Russell posts about Palm’s future on Mobitopia. I too share Russell’s concerns, but well, yeah, the new Treo 600, w/ a BT of WiFi SDIO card is gonna kick so much ass.
And the question is really whether Palm is really even making a “smart phone” right now at all. Or whether the Treo 600 is actually more of a small “PDA Phone” and thus not anywhere near the sweet spot in the mobile phone market. In my mind the Treo is actually competing with all the PDAs and PDA phones like the P800 and other UIQ-based phones. With Nokia pushing one-handed smart phones like the 3650/6600 it’s hard to think that Palm is going to be able to compete in that area at all. I’ve said it before, but despite having a great brand, Palm is not Nokia.
Palm seems to want to change this by repackaging PalmOS 5 as the mobile version of their OS. But *why*!?! That’s not going to be able to compete with Symbian and Windows Mobile 2003, both 32 bit multitasking OSes with real file systems. Why would Palm think that? Why waste developer resources on this sort of thing? Better a mobile version of PalmOS 6.0 than old tech. Unless they’re targeting *really* low-powered devices (think about how little power is in the Zire 71, and that gives you an idea), but then they’re directly competing against J2ME and BREW. *That* to me is a *really* bad idea.
Related blogs:
- Mobitopia
- moblogging.org
- textually.org
- Josh Rubin’s Techetiquette, Cool Hunting