Talkin' Palm - Week ending 6 Mar 10 | webOS Nation
 
 
 

Talkin' Palm - Week ending 6 Mar 10 16

by Annie Latham Wed, 10 Mar 2010 3:19 pm EST

Palm had a busy week with webOS v1.4 being rolled out to all carriers. That spawned a bunch of user created videos (one of the cool features of this new version).  There was also some air of excitement around games/apps. Sure, the financial picture was less than rosy. But the attitude now seems to be, "What? Me worry?"

So here's a rundown of what went on this week in the world of Palm. Big thanks to Mike of balloongeek.com for the Pre image above!

PALM Financial News - downgrades, talks of being an acquisition target and plenty of advice.

"So what’s Palm to do? Over at Needham & Company, analyst Charlie Wolf suggests the company redouble its efforts to build out the webOS ecosystem..."

"...Buying Palm could be a way for H-P to get into the market for lower cost devices. It might have to abandon Windows, or offer two families of devices. H-P has often juggled competing product lines, diverse chip architectures and operating systems."

"H-P has also shown more marketing savvy targeting products directly to women. Women are also a big installed base Palm has been trying to retain with the Pre...."

And speaking of Sprint, you may have noticed the return of CEO Dan Hesse to the airwaves: "Our $69.99 is worth more than their $69.99."
 

ATD: GDC 10: Palm's Mobile Gaming Push

At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco next week, the company plans to release its webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK), a set of tools that will help developers to create graphics-intensive games. Perhaps more importantly, the PDK will allow devs to rewrite mobile apps that they’ve built for other platforms to run on webOS with minimal modifications. iPhone apps can be ported over in a matter of days, sources close to the company tell me, and they don’t really suffer any degradation in performance.

Note:  Timing is interesting with Sony's new push.

Pre Plus Reviews - This week there were a few Palm Pre Plus reviews of note.

"The Pre Plus isn’t perfect, but there’s an awful lot of fresh thinking packed inside its diminutive case. It’s one of the handful of phones I’d suggest as a contender to almost anyone who’s in the market for a new smartphone."

Give Palm credit, though, for thinking outside the iPhone. And if you're a dedicated Palm customer and still own the deplorable Centro, proceed immediately to the phone store and swap it for this Pre Plus -- just $149.99 online and at stores after $100 rebate -- and enjoy stepping about a light-year forward in smartphone coolness.

 

 

App Watch

What's Tweetin'...

The Palm Pre fans continue to dominate our "favorite phone" straw poll, but other mobiles have some passionate defenders. (Stand by for RTs) --BestBuyMobile

 

Here's a good one to keep your spirits up.

That's a wrap!

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16 Comments

Posted by nwkenning on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 3:46 pm EST

horray for pre!

Posted by PreMaster on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 3:48 pm EST

I guess im first. lol. who cares really. I care more about when flash comes out so i can watch atdhe.net live football on my fone. lol.

Posted by Muesli_ on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 3:54 pm EST

Didnt see the ad before, is great. Props to the author.

Posted by kewlnesss on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 3:55 pm EST

love the video

Posted by hbg on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 4:25 pm EST

The acquisition of Palm looks much MORE likely now. With Android under assault it is perfectly plausible that a handset maker that had tied their hopes to Android (e.g., Motorola) could merge with or acquire Palm. A handset maker would get the advantage of not having to run to Microsoft's arms, yet also have something that nobody else has and which is not open source. Granted, Motorola has its own problems, but it is possible. The same is true for a possible purchase by another handset maker. The stars are really aligning for a sale.

Posted by omatus on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 4:31 pm EST

When do we start getting the EA games for free?

Posted by jjeffcoat on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 4:35 pm EST

Hey cool.... my avatar being used for this blog post!

Posted by mjorange on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 4:47 pm EST

Palm is presently running ads within the entire Powell Street BART terminal, both upstairs and downstairs. Felt like a VIP when I noticed, whilst speaking on my Pre.

Good job, Palm.

Posted by Sk3lleton on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 4:49 pm EST

Just thought of something... if you have an unlocked pre can you get the ea games free?

