palm pre

Marketplace hits 5000 apps, zooms passes Palm Pre App Catalog, set to pass RIM’s App World in 6 months

December 28, 2010 | By Surur

marketplacerise

Winning quite a few bets I am sure, the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has passed 5000 apps, currently running 5023 according to Marketplace Browser.

This would mean the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has now passed that of the Palm Pre, established 18 months ago, in less than 2 months. At this rate it should pass the Blackberry App world, which only has a bit more than 16,000 apps, in less than 6 months, and likely faster if the Windows phone 7 Marketplace sees the same exponential influx of developers as the iPhone and Android has seen.

While the Marketplace is growing by leaps and bounds, there are still some essential segments which are still woefully underserved, including essential vertical ones like medical applications, so there is certainly a long way still do go.

Via WPCentral.com

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Music players on iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Palm Pre and Android compared

December 12, 2010 | By Surur

Zollotech have published this 13 min video overview of the music players on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and Palm Pre.

From the 5 devices tested the Windows Phone 7 device appeared most visually elegant and sophisticated, but lacked in terms of features compared to the iPhone. Two issues which were significant negatives on Windows phone 7 were the lack of scrubbing controls in the Zune player, although it is of note that the fast forward control accessed by tapping and holding on the forward control does speed up if held down, and works pretty well for skipping ads in podcasts.

The second issue also involves podcasts, as the Zune player does not allow downloading podcasts over the air, likely a concession by Microsoft to the carriers and their data limits.

How do our readers feel about the Zune music player on Windows Phone 7? Is there any glaring features missing, or any features that are particularly great? Let us know below.

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E-mail experiences in HTC HD2, iPhone, Nexus One and WebOS compared

May 10, 2010 | By Surur

I just came across this rather old video from Pocketnow comparing the email experience on the HTC HD2, iPhone 3GS, Google Nexus One and Palm Pre. The HTC HD2 fares surprisingly well, and I think Brandon missed another area where the device scores points over the iPhone 3GS – switching between mail accounts, which is extremely painful on the iPhone but a simple swipe on the HTC HD2.

Now if Microsoft only allowed us to download pictures automatically…

Via DialyMobile.se

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HTC HD2 vs Palm Pre play-off – Vote for the HTC HD2 now!

March 31, 2010 | By Surur

Laptop Magazine is running a March Madness smartphone play-off, and the current contest pits the HTC HD2 against Palm’s failing Pre.

Strangely enough the Palm Pre is currently solidly in the lead, but I dont think we can tolerate that outcome.

Votes are open till 9 a.m. EST tomorrow, April 1, but to prevent a massive April’s fools day joke vote for the HTC HD2 now!

Vote at Laptopmag.com here

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Palm says goodbye to Treo Pro, does not want to drag it down with the company

January 22, 2010 | By Surur

PalmInfocenter has noticed Palm’s last Windows Mobile device, the Palm Treo Pro, recently made a rapid disappearance from Palm’s website and from their online store.

The only mention of the device is on a still-active product page for the CDMA Treo Pro in Alltel and Sprint. The handset can also still be bought unlocked in its GSM version from Dell for $179.99 as well as from Amazon.

Palm, who has turned to Windows Mobile in an attempt to save the company in 2005, has recently seen its share price drop a third from a one year high of $18.09 to a low of 11.98 today (and as low as $10 on New Years Eve) after it abandoned its Windows Mobile-based business market in a quixotic attempt to unseat the iPhone consumer king and losing money for 9 straight quarters. With increasing loss of interest in USA and overseas sales below expectation, it is expected by many not to survive the current smartphone wars.

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Palm Pre Plus WIFI tethering to cost $40 per month, HTC HD2 owners ROFLMAO

January 21, 2010 | By Surur

Verizon has announced pricing for the Palm Pre Plus on the Verizon network. One of the major features of the Palm Pre Plus will be the WIFI Hotspot features, a feature pretty familiar to HTC HD2 owners which allow smartphone owners to share their 3G internet connection via WIFI with devices close to them.

Enabling the feature will add an additional $40 charge for 5GB of data with this 3G-based Wi-Fi connectivity. The $40 charge is levied on top of your calling and data plan so a Wi-Fi mobile hotspot-activated Pre Plus on a 450 minutes Talk and Text plan would cost you a whopping $129.99 per month ($59.99 for calling plan, $29.99 for Email and Web data plan and $40 for the Wi-Fi feature).

Launching the Palm Pre on Verizon was supposed to save Palm. Somehow in now rather seems unlikely.

Via BoyGenius Report.

