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Palm: The stats on smartphones
Thu, 19 Apr 2007

(While I am pretty darned sleep deprived I think I'm reading things right ;)

Being a developer for various sundry mobile platforms, I like to try and guess where things are going, and gauge where to spend my efforts, and really .. I like to see what new gadgets are out there, and fondle as many as possible. Its been a dry couple of years for us gadgetheads .. the sheer variety of toys we've seen before hasn't happened for awhile - no more Handera Inc's my dear friends. We need some shakedowns .. some rolling screens, not just GPS-in-everything. We're tough to please nowadays.

I've been pretty hard on Palm Inc (and what was PalmSource too) of late - rightly so I think, what with them spending literally years sitting on their hands and starving the consumers and developers both. This recent news of Palm Inc making a new Linux based Palm OS chuffed up a few people, but to those of us who've been around the rack awhile the news came along - great, another new OS each year when they can barely keep from introducing device breaking bugs in the OS they already have. Since this is a Palm Inc baby, I imagine it'll actually fly, and hopefully it'll even have developer tools behind it (since the official Palm OS dev tools have been discontinued for many years now!) due to the Linux side of it. Anyway, to say the least, developers are pretty unhappy with the current situation, and the consumers want some new cool toys. iPods are cool, but execs want something with lots more buttons on it.

I have hopes that this year, with the iPhone set to ripple the telcos a little and an actual Linux Palm OS device promised .. maybe, just maybe, the mobile industry will get interesting and fun again. Wouldn't it be something to have a growth market again like in those halcyon days just a few years back? People are getting more savvy and you can't just get away with little hack applications anymore .. people rightly expect quality, which is hard to deliver cheaply when the operating system is exploding at the seams with all the stretching its been forced into. Its time for a reset, to do something fresh and get people interested and flagwaving again, before all is lost. I just hope that if ACCESS ever gets its Linux-and-Palm variation out that the applications we write will be compatible with Palm Incs Linux-and-Palm too. I've had it up to here hacking apps differently for every darned device out there. Course, iPhones might need serious finagling to support at all -- its not 1987 anymore so we shouldn't have to start at the stick-and-wheel for every app on every toy :) There should be an easy way to support Palm, Pocket PC, RIM, Symbian and Apple handhelds .. at least a fresh newer OS might get us half way there.

Anyway, last night around 3am or so after calming the tot I got to checking into Palm's financial reports as I've been too busy to keep tabs of late. This little gem is pretty interesting. It would seem in Q3-07 only $57mil out of about $400mil revenue was made on the traditional PDAs while the rest was on the Treos. A year earlier, the ratio was 1/3rd instead of 1/8th while two years back it was PDAs > Treos. We all knew it was happening, but its interesting to see the details. I really wish I knew the actual device breakdown (especially between Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices) but I only wanted to highlight this factoid. Smartphones won (and to developer chagrin, most people don't know smartphones can actually run 3rd part applications.) Anyway, its good to see that Palm Inc still has a bread and butter device. They've got a future. And they're bringing a Linux device out, which will be cool. (There are a lot of devices with Unix behind the scenes, but few 'obviosuly Linux' gadgets out there.)

So heres to hoping we have a fun gadget year. Its hard for developers to be motivated with existing Palm OS -- a very hostile development environment that maximises cost, so its very refreshing to see news on the horizon for those of us who've hung on so long :)

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