Palm leaving the Chinese market!!!

[Mads]

http://www.bargainpda.com/default.asp?newsID=2290

The Palm market is getting more and more in trouble. I don't really understand what is wrong with PalmOne but apparantly they don't like a little competition. Their market share has dropped and Sony has left the Palm OS platform. On top of that they try to fight back with lackluster products like the T5 and they haven't even gotten around to making a device with Cobalt.

All this makes me want to know, if I would have to pay full prize for a pocket PC version of your program, if I made the switch? I originaly bought a palm to use your program and I bought a TE. Now I use it so much that I would like to upgrade to something better (VGA, Cobalt preferably )

I'm a little suprised by Palms move since the new OS 6 was supposed to have an improved environment for chinese language :?

 

[mikelove]

This is actually only a temporary departure from the market, and doesn't really affect us much anyway - our sales in China have not significantly improved since Palm entered the market a year-and-a-half ago. It's really more of a marketing distinction, the big electronics shops will still have guys importing Palm's from HK just like they did before Palm arrived in China. But I agree that Palm appears to be in trouble, and I really wish there was a way we could get a Pocket PC version of our software out earlier. In fact I've started wondering whether or not it might be a good idea to release a Pocket PC "preview release" that didn't include the all-important handwriting recognizer, since without having to deal with all of that extra development work we could probably have it ready as early as March.

As for your upgrade question, I can't be 100% certain, but I really don't think we'll be charging full price for a platform switch - there would probably just be some sort of a "crossgrade" fee in the $20-$30 range. But this only applies to the ABC/NWP dictionaries - for legal reasons we can't release the Oxford ones on Pocket PC, even for people who already own them on Palm, so if you only own the Oxford and wish to switch to Pocket PC you'll likely have to pay full price (or nearly full price) for the ABC/NWP in order to make that switch.

 

[Mads]

I guess the article is a little misleading then. The "withdrawn its products from the Chinese market" also didn't make sense to me since I just saw the T5 here in Beijing yesterday.

I think in the end I'm sticking with the PalmOS as long as they are around. The choice of handhelds on their market is just getting dissapointly few. Now PalmOne products are pretty much what you can get.

By the way, I'm kinda of eager to do a PDA upgrade but want to wait to something really cool comes along. Still I'm curious as to how much more snappy you program would run on a T5 compared to my TE?

 

[mikelove]

I'd get the T3 instead of the T5 - it's US$50 cheaper for pretty much the same feature set, and there have been a number of reports floating around recently of various bugs and problems (not specifically with our software but just in general) on the T5.

As far as the speed comparison (with either the T3 or the T5), the dictionary does run significantly faster on the T3/5 - I'd say roughly twice as fast as the TE for most of the really time-consuming operations. But the finished version of PlecoDict should be a good deal faster than the preview release on most devices, so you might want to wait until that's ready before spending the money on a speed boost.

 

[goulniky]

Temporary departure from the market, just as the decision from Sony to leave the US/Europe? You must be kidding, why would they be leaving Shanghai where everyone else is eagerly trying to start business?
Palm is in trouble, the rumors and press releases about PalmOne assessing other OS is another indication. Their poor communication certainly does not help, and neither does the split into separate companies both retaining 'Palm' in their name. Then reports about buggy products rushed to the market or confusion on OS6, and general lack of clear strategy on both sides, etc. This Shanghai thing just shows how short-sighted they are, franctically trying to slash costs.
There's no doubt they are in deep trouble and that will eventually impact all of us, probably sooner than we'd like. I'll keep PlecoDict and my UX50 until it collapses, but still, the gates are closing...

 

[mikelove]

Well yeah, I guess it is a little silly to call it "temporary"... Palm is indeed in trouble, but fortunately (for our purposes) Microsoft is not. So simply by outlasting Palm they'll likely end up controlling the smartphone OS market. Which they were going to do anyway a few years down the line once smartphones became powerful enough to run desktop-class versions of Windows.

We may have been slow about Pocket PC, but I'm 99.999% certain there will be a Pocket PC version of PlecoDict sometime in 2005, and once we've crossed that barrier it will be much much easier to develop a Symbian or (pen-enabled) J2ME version since we'll already have the handwriting recognition and licensing details worked out - the new policy around here is that we never sign single-platform licenses for anything anymore, if it's not platform-agnostic then it probably doesn't happen.