What Happened To Palm? 305
Ian Lamont writes "Palm's fourth quarter results came out a few days ago, and they were not pretty: Palm reported losses of 40 cents per share, for a quarterly loss of $43.4 million. It's the fourth straight quarter of losses, and it's clear that the company is not faring well in the rapidly evolving smartphone market. The Treo line is lagging after seven years, and while the Centro has done well, it's not well enough to compete with the likes of the iPhone 3G and RIM's surging BlackBerry line. New competition is on the horizon, with developers and manufacturers working on the Google Android platform and the recent news that Symbian is being open-sourced. What happened to Palm? What can the company do to effectively compete in the mobile market, and turn its fortunes around?"
My story... (Score:5, Informative)
I bought my Palm T|X, direct from Palm, within 24 hours of when they first became available. I ordered it direct so that Palm would get all the margin (profit) from the order. I do this when I am trying to support a company. Keep that in mind as you read the rest of this. They got more money from my orders than they would have if I had bought from, say, buy.com.
I ordered it overnight on Wednesday afternoon; they sat on the order until Friday, and so I received it Monday, basically five days after I had ordered it instead of one. Annoying, but it was new, they were probably overwhelmed with orders, etc., so I just grumbled a bit. The TX itself, well, it was fantastic. A little thing here or there wasn't perfect, but overall, this was the PDA I'd been waiting for. WiFi, Bluetooth, beautiful display, music and video playback, used almost all my software from my long in the tooth M505 Palm... the TX is fantastic. Really.
Considering that I was so happy with the T|X, I decided to get one for my sweetheart as well (she's also a long-time Palm/PDA user.) So, I ordered it on October 18th. We received it on October 19th. Much better. Unfortunately, this is where the happy tone of the story fades out.
Her TX would refuse to connect to any WiFi node without taking about ten tries. Then it would connect. Once connected, it was fine. But connecting could literally take five minutes of poking and prodding it. This was clearly no good (heck, PDAs are supposed to be convenient, aren't they?) So I called Palm. They kept me on the phone for about 40 minutes (I timed it. Total cost to me, $46.60 via AT&T) I spoke to Cody in support. In 40 minutes, he verified, apparently by following a support script, what I had clearly described to him in the first 30 seconds: This T|X was not connecting properly. Yes, I kept my temper and stayed polite. I know this game.
So he tells me, now I have to call the Palm store. So I do - toll free. I tell them what Cody told me, and I give them the service request number he supplied for my issue. They take it, tell me it will be 24-48 hours and then they will issue (by email) an RMA. This new fellow also explains that the procedure continues such that if they accept the RMA (verify the problem on receipt of the unit) then Palm will refund to my card.
I object: I ask, "Why refund? I want it replaced -- this is a gift!" They say there is no other option, and this is to "protect them from fraud." I ask them how, exactly, giving me my $300 back protects them more than giving me a working T|X... but this only angers the person on the phone, who tells me he isn't going to explain company policy to me. Imagine that. So I thank him for his time (no, really, I did, and I remain polite as well) and I hang up.
So, 48 hours pass, no RMA email. (Definitely -- I kept every email while waiting for the RMA, so no spam filtering, nothing. Man, was that annoying!) So I call them again. This guy tells me that it takes 2-5 days to issue an RMA and the previous person "didn't know what they were talking about." Uh-huh.
So I wait. Five days pass. No RMA. So I call them again. It's October 24th now. They say they'll send it out after 5 pm, specifically telling me these emails are batched all at once. 5pm rolls around... no RMA. 9pm... midnight...
So the next morning, I call them again, only this time I call technical support back at the toll number. (Total time, 20 minutes, Total cost to me, $23.30 via AT&T -- we're now at $69.00 expended on toll calls to Palm support.) We're still sitting on this busted T|X, and no RMA. I'm not happy at all. My sweetheart is dissapointed, to say the least. But I remained polite. The fellow on the phone (Chris, employee number 72485) allowed as to how he could escalate the issue, and fax me the RMA. He did, and we got it, wonder of wonders, and so now we have this RMA. It's a UPS ground return to Palm. Gritting my teeth, I hand it off to UPS and wait.
