Motley Fool: Apple could / should buy Palm

Palm News 4 Responses »
Mar 072010

Motley Fool is not new to the “Palm will be aquired” group. Their latest statement was really, really funny…

The relevant passage goes as following:

…

Apple, on other hand, has several good reasons to go after Palm. It’s the most natural fit talentwise; webOS is based on the Mac maker’s WebKit tools; and CEO Steve Jobs has expressed a mild interest in deals even as he’s eschewed dividends. He’d need little of his company’s $40 billion war chest to acquire Palm.

And if he doesn’t, someone else will. It’s long past time to put Palm in new hands

…

Everybody with at least a minimal amount of IT understanding will be able to tell you that this is pointless: Apple has nothing to gain from Palm.

WebOS apps are completely incompatible to the iPhone OS, which follows a different programming paradigm. The two platforms are like race cars and lorries – not much to merge here…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 7:51 pm

QualComm CEO: there are too many chip makers

Editorials, Hardware News No Responses »
Mar 072010

I’d file this report straight into the under-reported but interesting category. When it came to CPU’s, QualComm was a nobody a few years ago – in the last two years, it became hard to find a non-Qualcomm mobile device.

The CEO of the company now stated the following according to Mobile Business:

Qualcomm’s chief executive Paul Jacobs said he sees the number of wireless chip providers shrinking either through consolidation or players disappearing, reports Dow Jones Newswires. “Consolidation will happen or people will leave the market,” he said.”We’re trying to make that happen sooner.” He also appeared to rule out the prospect of buying rival ARM.

Given that ARM is a fabless IP core vendor, and that Samsung has already all but left the market, this essentially targets one vendor: Marvell.

They bought up Intel’s assets a few years ago, and never got much out of it – Intel’s XScale CPU’s dominated the market, whereas Marvell’s new processors are almost invisible.

QualComm buying up ARM, on the other hand, would be a total GAU scenario. As ARM holds tons and tons of patents for ARM processors, it would allow QualComm to effectively stop competing chip vendors from creating ARM-based processors…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 3:06 pm

Palm: iPhone games can be ported “in days”

Palm News No Responses »
Mar 072010

Palm’s PDK has been around for some time – but we haven’t heard much from it so far.

AllThingsD now states the following:

…

Perhaps more important, the PDK will allow developers to rewrite mobile apps created for other platforms to run on webOS with minimal modification. Apps that currently run on Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone, for example, can be ported over in a matter of days, sources close to the company tell me, and they don’t really suffer any degradation in performance.

…

As of now, not much further is known…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 12:05 pm

Microsoft’s Pink and Turtle could drop on the 20th of April

Hardware News No Responses »
Mar 052010

Long-term followers of this blog know that I consider Microsoft’s Pink and Turtle phones potential show-stoppers for the Windows Mobile ecosystem. I am thus unhappy to present the two images below, which hit us via Engadget:
pink Microsofts Pink and Turtle could drop on the 20th of April
turtle Microsofts Pink and Turtle could drop on the 20th of April

According to them, the devices will hit Verizon on the 20th of April…potentially causing even more issues for Palm…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 11:58 pm

Big carriers could launch the “roaming revolution”

Editorials No Responses »
Mar 052010

Roaming has recently caused quite a bit of headlines due to EU intervention – the EU commission used its power to topple over free-market prices on roaming (info for US readers: the EU has powers which significantly exceed those of the federal government).

While I am not against this in any way, I think that it will not solve the problem. The solution will IMHO come from another side – traditional, former governmental carriers.

If you look at Austria, you see our former governmental carrier is in a terrible mess. Outdated Ericsson transmitters consume insane amounts of electrical power, and over 4000 employees who can’t be fired make operations unaffordable. Small and agile carriers like Hutchison have fun f##king them over here and over again…

But: A1 also has some strengths. For example, a law required by the carrier was passed by the government within 7 days – Hutchison was lobbying for the same law for ages. Furthermore, A1 is a member of a large global alliance similar to the Star Alliance in airlining.

Hutchison has offered free roaming in its networks for ages – but as it has but 7 countries covered, the offering is of limited value. A1′s alliance, on the other hand…you get the idea…

Thus, I see the solution coming from somewhere else. If legacy carriers are pressured enough in their home market, they will look offshore in an attempt to find value.