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HTC HD2 beats iPhone 3GS, Droid, Nokia N900 and Palm Pre in browser test

January 10, 2010 | By Surur

AreaMobile.de performed a browser comparison between the leading smartphones currently on the market, and I would not have to tell HTC HD2 owners that their device would perform pretty well.

The the speed test the HTC HD2 was only second the iPhone 3GS, and equal when the site had been visited previously (see the table below)

Name	Browser	WLAN, cached	WLAN not cached	HSDPA, cached	HSDPA not cached
HTC HD2	Opera 10 Beta	6	9	10	12
iPhone 3GS	Safari	6	7	10	11
Moto Droid	Dolphin	8	13	11	15
Nokia N900	Maemo	9	12	12	15
N97 Mini	Opera 10 Beta	11	15	12	16
Palm Pre	Palm	10	13	18	25
BB Storm 2	Bolt 1.6	12	24	20	24

The browsers were tested loading AreaMobile.de, with and without cache, over WLAN and HSDPA.

The HTC HD2 however beat the iPhone 3GS when it came to accuracy of rendering, scoring a full 100/100 on the Acid 3 test, vs only 97 on the iPhone 3GS, and performed better than the Motorola Droid, Nokia N900, Palm Pre and of course Blackberry Storm 2 with fast loading and fluid scrolling.

Name	Time on WLAN	AJAX	Flash	Acid3-Test	Scrolling
HTC HD2	6	yes	no	100	fluid
iPhone 3GS	6	yes	no	97	fluid
Moto Droid	8	yes	no	93	slightly jerky
Nokia N900	9	yes	no	93	slightly jerky
N97 Mini	11	yes	no	100	jerky
Palm Pre	10	yes	no	73	jerky
BB Storm 2	12	yes	no	100	jerky

The AJAX capability of the browser and the scroll speed was also tested on the www.areamobile.de.

For Areamobile’s full assessment read their full article here. Suffice to say however that the HTC HD2’s good performance, better rendering and larger screen put it ahead of the iPhone 3GS and made it a clear winner over all the other devices.

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iPhone losing popularity, revolutionary Palm Pre only as desirable as AT&T Tilt

December 18, 2009 | By Surur

Comscore continues to release a fascinating insight into the American smartphone market. The latest news to slip from their $5000 report into the region shows in that in less than 3 months, in terms of intention to buy, Apple’s iPhone dropped a whole 1% from 21 to 20%.

In August 21% of potential US smartphone buyers surveyed wanted to buy an iPhone. When the survey was repeated in November only 20% wanted the iconic device. While the drop is small it is highly significant for the device that many predicted would take over the smartphone world and displace all others and certainly not the direction Apple would want it to go. The reasons are unclear, but certainly shows Apple’s mindshare lead is far from unassailable.

More unwelcome news for money-losing Palm is that only 2% of respondents were interested in getting their JavaScript based webOS devices, the same as the 3.5mm headphone-jack less AT&T Tilt (2 presumable, but who knows). This likely explains why the company’s shipments are 5% down on the previous quarter, and they were only able to sell through 573 000 of their 783,000 shipment, despite launching overseas as supposedly the most anticipated device ever.

The challenge for Windows Mobile is obviously to raise the profile of their devices, but clearly ads with creepy women is not the way to go.

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Palm withering

December 14, 2009 | By Surur

It is often suggested that a beleaguered Microsoft should buy a newly re-invigorated Palm and dump Windows Mobile. There are many reasons why this does not make sense, not the least being that buying a failing OS from a failing company will do little to help Microsoft’s efforts.

The Washington Post’s Big Money blog is the latest to report on the company’s troubles. Calling the company a one-trick pony that is “quickly dying” and was “beset by so many errors and miscalculations that it is a wonder it has managed to survive even as long as it did”, they note that according to Changewave the company had 33% of the US smartphone market only 3 years ago, and is now scraping the bottom at 7%.

To ad insult to injury Gartner predicts the company will hold only 1.4 percent share of world smartphone sales in another 3 years time.

They note the Palm lacks an ecosystem, and their aborted attempts to piggyback on the iTunes ecosystem ended up just embarrassing the company. The company’s attempts to attract developers has also not gone very well, with Palm recently forced to throw open doors to hackers and abandon attempts to control their marketplace.

Despite these setbacks Palm has never been shy to talk the talk, with Roger McNamee’s promise that iPhone users would convert en masse to the Palm Pre proving so spectacularly wrong Palm had to file a 10-point “clarification” with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and with their claim that the Pre being even more anticipated than the iPhone in the UK falling resoundingly flat on its face with the smartphone being outsold 20:1 on O2.

