Tams Palm

The folks at Engadget’s usually have excellent columnists and editors – but their latest addition to the team doesn’t seem to be fully up to speed.

His latest column contained the following statement:

Sony led the market in innovation when it entered the PDA space. It offered the first Palm OS devices with removable storage, the first devices that could play back audio and video, and the first high-resolution color devices. All of these clearly drove the market forward. Then the innovations became less innovative and more “gadgetry.”

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As much as I adore Sony’s work in the PalmOS area, this is wrong – the first-ever Palm OS device with external memory was Handera’s TRGpro.

The two images below show the box:

Further information on this vintage device can be had at my coauthor Oliver W Leibenguth’s – if you can read German, hit the link below:
http://blog.compuseum.de/?p=92

Long-term followers of this web site know that I love new screen technologies – especially if they are of the OLED variety. Samsung claims to have one step further with its Super AMOLED…but has not disclosed too much so far.

Don’t ask me where erikaustria1974 got the tone-less video below – it seems to be a Samsung-internal video showing the benefits of Super AMOLED:

Not much to add here…

Palm’s PDK is a key ingredient for the long-term success of the webOS platform – it allows developers to break out of the Java runtime.

It has been announced for some time, and has been available to insiders for some time. However, it might be unleashed on the public in the near future.

The full press release is below:

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Game Developers Conference (GDC) – Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) today announced that a public beta version of the Palm® webOS™ Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) is now available at the Palm Developer Center (developer.palm.com). Palm is demonstrating new games from early PDK developers in its booth at GDC (No. 2016).

The PDK complements the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK), letting developers use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK and mix them seamlessly within a single app. The PDK enables new functionality, including immersive 3D graphics, and gives developers who have built games for other platforms an easy way to bring their titles to the webOS platform. Developers can download the beta PDK and start developing today, but distribution of games built with the beta PDK will require functionality provided in an upcoming Palm webOS update.

“Palm webOS is the go-to platform for great games on two of the three leading carrier networks,” said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. “We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world-class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it.”

At CES in January, Palm introduced 12 games built by four leading developers with early access to the PDK:

* “Asphalt 5″ (Gameloft)
* “Brain Challenge®” (Gameloft)
* “Glyder 2″ (Glu Mobile)
* “Let’s Golf!” (Gameloft)
* “MONOPOLY” (EA Mobile™)
* “Need for Speed™ Undercover” (EA Mobile)
* “SCRABBLE” (EA Mobile)
* “Sudoku” (EA Mobile)
* “Tetris®” (EA Mobile)
* “The Oregon Trail” (Gameloft)
* “The Sims™ 3″ (EA Mobile)
* “X-Plane” (Laminar Research)

Since then, more than 20 exciting webOS titles have been launched by these early-access developers:

* “Apollo” (Laminar Research)
* “Assassin’s Creed™ – Altair’s Chronicles” (Gameloft)
* “Brothers In Arms®: Hour of Heroes” (Gameloft)
* “Castle of Magic” (Gameloft)
* “Deer Hunter 3D” (Glu Mobile)
* “Dungeon Hunter” (Gameloft)
* “Earthworm Jim” (Gameloft)
* “Gangstar: West Coast Hustle” (Gameloft)
* “Giant Fighting Robots” (Laminar Research)
* “Guitar Hero 5 Mobile” (Glu Mobile)
* “Hero of Sparta” (Gameloft)
* “Real Soccer 2010″ (Gameloft)
* “Real Tennis” (Gameloft)
* “World Series of Poker: Hold’em Legend” (Glu Mobile)
* “X-Plane Airliner” (Laminar Research)
* “X-Plane Carrier” (Laminar Research)
* “X-Plane Extreme” (Laminar Research)
* “X-Plane Glider” (Laminar Research)
* “X-Plane Helicopter” (Laminar Research)
* “X-Plane Racing” (Laminar Research)
* “X-Plane Space Shuttle” (Laminar Research)

“The Palm webOS PDK is extremely powerful and far-reaching, as evidenced by the number of titles we’ve been able to bring to the webOS platform in a very short time,” said Baudouin Corman, vice president of publishing, Americas, Gameloft. “It’s quite difficult to make a great phone that’s also an outstanding gaming platform; Palm has been successful delivering both.”

More information about the beta PDK is available at the Palm Developer Center (developer.palm.com). More information about games for Palm webOS is available at www.palm.com/applications.

Further information can be had via the official PDK page:
http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1936

The iPhone’s lack of stylus was praised when the unit first came out – unfortunately, having no stylus makes using the unit with gloves difficult.

Koreans discovered that a popular type of snack sausage could be used as stylus – and an innovative vendor has now capitalized on their findings. His “sausage” is non-edible, but can be used as a stylus for long times without fear of “degeneration”:

Those of you who feel like taking a stab can do so for the acceptable price of 1 USD – further information is at the URL below:
http://www.casecrown.com/iphone/accessories/iphone-1g-3g-3gs-sausage-screen-stylus

Dr. Schaffer’s Mobile Computing facility at the Austrian FH Hagenberg has produced quite a few really amazing projects (think Shaker Racer) in the last years; the knowledge of their faculty staff is top-notch and contains loads of Forum Nokia champions. Cutting a long story short: the price (free) is more than right – I am there for about 18 months now and am happy overall.

In case anyone of you feels like adding a Bachelor of Science in Mobile Computing to his business card, definitely consider these boys. As tuition is free and living in Linz is dirt cheap (900E/month max), interested German-speakers are well advised to visit their open-house day to find out more about how to get great education for a very low price…which is held on Friday:

FH Hagenberg Campus
Softwarepark 11
4232 Hagenberg/Austria

Open: 9h to 18h local time

Yours truly will not be around this time. However, it would be too cool to have a group of Tamoggemon Content Network heads at this university…

When the iPhone came, yours truly was among the first to muse that a stylus would eventually come back – the device has since brought us sausages used as styli, weird aftermarket solutions and a load of other ideas regarding that “god-darn toothpick”.

Dell apparently sees value in styli, too – SlashGear reports the following:

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As for stylus input – something we puzzled over earlier – Choubey seems to hint that Dell might use new transparent conductor resistive panels over capacitive technology in future tablet models, which support multitouch finger-input and stylus control with high-resolution accuracy.

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This makes their Mini5 tablet interesting all over again…

PreCentral have just undug the shot below – they claim that it was posted by a forum user who stated that he is an AT&T employee:

According to him, it would be a high-end slate running webOS.

However, some Chinese mobile phone suppliers have since showed the Elan as a Pixi derivative – while this could just be a case of a badly chosen filler image, it nevertheless should be mentioned here…

We’ve heard our fair share of news about new Bluetooth standards – unfortunately, very few devices have implemented anything beyond 2.x so far. Nevertheless, it’s always interesting to see what the boys plan for Q4 of this year.

PCWorld states the following about the new standard:

…Previous versions of Bluetooth could only go into devices with triple-A or larger-capacity batteries.

Bluetooth 4.0 includes a low-energy specification for transmitting small bursts of data over short ranges, in addition to the high-speed data transfer capabilities introduced with Bluetooth 3.0 last April.

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So much, so good…

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:

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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

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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…

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…

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

AllThingsD now states the following:

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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.

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As of now, not much further is known…

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:

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

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…

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…

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 …

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/

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.

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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

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:

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…

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…

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