug store (the idiots). Their ‘mobile strategy’ was an iPhone app pleasing 3% of their customers and ignoring 97% while rival Rite Aid drug store did the SMS based loyalty card, prescription renewals etc and reached the pockets of 100% of Americans. Which is the smart move, which is the moronic move? And thats before we factor in the cost. The iPhone App still costs typically $35,000 to develop. You know what a mobile web site development costs on WAP or Web? Try one tenth of that cost – $3,000 according to that same source I used earlier, Internet Retailer, on May 1, 2010.

The full, somewhat long, but nevertheless very interesting article is below:
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2010/06/full-analysis-of-iphone-economics-its-bad-news-and-then-it-gets-worse.html

One of the core weaknesses of traditional Palm OS devices was their terrible browser – browsing the web on a Treo 680 was hardly an activity one could consider fun.

Palm thus was extra careful to make the browsing experience on the Palm Pre as smooth as possible – and it has largely succeed in this endeavor. The only thing webOs heads still miss is Flash. We saw it at the MWC…but haven’t heard much from it since.

Electronista now states the following:

Adobe hasn’t given any signs that it’s close to porting Flash to webOS, Palm said in an AT&T online app development seminar on Thursday. When asked about the multiple delays, a representative said that Palm didn’t ‘know what the hold-up is’ with getting it ready. Adobe itself hasn’t commented on the state of the webOS version or of other platforms.

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Not much to add here…

Sometimes, a little bit of bickering can work miracles. After I complained that Krusell no longer sent us their sales reports for some reason, the data has started to trickle in once again.

For all those of you new to the topic: Krusell is a large Swedish case manufacturer with an extremely strong retail presence. Their data is thus extremely interesting, as it shows which phones “people on the street” use.

For this month, the list looks as following:

1.(1) Nokia 3720 Classic
2.(3) HTC HD2
3.(2) Apple iPhone 3G
4.(4) HTC Desire
5.(5) Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10
6.(9) Nokia E52
7.(-) Nokia 6303 Classic
8.(7) Samsung B2100
9.(6) Nokia 2730 Classic
10.(10) HTC Legend
() = Last month’s position.

Not much to add here…

Our initial experience with Emblaze was not too good – and their handset didn’t look like an excessively promising Treo replacement either.

Engadget now claims the following:

We have word from an industry insider that the First Else handset running the ALP OS is in trouble. Not a surprise since Emblaze, the company behind the handset, has been dead quiet about Else ever since CES where it promised a March beta and Q2 launch. From what we hear, the software simply isn’t ready and Emblaze has been unable to sign on any major carriers as the components continue to age inside a cellphone first demonstrated in November of 2009.

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Given that the market is already overfilled with fun devices, I can very well see carriers ignoring a potentially expensive-to-acquire device from an unknown vendor. Being the “official” successor of the Palm OS is nice and fine – but carriers tend to keep an eye on their financials…

The single largest issue mobile application stores face today is getting people to BUY – for example, Nokia’s Ovi Store has thousands of free downloads but suffers from conversion rates around 1:1000. Average customers (aka those who don’t read TamsPalm ) need to be made accustomed to paying for apps…and a promotion can be helpful for that.

Palm has now opened one as following:

If you’ve been looking for a good excuse to check out some new apps for your Palm webOS phone, here it is: Starting today (and for a limited time), nearly every app in the US Palm App Catalog and Palm web channel are available at half price. (A handful of exceptions are indicated at full price in their catalog listing.)

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Let’s see whether it does much for developers…

Don’t ask me what is wrong at Aceeca’s, but the boys have managed to get quite a bit of a credibility issue when ship dates are concerned. Their Garnet OS-powered PDA32 has been due for “June” – but it, once again, has failed to materialize.

A posting to the palm-dev-forum now reads as following:

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Just wanted to share a quick bit of info here:

The Aceeca PDA32 Palm OS Garnet handheld is real — you just can’t buy it quite yet…

I have one sitting on my desk right now for beta testing. My first impressions are that this unit is going to be even better than I was hoping for! There is still some system software work to be polished before it is ready to ship.

I’m not supposed to say anything more about it before the official press release from Aceeca, but I can say that it is real, and it is coming.

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As of now, my reps at Aceeca’s have not provided any further information. Stay tuned!