For A1, offering “global roaming” is a question of an email or two (they already do it for governments and large entities). This would then lead to closer cooperation between smaller carriers (see Airberlin and Hainan)…

What do you think?

P.S. Orange has already started the trend by giving its customers complimentary free minutes to call phones all over Europe…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 1:07 am

BrightHand – most popular smartphones, February 2010

Hardware News 5 Responses »
Mar 032010

As usual, the folks at BrightHand’s have just released their infamous monthly mindshare numbers.

To all new readers: BrightHand is a large US mobile phone site which covers all platforms evenly (read: not much of a bias). They monitor which devices generate the most search traffic, and thus are “most in demand” with power users.

This month’s list is as follows (last month’s position in brackets):

  1. BlackBerry 8530 (4)
  2. Nokia N900 (3)
  3. Nokia E63 (5)
  4. HTC HD2 (1)
  5. Samsung Moment (Android, 2)
  6. Motorola Droid (Android, 7)
  7. BlackBerry 95630 (Storm I, returning)
  8. XPERIA X10 (Android, returning)
  9. Motorola BackFlip (new)
  10. BlackBerry Bold 9000 (8)

The Nokia E71 and Samsung Omnia II fell out of the top list from last month…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 9:57 pm

Palm releases webOS 1.4 SDK

Palm News No Responses »
Mar 032010

Palm released webOS 1.4 a few days ago – and has now followed up with an SDK allowing developers to target the new features.

Chuq van Rospach claims the following “big changes:

* webOS now incorporates WebKit 4, which features enhanced CSS support and numerous other improvements.
* The webOS implementation of the HTML 5 Media API has been updated, bringing closer conformance to the specification, and improvements to audio performance.
* The Camera API has been extended to let an application initiate video capture, in addition to image capture.
* The V8 JavaScript engine used in webOS has been updated.

The full change log is below:
http://developer.palm.com/index.php …

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 11:21 am

Palm updates Facebook app for webOS

Palm News No Responses »
Mar 032010

Palm’s management seems to have really interesting tricks up its sleeve – for example, the developer relations team was hardened by making them develop the Facebook app for webOS.

It has just received an update adding the following features:

* Enhanced Inbox – Now, your inbox lets you compose, send, and reply, so you can always access your Facebook messages.
* Photo albums – Now you can view photo albums from all your friends, not just the photos in their news feeds. Uploading photos is easier as well, and includes the ability to add captions.
* Profiles – The new app lets you view users’ profiles, whether they are your friends or not. View and post to their walls, view their information, and see their photo albums (subject to privacy settings, of course).
* Events and birthdays – Now you can see upcoming birthdays from your friend list as well as upcoming events.
* Friend search – Easily find your friends using the Friend Search feature. This takes you to their profile, where you can see and post to their wall, view their information, and look at their photos.

Those who want to know more should hit the link below:
http://developer.palm.com/blog/2010/03/new-facebook-app-now-available/

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 3:17 am

European Union: mandatory roaming spending caps

Miscellaneous No Responses »
Mar 022010

450px La2 euro European Union: mandatory roaming spending caps

Mobile Business Briefing reports the following:

The European Commission announced yesterday new moves intended to protect consumers from building up large bills when roaming in other EU countries. Mobile operators are now obliged to offer their customers a monthly cut-off limit of EUR50, and can also offer any other limit. Users will receive a warning when they hit 80 percent of the chosen limit. Until 1 July, customers need to make a deliberate choice in order to benefit from a cut-off limit. But if they don’t make a choice by July 1, the cut-off will be set at EUR50 by default from that date.

…

From my point of view, this definitely is a good step. However, it IMHO won’t really do much – the party will start only when one of the big networks declares itself as “one”. Hutchison 3G does that for some time, but is too small (7 countries) to have meaningful impact.

