Palm To Be Sold?

[gato]

http://www.forbes.com/business/business ... 5palm.html
Smart phone pioneer Palm may finally be giving in to shareholder pressure to sell. Is it too late?

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/n ... A264AA3%7D
A Nokia-Palm deal? No way, analysts say

And while she doesn't see Nokia as a good strategic fit, explaining that the Finnish company's use of the Symbian operating system is actually a useful differentiating tool in the enterprise market, she believes a Palm deal could make sense for a computer player without a core competence in handset manufacturing, such as Dell.

Regarding Palm's proprietary operating system, Milanesi doesn't believe it has much a future. Rather, she sees the company incorporating its best features into the Windows Mobile platform.

Others, like Ilkka Rauvola, a telecoms analyst with Finland-based Evli Bank, are slightly more positive on Palm's proprietary operating system, saying some aspects of that interface could be of interest to Nokia.

 

[sfrrr]

It's about time we start to see some convergence in PDA-smartphone formats. Interoperability has to happen some time.

I hope.

Sandra

 

[mikelove]

Might make sense for Motorola; by all accounts the worst thing about the Q is its keyboard, and the Treos have generally gotten high marks on that, plus the Treo would make a nice business-oriented high-end addition to the current Q/RAZR/KRZR/ROKR lineup. Seems more likely that they'd be bought by some company like Dell that wants to get in on the smartphone party; a lot of people think within 10 years or so PCs and smartphones will basically be the same thing, and that everyone will just carry around a portable device that they can dock to a monitor/keyboard/etc when they get home, so a PC manufacturer that wants to hedge its bets against that happening would do well to get into the smartphone business. Not to mention that Dell's manufacturing clout (their PDAs/laptops are built in many of the same factories as Palm's, but they're a much bigger customer) would likely help make Palms both cheaper and more reliable.

 

[mikelove]

Oh, and speaking of convergence, Microsoft is adding support for 320x320 screen resolution (the same one used on high-res Palms) to Windows Mobile 6 (see this page for more on that), and it's widely speculated that they're doing so at the request of Palm. The sensible explanation for this would be that they want to standardize their hardware better, but I have a more interesting thought: what if Palm wants to release a device that runs both Palm OS and Windows Mobile? Either with a built-in, StyleTap-like emulator (StyleTap would probably run great at 320x320, actually) or possibly even in some sort of dual-boot configuration. Now that they have that perpetual/unlimited license to the OS from ACCESS, the marginal cost of adding Palm OS to a Windows Mobile phone is $0. And Microsoft would probably even welcome the idea as a way to transition people from Palm to WM; buy the phone to run Palm OS but switch to WM a year or so down the line without having to get a new phone.

 

[gato]

A dual-boot smartphone? Isn't that moving more in the direction of a PC than a phone? Steve Job's reason for not want to make his iPhone open was that it's not a PDA and people don't want their phones crashing. I think that's got a lot of merit for a mass consumer product. I'm not sure how much value dual boot would add and it could introduce more unstableness to the system. I like the Palm interface, but why can't the Treo have the form factor of the iPhone and be much better as a phone?

What I would like to know is what has Palm done to improve the Treo since it acquired HandSpring in 2003? Given its probably substantial development budget, it seems that its accomplishments have been fairly minuscule. It seems that Palm has been living off its old glory and taking its loyal user base for granted, not unlike Apple before the return of Jobs

 

[mikelove]

I wasn't thinking people would be able to switch back-and-forth randomly, more than they'd be able to initially set up their phone to run one OS or ther other and could switch OSes later on after a hard reset. Partly to simplify Palm's product line and partly to let users try out both OSes without being committed to one when they buy their phone.

Some good news on the product-improvement front, though:

http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9291/palm-brings-in-a-new-software-engineer/

Not sure how much of a difference he'll actually make, but at least they're spending some money on improving the UI.

 

[gato]

That sounds like good news. In addition to designing the interface for the first iPod, Paul Mercer also designed the interface for Samsung's new Z5 music player. Palm has also recently hired Marc Blank, the developer of ChatterEmail, an email client for the Treo. I guess Palm is finally getting serious about improving the product.

 

[sfrrr]

Except that that sounds like a company wanting to be bought. Make some improvements in product and in management team (or even slim down management) to make themselves more attractive and then sell themselves to the highest bidder. Old management stays on for about six months and then collects its golden parachute and disappears. Or, am I too cynical?

Sandra

 

[gato]

A quite pessimistic article about Palm.

http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/ ... 5245438676
Solo Palm Worries Analysts
By Andrea Orr, The Deal
April 2, 2007

Ken Dulaney, vice president of mobile computing at Gartner, argues that Palm has the most to lose from the Apple iPhone because its customer base is so similar to Apple's. The two companies have each built a following around their reputations for outstanding design, but Palm has of late failed to live up to that image.

"If you put a Palm Treo next to a [Research In Motion] BlackBerry 880, you will see the problem," Dulaney said. "The Treo is three times thicker."

As an 1,100-employee, $1.6 billion-annual-revenue company with limited resources for R&D, Palm risks upsetting its financial stability if it invests too aggressively in new product development, said Tavis McCourt, an analyst with Morgan Keegan & Co.

In its latest fiscal year, for example, Palm spent about $136 million on R&D, compared to Research In Motion's $469 million.

Dulaney said he did not think either Motorola or Nokia -- the two companies most often rumored to be interested buyers -- would make a good strategic fit since their basic device designs are so different from Palm's. He said up-and-comers in the device market such as Samsung or Taiwan's HTC Corp. could benefit from Palm's design expertise, but they are likely to prefer sticking to their own design team.

"Upgrades are not what they need," Dulaney said. "They are badly in need of a refresh. I think if Palm had had more money they would have revived the product by now."

 

[mikelove]

BlackBerry 8800: 114 x 66 x 14 mm
Treo 680: 113 x 59 x 21 mm

So only about 50% thicker, for a phone that does considerably more. Certainly this is an area where they could do better, but I really don't think this is the crisis that they make it out to be - nearly all phones of the Treo's class (i.e., with a touchscreen and support for non-Java third-party apps) are comparably clunky. If Palm really feels the need to compete with BlackBerry / Motorola et al I'm sure they could come out with a WM Smartphone-based Q lookalike; several other manufacturers already have.

The iPhone is at its heart a multimedia device; if you're not planning to watch movies on the go then there's really not much point in getting one. If you want to send e-mail then you're much better off with a device with a dedicated keyboard and a more battery-friendly screen size, and for web browsing, while I don't doubt it'll offer a better experience than many phones, the lack of a stylus (necessitating awkward zoom-ins or precise fingernail taps to follow links) along with that silly onscreen keyboard means it really isn't going to change the way people can interact with the web on their phones; useful for quickly grabbing a few pieces of information, but frustratingly slow and eye-straining for more extended browsing, and simply impractical for typing lengthy blog / forum posts.

So the target market is people who want to watch TV / listen to (lots of) music on the go, and given the Palm OS' piss-poor multimedia capabilities I imagine most of them have already jumped ship to Windows Mobile. (and most likely to large-screen HTC devices rather than the decidedly multimedia-unfriendly Windows Mobile Treos) Microsoft in general has a lot more to lose here than Palm does, if Apple manages to establish the iPhone as the dominant portable video device in the same way that they've established the iPod as the dominant portable audio one then the best Microsoft can hope for is a standoff in the video download market.