TamsPalm – the Palm OS / web OS Blog

Palm’s recent situation has caused quite a bit of Sprint bashing: if the Palm Pre had launched on Verizon, blah, blah. While I can fully understand the annoyedness of Palm stockholders, I think that Sprint is not the culprit.

We must keep one thing in mind at all times: when the Pre launched, Palm was considered dead meat!

Verizon, AT&T et al would have kicked their a$$es out of the front and back doors when suggesting a new product there. For them, Sprint was the only company which was willing to wager a bet with their new product…and it actually worked out decently well for them. Bad advertising did of course take its share at f%%king up the launch, as did the insane delays and quality problems. However, these issues are in no way Sprint’s alone – and are, in fact, more of a problem of Palm than of Sprint.

For me, Sprint plays an integral role in the success of Palm: keep in mind that many (Japanese) manufacturers manage to make a living off a single (Japanese) carrier. Given a lean organizational structure, Palm could live off Sprint alone! Pissing them off thus is not a good idea…

For me, Sprint is not part of the problem, but rather part of the solution – what do you guys think?

Hey Metalheads,

there’s a new version of MetalFan for Palm webOS available.
The triumph of this version is the less ipk-file size by same contents:
Old Version: 4,6MB
New Version: 1,4MB

Unfortunately we couldn’t add any new band to this new version, but we’ll do this soon.

The new version can be downloaded here.

Best regards,
Simon Pfundstein

The folks at Palm’s seem to have a nice bit of trouble recently – after having bad results this quarter, it looks like AT&T is acting up.

AllThingsD sums it up as following:

“Beyond generally lacklustre handset sales in the current quarter, which are already reflected in our previous estimates, we have recently learned that AT&T has delayed the planned launch of the Pre and Pixi on its network from April to June/July,” Misek writes.

“Moreover, we believe that this is more than just an ordinary delay,” the analyst adds, “as AT&T has cited a long list of technical issues with the Pre and Pixi. Furthermore, the carrier has decreased its initial order size and has decided to sharply reduce its marketing budget for the launch.”

Given Palm’s past track record of issues, this unfortunately sounds more than believable…

Long-term followers of this blog will likely still recall that Palm was split into two parts some time ago – one half was the hardware maker, and the other part owned the rights to the Palm OS.

An Associated Press report which gained wide-spread distribution recently contains the following quote from Donna:

Dubinsky said all the shuffling took “critical resources and attention from product development.” And even though it happened years ago, she called the decision to spin off PalmOS a “huge strategic error.”

“As RIM, Apple and Palm all have demonstrated, these devices need to be highly integrated hardware and software developments in order to optimize the user experience,” Dubinsky wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. “When Palm no longer could advance the OS, and had to create a new one, it lost several years.”

Even though I personally think that the idea behind the spin-off was sound, it has horribly back-fired for Palm – they never managed to attract another licensee.

However, hindsight is always easy – what do you think?

When it comes to mobile devices, analysts usually look just at the processor. However, the CPU alone does not make a device – it also takes the baseband processor which handles communication.

Strategy Analytics performed a tally of baseband makers, and ended up with the following chart – it shows who produced how much in Q3 2009:

Source: Strategy Analytics

Traditionally, integrated development environments were file oriented – if you edited code, you edited it on a file-by-file basis.

Code Bubbles is an experimental Java IDE which goes a different way. In it, functions are the elemental parts of an application: you edit code on a per-function level, and can open calling and called functions easily.

A video showing the concept is below – set it to a lower resolution on a slower machine:

Verizon recently promised to “make up” for the botched launch of the Palm Pre Plus on their network. This has happened in the form of no mail-in rebates, a changed advertising line and – last, but not least, rebates like the ones below:

Amazon
First of all, Amazon has lowered the Pre Plus to 39$:

Wal-mart
Wal-Mart has gone really insane here. They offer the Pre Plus for less than what Sprint’s normal Pre costs:

As of now, not much further information is available…

Palm’s App Store is small, but has extremely cool features – unfortunately, it has not been internationalized so far.

This is set to change in the near future. Palm has just urged its developer partners to internationalize “their binaries”, so that the actual certification after the launch of the store just has to check the creatives.

The interesting parts of the full email are below:

We are very excited about the upcoming launch of international e-commerce for the Palm App Catalog. To follow up on our announcement in January we want to provide you with some additional information to ensure that your paid applications are ready for international distribution as soon as possible. We’d also like to inform you that in addition to the planned European launch, we will be launching e-commerce support in Canada and Mexico.

In preparation for the launch we encourage you to localize your application and metadata immediately for each country and language you plan to select for distribution, prior to Palm’s international e-commerce launch. This includes language specific categories and tags for improved discoverability in non-English speaking countries. If you prefer to ship an English only application, or an application that is in English but presents localized/local content, that is acceptable.