On November 3rd, I receive an email(!) from Palm saying that they
Re:My story... (Score:4, Informative)
You might try a Nokia N8x0. It has a genuine Garnet (e.g, Palm 5) emulator, and runs all of the software I've tried on it quite well. However, you can't set your user ID (I know, what a stupid restriction), and you can only sync the PIM via wifi.
But it's a sweet tablet in its own right. Oh, and yes - it runs Linux. :-)
Re:Palm has been busy.... (Score:5, Informative)
Want to make a chat application? Have an ssh session running in the background? Have the wifi card work as a wireless router with an internet connection through the cellphone service? Nope, sorry. The hardware can do it, but it's not part of Steve Job's vision.
You clearly did not watch the Keynote. They ridiculed this idea for mobile computing. Backround apps are the death of your battery. Do you really want to be dicking with task managers on a mobile device to find out what's using up your resources? And then there's apps that want persistent connections. Apple finessed that by giving away push notification server available to all developers.
In the future your persistent connection (e.g the ssh connection) will be running on a server not on the iphone. The display might be on the iphone but the ssh session you are monitoring won't be on the iphone. You can stop and start this display app, just like it were a VNC connection or a unix "Screen" connection without affecting the ssh operation.
Yes they have chat too. Yes Jobs said they will allow wifi phone service.
You really ought to watch the keynote since you are quite mistaken in your information.
Re:Palm has been busy.... (Score:5, Informative)
Buying and selling their own name to themselves for 6 years.
Don't forget selling their OS, writing a new one from scratch, shelving it, buying back the old one, then rewriting it again, all the while promising "It's gonna be Linux!" Color me unimpressed. [infoworld.com]
Failed to Jump to Linux (Score:4, Informative)
In 2004, Palm planned to convert [palminfocenter.com] PalmOS into nothing but a GUI and backwards compatibility API layer, replacing the OS with Linux. Lots of Palm software assets and licenses were transferred among Palm, China MobileSoft, and the Japanese "Access" mobile SW company [com.com] over the next year or two.
By now, we should be able to get smartphones with easy Web access, the thousands of little PalmOS apps, and all the Linux apps, all upgradable at a "tap" over the air or USB from the Internet. But it never happened. Instead, Palm put out a couple of different models of Treo, which were excellent phones when released, but rapidly eclipsed by more frequent updated releases of Symbian and Windows phones.
I bet what happened was that just announcing a PalmOS/Linux smartphone earned its execs and directors a lot of money, money changed hands in the endless spinoffs/acquisitions/mergers, but no one ever paid a team to convert the phone to Linux or PalmOS as a layer on top of it.
Another good question is why I can't just install Linux on any of the new phones with HW compatible with it, and keep my telephone service contract. That should be easy by now, and shouldn't require Palm to do it.
Re:My story... (Score:4, Informative)
You don't buy phones from Palm, you buy them from the cell phone provider, who provides the service. I'm very happy with my Treo 755p. It needed service -- dust somehow get between the glass and the LCD. The Sprint store five miles from my house swapped in a new screen while I waited.
500 voice minutes, unlimited text and internet data, $30/month with the SERO plan [slickdeals.net].
Re:They need to open their platform. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Update the interface already! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Update the interface already! (Score:4, Informative)
Is the hardware really that good? I thought they hadn't been updating hardware significantly for the past few years. Seems like they should either get some better hardware together or drop the price some more.
But also, their software was great for the time it was introduced... what... 10 years ago? They've been hopping between OS upgrades like Duke Nukem Forever has been hopping between game engines. They need to commit to one and build the fricken thing. It makes me sad that BeOS wasn't bought by someone with the ability to do anything with it.
Re:They need to open their platform. (Score:3, Informative)
Too expensive for the good Palms (Score:3, Informative)
I like the Treo phones; they are capable and the ones with the Palm OS are pretty good. Nice screens, etc.