So while Windows Mobile users worry about losing marketshare and years in the wilderness, spare a thought for Palm, dying once again.

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Palm laying off staff, Palm Pre collecting dust on the shelves?

September 30, 2009 | By Surur

The truth is out there Palm has recently made it clear they intend to seek their fortune purely in the consumer field, but unfortunately it seems their bet is misfiring rather badly.

SeekingAlpha reports that, despite repeated price cuts which saw the stylish $199 smartphone being reduced to a rumoured bargain-bin $79 on contract the device is still clogging up the warehouses and shelves at Sprint, Amazon and Bestbuy.

Says Gerald Hallaren:

Our best information says Sprint activated a little less than 375,000 Palm Pres as of the end of August. This left about 275,000 or 11 weeks of Palm Pres in “Sprint channels” at the end of August. This is not to say Sprint is carrying 100% of the cost of these phones. Best Buy , Radio Shack, Walmart , Amazon and Letstalk.com are all likely carrying some of this inventory cost. How much we do not know. What these dealers’ return rights, price protection, rebates or other incentives are we also do not know. These dealer terms and conditions vary greatly with the phones. However, the core economics around the Palm Pre’s market are slipping.

Sprint reduced the price by 25% to $149 only 93 days after first shipping the Pre. Amazon is selling it for $99. Walmart and Letstalk.com are both offered "specials" on the Pre for is $79. While undoubtedly some expect lower prices will improve demand, we believe the lower prices are more likely to blunt some competitive impact. There are more smartphone competitors today than at time of announcement. HTC’s Hero, Touch Pro2, and Snap, a reworked Blackberry Tour, and Palm’s Pixi are all recent entries to Sprint’s smartphone line up. Moreover, we do not believe Sprint has announced all of its new smartphones for the Christmas season.

There are even reports that, despite carrier expansion in US, the smartphone would not do much to bolster the company’s bottom line:

Verizon could offer to launch the phone at a price point of $129 with a $150 subsidy making the platform unprofitable for PALM.

The perpetually beleaguered smartphone maker is now rumoured to be laying off staff in US. Of course they may simply be letting go their Windows Mobile team. Who needs steady, high margin enterprise customers after all?

Palm drops corporate market while failing to win over consumers

September 18, 2009 | By Surur

Despite much media hype the Palm Pre has failed to turn around Palm, who has continued to lose money. Announcing its quarterly results yesterday, the company announced a $164.5 million loss, a 300% increase compared to the $41.9 million loss for the quarter previously.

The loss was on the back of the sale of 823,000 smartphones, mostly Palm Pre’s, which continue to lose the company money. The smartphone has failed to maintain its initial $199 price point, dropping to $149 a mere 2 months after its launch, with rumours of a $99 price point already circulating. Sales of the JavaScript based device has also failed to improve Palm’s sales over its already dismal performance last year, with sales 25% less than the 1029000 sold in the corresponding quarter last year.

Despite the poor performance of the much hyped handset Palm has announced its intention to discontinue its higher margin Windows Mobile-based cooperate line, saying it will concentrate on developing its WebOS devices.

With Palm under pressure from many sides in the consumer market, with Motorola set to launch its own social network based device on Sprint soon, Palm’s reliance on the cheap consumer market may again be its undoing.

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Palm Pre is amazing

January 8, 2009 | By Surur

I am a long time follower of Palm. My first handheld was a Palm IIIe. I quickly moved on to Windows Mobile as I wanted power, and PalmOS could certainly not deliver, nor could their lackluster hardware.

The company, which onces ruled the handheld/smartphone roost, has seen a significant reversal of fortunes these last few years, but all the time in the background management has been holding out the promise of a savior in the form of a new OS, but most faithfull have long lost hope.

Today Palm delivered, and then some! Their new webOS and Palm Pre handheld form an amazingly coherent package which packs in so much innovation its in danger of exploding.

The Palm Pre packs now-standard must have features such as a multi-touch capacitive screen, GPS, 8GB storage and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It also has amazing new features such as contact-less phone charging and a gesture area which extends well beyond the screen (like the HTC Touch Diamond, but actually used for something interesting).

The webOS is smooth, polished, and features innovative metaphors. It also features deep integration with web properties like Google and facebook, with web search built right into the OS.

Read more about Palm’s return to innovation at Edgadget’s Live blog from their CES presentation here.

Personally I just wish to congratulate the company on their spectacular rise from the walking dead. Long may they prosper.

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