TamsPalm - the Palm OS Blog

So far, developers of mobile devices have not felt the need to especially advertise the third-party extendability of their products in their Point-of-Sales demos. However, Apple’s iPhone 3G demo explicitly features third-party apps in Austria - read on for a few images and a Tam-Hanna-made translation:

	“Web applications directly on your Phone”
(this now shows a few applications in the iTunes app store. Note that all of them are free)
	(Now, Super Monkey Ball is selected)
(The icon now shows up in the launcher’s screen. Amusingly, the payment process and the application’s price have not been shown)
	(The game starts up and the screen begins to tilt)
(The device is shown toppling around as the game runs)

AFAIK, this is the first time ever that a mobile phone manufacturer explicitly advertises the expandability and third-party application availability of its platform. Palm once planned something similar, but never aired the TV spots…looks like another first for Apple!

P.S. Want to know more about Apple? Visit our sister site TamsIJungle!

People wanting to get their hands onto a Treo 680 can now do so for cheap if they feel like using it on AT&T - the carrier currently offers a web-only special that includes a free refurbished Treo 680:

I personally consider AT&T the best US carrier for the Treo 680 (and other GSM PalmOS devices), as it’s EDGE network is by far the strongest. AT&T was the initial launch customer for the iPhone; which was an EDGE-only device…

Palm OS developers currently evaluating to port to Android will be more than happy to hear that google’s Eric Chu has just stated that the OS will contain a OTA purchasing system said to be developer-friendlier than Apple’s:

…We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.

I also wanted to share some early details to help with planning… Developers can expect the first handsets to be enabled with a beta version of Android Market. Some decisions are still being made, but at a minimum you can expect support for free (unpaid) applications. Soon after launch an update will be provided that supports download of paid content …

Chu furthermore posted the following four screenshots:

As of now, nobody knows about payment venues or revenue shares - stay tuned for further information as we get it!

Providing ads to mobile web sites gives you loads of data about mobile web browsers. Intelligent companies like AdMob make parts of this data available to the press to gain free PR (here you go) by helping the press do its job.

Anyways, this month’s “Mobile Metrics Report” was especially interesting, as it looked at worldwide browser market shares for mobile web browsers. The chart below is from the report linked above:

Classic smartphone web browsers surprisingly make up a minuscule of requests: Palm’s Blazer and Apple’s mobile Safari (which is a much better browser) both have 2% market share, Microsoft’s Pocket Internet Explorer and RIM’s browser both don’t exceed the 4% mark.

Nokia’s browsers (S40 and S60) and OpenWave (a classic dumbphone browser) both have about 30% of the market each, with Access’s Netfront (deployed on smartphones and embedded) coming in as a distant third with 12%. Amusingly, Sony’s CLIE handhelds make up for 4% of these 12%, which gives them a total market share of about 0.5%.

The real lesson which can be learned here is that smartphones and their users are an almost-ignorable minority when it comes to mobile web usage. We may be the most vocal bunch, but our numbers diminish compared to the millions of “dumbphone” users populating the mobile internet (and likely having a data contract). As each and every phone that has a web browser also is Java capable nowadays, the implications that this has on the size of the J2ME market are obvious: it is huge.

What do you think?

A big thank-you goes out to AdMob for providing the data!

Very few people know that the emulator used for debugging OS4 applications (POSE) is an open source project. This allows for easy porting across multiple platforms - and allows the sharing of precompiled binaries.

The boys at Mobile Geographics have created a build for Mac OS (X) and have posted it onto their web site.

Should anyone of you feel like taking a stab, hit the link below:
http://www.mobilegeographics.com/dev/POSE35Mac.zip

Yours truly has recently switched to a MSI Wind U100 due to its excellent portability. The machine is powered by an oddball CPU from Intel called Atom, and has satisfied me so far. Benchmarks and an unboxing will hit TamsPalm shortly.

Until then, feel free to take a look at the SysOpt.com article linked below. It looks at what’s inside an Atom processor, and provides an overview of the available configurations/models.

Get the full scoop here:
http://www.sysopt.com/features/cpu/article.php/3765986

No matter how little software you sell - having an own web site with a top-level domain is important. Not only does an @company.com email address look professional, but it also allows you to join the PEF club.

GoDaddy, a pretty nice domain reseller (ask your host if they have DNS servers of their own, however), currently sells domains for just 7$ a year: the discount code gdp0820c is all you need to have.

P.S. The domains drop with free POP3 email (one account) and basic, ad-supported hosting…
P.S.2 I am not affiliated to GoDaddy in any way except as paying customer.

Google’s mobile OS has just lost a few features due to security and/or time concerns. The latest beta of the SDK misses two notable pieces of API:

Bluetooth
The Bluetooth API will also be missing from the initial release of Android. While this doesn’t mean that handsfree devices can’t be used (this will work), developers will not be able to access the transmitter.