But, every time I go to shop for a new phone, the Palm PDA-type phones are always so damned expensive. When I can get a Windows Mobile phone for free (or $99 for a delux one) with my plan, paying $600 for a Treo doesn't seem to make much sense.
They've marketed for a fairly small segment it seems, so I don't know why it's a surprise that they're struggling.
Re:My story... (Score:4, Informative)
Thats "switching noise" you hear.
The internal power supplies chop the voltage to a pulsating DC signal and then move it up or down. Much more efficient than trying to "light" at lower voltages.
--Toll_Free
Re:My story... (Score:3, Informative)
The Visor was Handspring. The original Palm was the US Robotics Palm Pilot.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:My story... (Score:2, Informative)
I know what happened to Palm. They stopped caring about quality, and the market noticed. Let them reap what they have sown.
Re:The future caught up (Score:5, Informative)
This is so painfully true...
I'm the author of Weasel Reader [weaselreader.org] so I can speak to this as a Palm OS developer. In the beginning it was pretty nice. The OS was clean and easy to program for and the open source toolset worked great.
The people who designed the original Palm OS did a very good job and this lasted up until about OS 3.5. After that... not a whole lot changed. OS 4 came out and there weren't really any compelling reasons to upgrade and the new/changed features sure didn't seem to warrant a major version increase.
It was about this time that the Palm OS hardware market began to diversify and devices with different features began to appear. Things like expansion slots, higher resolutions, more buttons, etc. Unfortunately, they were done in a horribly haphazard manner with little guidance from Palm OS HQ. This meant conflicting ways of doing the same things and, as as developer, it's been a huge pain.
Hi-res has especially been annoying. Originally, all devices were 160x160 so many programs and even the OS made assumptions based on this. Then Handera released a 240x240 device. They made it fairly easy to let your app support this resolution. Soon, Sony released several hi-res Clie devices with resolutions of 320x320 and they used a different method for programming. Finally, Palm woke up and for Palm OS 5 they added the hi-res feature set which did things in an entirely different manner.
Now suppose you want your app to support 160x160 devices, Handera's 240x240, Sony's hi-res, and Palm's new hi-res standard. Not fun at all.
OS 5 was, finally, a substantial improvement. All the newer devices moved from the m68k architecture to ARM CPUs. OS 5 helped to merge a number of divergent developments during the OS 3-4 period. Nearly all code is still m68k running on the PACE emulation layer, though. The *next* release was supposed to be native ARM and have far more support for native ARM apps, but it never came.
The fun continued with other botched features. Even something as simple as extra buttons and keys. Many devices have jog-dials, but they all assign different keycodes to the same thing! Even the 5-way/d-pad buttons on newer Palm devices can work differently depending on what device you have.
And the future? Access owns Palm OS now and they keep talking about a grand new Linux based Palm OS. But it's not out and who knows when it will be. Meanwhile, OS 5.x continues to age, any new features merely hacks glued onto the side of a framework not meant for this sort of customization.
Ah well... it was a good run. I'd be less disappointed if I wasn't the author of software for the platform. I had always assumed that the next major PDA/phone platform would have the sense to license a Palm OS emulation layer. This couldn't cost all that much and would give customers access to thousands of existing PDA programs. And the existing hardware is more than capable of performing this task. Too bad...
Re:Failed to Jump to Linux (Score:1, Informative)
no one ever paid a team to convert the phone to Linux or PalmOS as a layer on top of it.
I am on that team. Long story short, we got screwed by a hardware partner insisting on a cheap platform that couldn't meet performance goals. There'll be something next year.
Re:Palm has been busy.... (Score:3, Informative)
you are not their customer.
Which is exactly what turns a lot of us off the idea of buying Apple products.
Re:My story... (Score:3, Informative)
Just a hint: One of the first "printers" available for home computers consisted of a matrix of solenoid actuated rubber fingers to be bolted on a typewriter. REALLY!
Beyond that, a test harness taps the display output and input keys.