On the other hand, former governmental operators like A1 (who have since joined the VodaFone network) could do this to protect themselves from competition by cheaper, small operators – forcing others to follow suite…

Image: Wikimedia Commons / Lars Aronsson

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 10:50 pm

Tam Hanna talks at Nokia Mobile Developers Forum Hagenberg

TamsPalm internal No Responses »
Mar 022010

Dear Readers,
file this straight into the “we love our editor” folder. Yours truly will be talking about Symbian application distribution on the Nokia Mobile Developers forum on the 6th of the month:
tam hanna talks Tam Hanna talks at Nokia Mobile Developers Forum Hagenberg

My presentation will be held in English, and will be added to the web site shortly. Hit the link below to find out more:
http://www.nokiaappforum.com/conference/

P.S. The current schedule is in this PDF…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 7:16 pm

Palm’s credibility issue – CNBC

Palm News No Responses »
Mar 022010

Palm’s stock price has fallen quite a bit in the last ten days – and the CNBC now summed up Palm’s problems as following:

Management has a serious credibility issue, I’m told, and this only makes it substantially worse. Another told me that Palm’s attempts to throw investors off the scent of an order slowdown by its major customers by connecting a manufacturing stoppage to the Chinese New Year isn’t nearly as forthcoming as the company ought to be. (He had more colorful language to share, but that’s what he meant.)

Even though I am somewhat bullish on the near future for Palm (up 2% intra-day ATM), the situation is indeed as described. Keeping information secret which ought to be communicated is really, really stupid…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 2:11 pm

TamsPPC and TamsS60 rebranded

TamsPalm internal No Responses »
Mar 012010

Dear Readers,
just in case anyone of you is wondering what the hell happened to TamsPPC and TamsS60: these sites were renamed. The URL’s and the content remain the same.

However, TamsPPC is now known as “the Windows Phone blog”, while TamsS60 now carries the tagline “the Symbian blog”. Once again, this has nothing to do with the content or editorial line – it remains the same.

The reason for this renaming was that the terms PocketPC and S60 are starting to get less and less popular. In order to make the TCN more visible for new readers, this renaming had to be performed.

If anyone of you has any questions or issues, please leave a comment here!

All the best
Tam Hanna

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 9:36 pm

Mobile Design and Development – the review

Book reviews No Responses »
Mar 012010

I first saw Brian Fling’s book on Mobile Design and Development on a local connection. Mark A. M. Kramer, an Austrian maven of the mobile computer scene read and praised it – can the tome stack up in the largely empty area of mobile user interface design books?
front Mobile Design and Development – the review back Mobile Design and Development – the review

Brian starts out by looking at the history of mobile and the mobile landscape as it is today. Long-term followers will not find much new stuff here, but it nevertheless makes for an interesting read.

He then moves on to “mobile strategy”. Topics include questions like “What is special about mobile”, the influence of “context” also is explained in some detail. Finally, various options for creating a mobile app are explained – some of them are somewhat obscure and definitely aren’t something you deal with every day.

The next part analyzes the design process for mobile applications. These chapters are what make the book really interesting – you are introduced to design, prototyping and user testing methods for touchscreen and non-touchscreen applications.

The second half of the book looks at the design and creation of mobile web sites: frameworks, compatibility et al get covered in extreme detail. Native application developers are largely left twiddling their thumbs…

As usual for O’Reilly, the book is well-written and readable even for non-native English speakers. Code examples are provided in various web languages; an ample amount of images is included for clarification where beneficial.

In the end, Mobile Design and Development is a great book if you want to create a mobile web app. Creators of native applications can’t use half of the book: if you are interested in the mobile design process, it is a good if somewhat paper-heavy tutorial. Web heads, on the other hand, should buy it straight away…the 23$ shouldn’t hurt…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 12:28 pm

Intel releases 1.83GHz Atom N470 – VGA out still limited

Hardware News No Responses »
Mar 012010

intel atom n470 Intel releases 1.83GHz Atom N470 VGA out still limitedEverybody who knows how I use my MSI Wind U100 probably smells that I am unhappy with the new 4xx series of Atom CPU. The reason: their VGA output is severely limited and can’t drive large monitors.

Nevertheless, the company has just added a new CPU to the line-up. The N470 has a slightly higher CPU clock speed – which comes to nothing, as almost every N270 can be overclocked to 2GhZ without much effort.

Either way – we told you about it…

Posted by Tam Hanna, Site Founder at 9:00 am
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