Posted by grndslm on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:59 pm EST

No. You MUST setup a Palm Profile first and then have a credit card tied to that Profile in order to download paid apps.

Posted by bevcraw on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 5:12 pm EST

That balloon guy was in front of me in line on the Pre launch day last June at the Memphis (Cordova) corporate store. The employees hung the Pre balloon from the store ceiling.

Posted by sybermike on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 5:29 pm EST

Im still know as Number 1 when I walk in that store. We had a great time waiting that early morning. Thanks to Dieter and PreCentral for keeping the community healthy.

Magnificent Mike the BalloonGeek

Posted by stephenjxn on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 5:49 pm EST

Palm needs to add more marketing and advertizing dollars to their bottom line. I have come across many people who have heard of the Palm Pre, saw the device in big box stores but never knew it's capabilities. Once I show them some of the neat things it does they are instantly amazed. Of course I get a lot of "haters" saying its trying to be an Iphone. I tell them its not an Iphone. Its the next best thing only better. I would love to see Pre vs All The Others commercial ads much like the Microsoft / Apple guys commercials.

Posted by Political Season on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 6:26 pm EST

Found this comment elsewhere: somebody tell me why this logic is wrong?

Getting Web developers on board for Palm apps is not going to happen. At the same time as Palm has been making a way to make Web apps that seem to be native on Palm, the W3C has been making a way to make Web apps that seem to be native on everything. If you have Web development skills, you can make an HTML5 app and it runs on Palm, Android, Nokia, iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Mac, Windows, Linux, and soon Blackberry. It can run when the device has no Web connection, it can store a database locally on the device. On the Apple devices, it will be GPU-accelerated.

So what Palm is really offering is a way to hobble your Web apps so it only runs on Palm. They're not just competing with iPhone apps, they're competing with HTML5, with the Web itself. It's less than Web apps, not more than Web apps.

What Palm needs to do if they want apps is create a native programming interface in C. Android's biggest native app problem is they are written in Java. You can't port desktop C code over like on the iPhone.

Running Web apps is expected, you're supposed to get that for free as on every other platform. The value add is native apps that can do things that aren't possible on the Web, aren't possible with Web tools and languages. On iPhone, you can run interpreted HTML5 Web apps or you can run compiled C native apps, your choice, it covers all the bases. The native apps have a reason to exist because they're NOT made with Web technologies, so you can work in C, you can port C code, you get compiled performance, you have programming interfaces that don't exist on the Web yet.

There are many iPhone apps that simply cannot be ported to other phones because there are no other phones with a desktop class C-based object-oriented app platform. On iPhone you literally have a Mac-level app platform. The only thing that will compete with that is another desktop-class app platform.

Palm spent too much time and effort on the hardware and not enough on the software. They should have hired an Apple software guy, not hardware guy. Pre has 2 screens, 2 keyboards, 2 batteries, and only 1 programming interface with no GPU support. iPhone has 1 screen, 1 keyboard, 1 battery, and 2 programming interfaces, both of which have GPU support.

So it's not 3rd party software developers who are holding Palm back, it's Palm's internal software that is holding them back.

Remember that for the first year of iPhone you could make apps for it using Web tools and the world yawned. Then Apple unveiled a native C interface and it was like fireworks going off.

Posted by grndslm on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:07 pm EST

The incorrect logic stems from the fact that it's completely outdated.

Native C/C++ apps are now able to be developed for webOS with the PDK (Palm Development Kit). There's also the WIDK (WebOS-Internals Development Kit). There's even talk about being able to easily convert QT apps over to webOS... not to mention the ease behind converting iPhone apps. There's also the Ares online development platform... http://ares.palm.com/Ares/login.html

Palm has truly outdone themselves, except when it comes to educating people, and especially developers, about what they're offering. PreCentral can't be their only means to diffuse information to the masses. They need more press releases, more partnerships, more reviews, and certainly more brainwashing commercials (pref. a late night 30-min infomercial).

Somebody needs to start making a bigger splash in the pool.

Posted by snork4life on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 6:32 pm EST

hadn't seen a Alfred E. Newman reference in a long time...come to think of it, nither a M.A.D. Magazine!