Application submissions will be accepted for international distribution when the Palm Developer Center portal is updated to accommodate the expanded list of countries for paid applications. Please look for follow up communications with additional details regarding submissions.

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o Localize your app binaries in advance to reduce review time: If you have an existing application, we strongly recommend that you localize your application prior to the launch so that you only need to submit a metadata update (pricing, localized descriptions) on the day we launch.

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The US smartphone market is especially interesting for mobile developers, as it has traditionally been extremely strong when it comes to moving content. The US-based company comScore has just released a bit of data on the matter.

First of all, a look at the vendors on an OEM level – this figure includes both dumbphones and smartphones alike:

Another classic metric is the one showing the platforms – here is ComScore’s take on this matter:

Further information can be had via the URL below:
http://www.comscore.com/index.php/layout/set/ …

The folks at BrightHand’s have followed the Palm industry for ages. Their reviews thus carry an extra degree of significance for this site.

Palm’s Pre Plus has just hit their desk – and left them somewhat impressed:

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The Palm Pre Plus is a nice update of the original Pre, but unless you’re absolutely desperate for more memory or for the Mobile Hotspot feature, it isn’t worth the upgrade cost or the switch from Sprint.

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Unfortunately, the keyboard is still bad:

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The Pre Plus’s keyboard is fairly good, but you have to adjust to it. . There isn’t much space between the keys, and they are rounded and only slightly curved on the top surface. At first I found myself using my thumbnails, which was both slow and frustrating because I often hit the wrong keys.

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Further information can be had via the URL below:
http://www.brighthand.com/default.asp?newsID=16314 …

In the good old days of the Palm OS, over- and underclocking programs were extremely popular. If you needed extra battery life, the CPU frequency went down – if you needed speed and had a Proporta external battery handy, it went up.

A group of PreCentral users now got an overclocking kernel of their own done. It is compatible with webOS 1.3.5.1 ONLY, and overclocks the CPU to a whooping 800MhZ. The video below shows further info:

Should you feel adventurous, hit the link below:
http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre-tips- …

Verizon’s somewhat botched launch of Palm’ss webOS phones caused the boys in Orange a fair bit of grief – however, the carrier offered them to perform some “fix-up measures”.

German news portal FinanzNachrichten.de shares the press release below:

Verizon Wireless customers with the Palm® Pre(TM) Plus can experience the most popular console games on the nation’s most reliable and largest wireless voice and 3G data network.

Pre Plus smartphones operating on the Palm webOS(TM) platform offer customers exciting gaming functionality, including 3D graphics. The games range from action and strategy to mobile versions of popular console games, all from the leading content providers in the mobile gaming industry.

Some of the games available to Verizon Wireless customers with Pre Plus smartphones include:

– “Asphalt 5″ — “Brain Challenge®” — “Glyder 2″ — “Let’s Golf” — “Assassin’s Creed(TM) – Altair’s Chronicles” — “Brothers In Arms®: Hour of Heroes” — “Gangstar: West Coast Hustle” — “Hero of Sparta” — “Dungeon Hunter” — “Monopoly” — “Need for Speed Undercover(TM)” — “SCRABBLE” — “Sudoku” — “Tetris®” — “The Oregon Trail” — “The Sims(TM) 3″ — “Apollo” — “X-Plane”

Palm Pre Plus is available exclusively from Verizon Wireless for $149.99 after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement. Customers can find these games, along with many more apps, in the Palm App Catalog located on Palm webOS smartphones. More information on great apps for Palm webOS is also available at http://www.palm.com/applications.

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Sounds pretty interesting to me – since when do carriers send out a press release about a “software update” for one of their phones?

Years ago (when Palm was the only game in town), developers were offered significant discounts on Palm devices intended for testing. OK, not the kind of discounts Nokia gives – but nevertheless quite a bit. However, word spread – and the service was discontinued.

Developer phone purchase has now been resumed:

The devices are discounted by 20 percent and are sold in US dollars, which leads to a rebate of about 33% for Europeans. However, no data plan or anything is included – and as European carriers usually don’t give you lower monthly rates for bringing a cell phone of your own, well, you get the idea…

Further information on this – admittedly rather useless – offer can be found below:
http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/developer-phones.html

P.S. To the Palm folks reading this: what about carrier-unlocked webOS phones? They would make you a nice bit of cash…

Palm has been extremely active when it comes to promoting its webOS as gaming platform – this is sensible, as casual games have turned out to be one of the biggest money makers for Apple. Their latest stunt is impressive – they managed to get Epic to port the Unreal 3 engine.

The video below hits us via Engadget:

BTW: the control scheme chosen is similar to the one on some iPhone games – two “on-screen mouse pads” are used for looking and moving…