Palm not worried about a possible Apple iPhone
November 26th, 2006 Leave a comment Visited 59 times, 1 so far today
Palm not worried about a possible Apple iPhone
Apple Computer is already the market leader in the portable digital music and video player segment. The company is rumored to be working on a mobile phone capable of playing digital music. The latest rumors are that Apple would be launching two such products early next year.
However, this does not seem to worry one of the major players in the Smartphone market Palm. Palm CEO Ed Colligan found the idea ridiculous that a computer company can enter the mobile market and win a major chunk of it easily.
He said: ” We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
He further said that Apple is likely to rely upon their own stores to sell these Apple iPhone rather than collaborating with mobile service providers like Verizon and Cingular.
However, we do know that Apple entered the digital music player market with their iPod, which was earlier dominated by players from Sony and Creative and did better than both of these companies.
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November 26th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
I could see his point if this were Dell or HP entering the phone market. But Apple has two things going for it that should legitimately worry Mr. Colligan: 1) the best product designers on the planet, and 2) the strongest brand in personal electronics of any company. If that’s not enough to make him think Apple has a good chance of eating into his market share, then perhaps he needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
November 26th, 2006 at 8:49 pm
When I last looked at smartphones, I reviewed the Treo, Blackberry and Sidekick.
The Sidekick has the problem of requiring use of the often weak T-Mobile network, but there’s otherwise little to complain about. The keyboard is excellent, the screen is the biggest of the three, and I found the web browsing experience to be very good. There is no third party application support to speak of, but everything you really need is there, including a perfectly fine SSH/terminal application for $10.
I found the user interface of the Treo to be a bit odd and the screen was lower resolution than I’d like. The Treo’s huge advantage here is compatibility with all the Palm applications that have been developed. That’s a large ecosystem and very nice to have. I understand they’re transitioning to Windows, which I think is a very bad idea, but it has similar advantages too. However, I don’t think they’ll do well thanks to the Motorola Q, which does most of what the Palm does but for half or less the cost. In my opinion, Palm was stupid to make that move. Always read history before getting in bed with Bill Gates’ pals.
I really liked the Blackberry a lot. It has support for JavaScript, which the Sidekick doesn’t have, but it’s so slow you’ll wish it didn’t. But the display, while small, was outstandingly clear, and the keyboard was very good. I thought it was straightforward to use compared to the Treo.
If we add an Apple iPhone to this, it will probably have the best design and user interface. I suspect the rumored two versions are correct. I expect something with a similar form factor to an iPod Mini, and something with a form factor closer to the big iPod. The latter would be the smartphone. If it has a full-sized keyboard and a mini scroll wheel I think people will really love it.
I expect it to be a fairly closed device, and so of the three smartphone makers covered above, Palm should be affected the least. Those Palm/Windows CE applications will still be a tremendous advantage to one segment of the market. So based on that, the Palm CEO might be right, just for different reasons than he says.
But I’m almost certain his business has been enormously wounded by the Q, and that’s his real competition going forward.
D
November 26th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Hewlett Packard does make mobile phones already. :D