The omission is due to lack of time - Bluetooth will be supported fully in the future:

The reason is that we plain ran out of time. The Android Bluetooth API was pretty far along, but needs some clean-up before we can commit to it for the SDK. Keep in mind that putting it in the 1.0 SDK would have locked us into that API for years to come.

Here’s an example of the problems in the API. Client code is required to pass around IBluetoothDeviceCallback objects in order to receive asynchronous callbacks, but IBluetoothDeviceCallback is meant to be an internal interface. That client code would break the moment we added new callbacks to IBluetoothDeviceCallback.aidl. This is not a recipe for future-proof apps.

To make things even more tricky, the recent introduction of the bluez 4.x series brings its own new API. The Android Bluetooth stack uses bluez for GAP and SDP so you’ll see more than a passing resemblance to bluez’s interfaces in Android. The bluez 4.x change requires us to carefully consider how to structure our API for the future. Again, remember that once we settle on an interface we need to support it for years going forward.

Google Talk
The Google Talk API has also been removed for a variety of security issues which would have allowed the device to be remote-controlled:

Although we would have loved to ship this service, in the end, the Android team decided to pull the API instead of exposing users to risk and breaking compatibility with a future, more secure version of the feature. We think it’s obvious that this kind of functionality would be incredibly useful, and would open lots of new doors for developers. One of our top priorities after the first devices ship is to develop a device-to-device (and possibly device-to-server) RPC mechanism that is fast, reliable, and protective of developers and users alike.

As a final note, I want to point out that since the GTalkService was always a Google “value-added” service anyway, it was never guaranteed that it would be present on every Android device. That is, GTalkService was never part of core Android. As a result this change actually allows us the potential to build a new system that is part of the core of a future version of Android.

More info can be found on the Android Developer blog!

Palm’s relationship with its manufacturers has given us quite a few interesting bits of news over the years - apparently, the company has managed to get its guaranteed shipments high enough to make HTC interested once again after having ditched them last year.

DigiTimes’s well-informed analysts have received confirmation that the Treo Pro is indeed being produced at HTC’s. As all other product lines remain at Inventec’s, this can be considered a very good sign for Palm…

What do you think?

From the very beginning of software development, piracy has been a huge issue for independent software developers. While the rampant spread of lawsuits, virii and malware have helped curb casual piracy on the PC, handhelds currently are mostly virus-free.

Nevertheless, a PC game developer called PosiTech performed a little survey to find out what motivates pirates: surprisingly, very few of them are politically motivated (freedom of information/communism/cleptomania/whatever). The biggest topics were high prices, repetitive gameplay, bad tech support, DRM and lack of digital distribution (aka having to go to the store).

Find our more about why pirates pirate stuff and take a stab at the conclusions our developer drew - hit the URL below:
http://www.positech.co.uk/talkingtopirates.html

We saw quite a few articles about the state of the boys with the orange orb recently - while some were positive, the outlook for the Palm OS looks bleaker by the minute.

The folks at MobilityToday’s now met some folks who were involved in the Treo Pro’s design - and left the meeting in a pretty impressed state. They claim that Palm plans to head into the enterprise state (currently dominated by HP’s ipaqs).

I personally don’t think that they are spot-on, as Palm’s biggest cash cow currently is a consumer device - give them a click at the link below and see for yourself:
http://mobilitytoday.com/news/008829/state_palm_well_defined

Palm’s recently-announced Treo Pro wis scheduled to hit our desk on September the 15th - a full review will then come up in the next days. Until then, feast your eyes on the specs and pictures below:

Specs

Get the rest of the scoop at our sister site TamsPPC!

The folks at Engadget’s have taken a stab at Palm last year, citing various issues inside the company. Back then, Palm’s CEO Ed Colligan responded and promised improvements. One year has since passed, and the parting chief editor of the site now took the time to sum up.

Amusingly, Ryan Block agrees with my verdict on the Palm Centro (Palm Centro review), and considers the keyboard and the screen way too small.

Palm OS II aka NoVa has also been a topic - the lack of progress has made the Engadget team recommend Palm to give up its OS exclusivity and start building Android devices(!!!)…

In the end, Ryan doesn’t feel too well about the future of the company. Even though the Centro currently sells very well, he feels that the gains will be “short-term” => the long-time strategy and Ed Colligan’s way of handling the media hasn’t improved too much.

Get the full scoop here:
http://www.engadget.com/2008/08/22/engadget-cares-the-state-of-palm-checking-in-a-year-later/

The last few weeks have been full of reports about the Best Buy sale - according to Ryan Kairer’s usually well-informed boys, the party will soon be over. Until then, however, Centro prices are as low as they have never been before.

AT&T’s Centro can now be had for free with a new 2yr contract; people updating/renewing have to pay 60$ and get the device immediately.

The Sprint version of the box costs 20$ for new subscribers, upgraders have to pay 100$.

As usual, these prices are OTC - there are no mail-in rebates, etc involved in the process. The prices are valid until the 23rd of August and should be valid in almost all Best Buy stores.