WMPoweruser.com

Pocketnow have published this video showing the messaging, email, and calendar applications. Do you find their vision appealing?  Let us know below.

Via Pocketnow.com

After managing to sell less than half the phones they shipped last quarter, word of Palm’s impending doom is spreading fast.

In the first quarter Palm shipped  960,000 Pre and Pixi’s to Sprint and Verizon, but shoppers only purchased 408,000, resulting in a shut down of Palm’s production lines in early February for most of the month. 

Now the company has revealed it expects similarly bleak results in Q2 2010, and rumours are spreading of carriers backing away from the troubled smartphone maker.

Canaccord Adams analyst Peter Misek feels Palm’s troubles will likely accelerate as its partners question the company’s solvency and withdraw their support.

"With what appears to be roughly 12 months of cash on hand, an accelerating burn rate, a complete lack of earnings visibility, and substantial debt and preferred equity, we no longer see any value in the company’s common equity," he said in a note.

The shares has already dropped a further 19% since their earnings call yesterday, and is trading at around $4.60 at present.  At it’s darkest hour the stock traded at $1.52 in December 2008, so it clearly still has some way to fall.  

Other analysts also predict bankruptcy. Kaufman Bros analyst Shaw Wu cut his rating on the shares to "sell" from "hold".

"While we believe Palm has some value with its webOS …we are unsure of the company’s prospects as an ongoing concern," he said in a client note.

Morgan Joseph & Co analyst Ilya Grozovsky  said "Palm is essentially an accelerating death spiral. They have had a tremendous problem selling their devices even at carriers like Verizon with 80 million subscribers,"

"They keep saying, ‘we need to market, market, market,’ because in their mind it’s a marketing problem," he said. "But it’s not about the trainees and the sales people, it’s just too competitive of a space right now for Palm to make any difference."

At its height on its IPO in 2000 the company was valued around $950 per share. Canaccord Adams’s Mistek and Morgan Joseph & Co’s  Grozovsky currently gives the stock a price target of $0.

Palm serves as a object case of the dangers of neglecting and abandoning your user base while pursuing new markets.  Much like Windows Mobile,  PalmOS stagnated for more than 3 years while the company developed and re-developed a next generation OS in secret, and of course launched without any backward compatibility and with a very small amount of applications. Much like Windows Phone 7, the OS was also lauded for its breakthrough user interface concepts and ability to mesh with cloud services. In the case of WebOS this has clearly not translated into sales.

While Microsoft is of course not at all dependent on their mobile business, hopefully their Windows phone division will manage this feat better.

Read more at Yahoo! Finance here.

The hacked Windows Phone 7 emulator has revealed more than just a task manager and file explorer.  Hidden in its depths were also the first looks at Windows Phone 7 Office, and it certainly does not look like anything to get excited about. The application looks as uninspiring as before, both in terms of UI and capabilities, and certainly does not bolster Microsoft’s argument that the OS is designed for business as much as pleasure.

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In a blog post Charlie Kindel admitted their message on the consumer focus of Windows Phone 7 may have been misleading regarding the suitability to business of the OS

We are building a phone that will be GREAT for helping end-users deal with BOTH their personal & business lives.

Windows Phone 7 Series will be a great business phone. We applied the same end user focus to designing the phone’s business capabilities that we did with every other element of the phone. We asked people and even IT administrators what they need from a phone. The answer was consistent. They want a single device that excels at core business functions like email, reading and editing Office documents and collaboration, while also offering rich features and capabilities that help people stay on top of the different parts of their lives, at home and at work.

We expect Windows Phone 7 Series to appeal to people who are active, connected and working, so Exchange & SharePoint integration and the features within the new Office hub are core to the phone’s value. Similarly, we know that people add these phones to corporate networks and that we need to make that process easy for administrators. Interestingly, when we talk to corporate IT staff and business decision makers they ask us to give them a compelling phone that will not only improve productivity,  but also appeal to the end user’s “whole life,” as people wish to carry only one Smartphone to meet both business and personal needs. We think Windows Phone 7 Series will do this better than any other phone on the market today.

While the post of course remains vague, it does hint strongly at business management features as already common with Windows Mobile, and we of course already know business handsets will be exempt from the Marketplace-only rule that applies to everyone else when it comes to apps.

It is however clear that, unless Microsoft transplants bits of code wholesale from Windows Mobile 6.5, the handsets are unlikely to have as many business-targeted features as its older existing sibling has. They clearly have a lot of work to do to make the OS suitable for work, not least cut and paste functionality.

Read the full post here.

Samsung has now admitted that the Samsung device shown of running Windows Phone 7 at MIX10 recently was in fact a hacked Samsung i890 Omnia HD.

"The launch was from Microsoft, not Samsung, and they used the i8910HD to demo Windows 7," said a Samsung spokesperson.

"It’s not yet clear whether existing i8910HD users will be able to upgrade to Windows 7 as this demo was a one-off."

An upgrade is however unlikely, with Techradar suggesting that not just the buttons needed to be silk-screened, but the processor and screen also needed to be upgraded to 1 Ghz Snapdragon and a multi-touch WVGA version too.

That Microsoft and Samsung could so easily shoehorn Windows Phone 7 into the shell of another smartphone speaks to both an opportunity and danger for the OS and OEMs.  The OS has very strict and standardized requirements, meaning in the end there will likely be only one hardware design with different shells used by all OEMs, with OEMs having great difficulty differentiating themselves.  On the other hand, they will likely be able to easily, cheaply and quickly churn out a huge number of minor variations quite rapidly, which could potentially mean the market will be flooded with relatively low cost Windows Phone 7 devices.

Is the strict hardware requirements for Windows Phone 7 a benefit or a curse? Let us know below.

Source: Techradar via Ubergizmo.com

Long Zheng  from the istartedsomething blog reports that the Windows Phone 7 Series emulator ROM has been completely unlocked, allowing users to access the full OS, rather that just the settings and web browser as previously.

Dan Ardelean  has published a modified version of the “BIN” file , allowing one to interact with the live tiles,hubs, use the  elusive voice search feature, and even the basic apps that are preloaded.

Read more about getting the emulator up and running at XDA-Developers here. Hopefully the real OS will fall as fast as the emulator version has

More  screen shots after the break.

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The HD2 can do many things, and we can now add detect your surroundings to the list. The metal detecting application is still in the beta stage. Created where many good things come from, XDA. This freeware is a pretty nice app that brings many cool things to the device.

The application works in a very simple way. It takes the compass(This works by detecting the magnetic field in the north pole)  in the HD2 is used to detect any metal object in its vicinities.

This application still has many bugs, but like many things, it will be fixed over time.

Try it

Do your readers concur? Let us know below.

Via Pocketnow.com