.KEYWORD ppeditorial0902
.FLYINGHEAD FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
.TITLE The morbid fascination that is Palm, Inc.
.DEPT
.SUMMARY David Gewirtz compares his long-standing morbid fascination with Apple to his more recent morbid fascination with the mystery that is Palm, Inc.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
I am morbidly fascinated by Apple. Every so often, I have to go to the Apple site and check out what they’re up to. I used to be an Apple user on a daily basis, and I still, to this day, look at their hardware and go, "Oooh, pretty."
Unfortunately, I can’t ever come up with a good reason to buy an Apple product. You know all the arguments. PCs are cheaper, Apple is prettier, but the bottom line is that, other than just the "wanna" factor, I can’t see any reason to buy Apple.
I do have to admit that sometimes they get close. Like the iPod, their hot little hard disk-based MP3 player. If that sucker had come out for both Windows and Mac at the same time, I would have snapped one up. But in the intervening seven or so months since it came out for just the Mac (hubris? stupidity?), a bunch of other MP3 solutions flew my way. The same is true of the wacky new iMac. I mean, it’s kinda cool. but it uses a laptop hard drive and is a bitch to upgrade. It’s easier, and way cheaper, to build a much more powerful PC.
Similarly, I’m becoming morbidly fascinated by Palm. Obviously, as the editor-in-chief of PalmPower, I’m a pretty heavy proponent of Palm handhelds and Palm OS devices. But I have to admit that I wonder just how many people inside Palm are paying attention.
As of September 3, the day we put this issue of PalmPower to bed, Palm’s stock closed at $0.69. Late in July, Palm got knocked of the Standard & Poors index, something that didn’t exactly inspire confidence in those stockholders holding stocks worth less than a penny on the dollar of their original post-IPO investment.
Palm is now at exactly 18 days into their 30-day delisting watch and is pretty much officially a penny stock. One of the criteria NASDAQ uses to kick stocks off the exchange is 30 days under a buck a share. To be fair, there are other conditions that also must be met to merit getting bumped, including overall lack of capitalization, and there is an appeals process. As a result, although Palm’s been under a buck for 18 days, I don’t necessarily expect them to lose their spot on the market anytime soon.
The fact is, though, that Palm is a company that makes real, physical products. A baby of the Internet stock boom, it’s not like those Internet companies with no products and no profits. However, Palm went public at close to $100/share and it’s now selling for under a dollar. Hopefully, no widows nor orphans bought into this stock! The company never should have gone public at that price value, as so many other companies learned. It was greedy and the market corrected. Today’s market value for Palm is about half-a-billion dollars, which is probably about right.
The morbid fascination continues.
They’re splitting the company into Palm, Inc. (the hardware company) and PalmSource, which is the OS business. Of course, PalmSource is also the name of their tradeshow. Could it have been that hard to come up with a useful company name, like, oh, I don’t know, how about The Palm OS Company?
The split might be a good idea. Figuring that it’s harder to keep up in hardware than software, the Palm OS business could gain revenue from the licensees, while the hardware side of the business could simply keep cranking out hardware.
But where’s the innovation? In comparison to Handspring’s nearly 3G (third generation telephony) wireless, color Treo, Palm’s clunky, black & white i705 is completely unlustworthy (and that’s not even counting the fact that it doesn’t have a phone).
In comparision to the Palm OS-based CLIE, which has full color, double the screen resolution, a built-in keyboard, a flip lid, and, oh yeah, an MP3 player, the Palm m505 is uninspiring.
The bad news keeps on coming.
.CALLOUT What’s a bit or two of color resolution among friends?
Could it be that the innovation resides in the high-resolution color screen of the m130? After all, this is a screen that purported to offer 16-bit color, the "more than 65,000 colors" that the company had been advertising since the product came out in March.
Just because Palm accidentally discovered that the m130 actually only supports 58,621 color combinations — a situation brought to their attention by a lawsuit about it, that doesn’t mean innovation has slowed. I mean, after all, what’s a bit or two of color resolution among friends?
And now, just today, TechTV is reporting that the m130 really only supports 4096 possible colors per pixel, but there’s a technique in the hardware that makes it appear to support 58,621 colors per pixel. Is it actually 4,096 colors or 65,000+ colors? And is it right to claim it kinda-sorta looks like 65,000 colors when you’ve cost-reduced it to only generate 4,096 colors?
By the way, that’s a big difference. With 65K colors or so, you can see a decent color photograph without posterizing. With only 4,096 colors (including shades of colors, because each shade of a color is counted as a color in hardware implementations), photos of little Jimmy could look a lot more splotchy than you ever intended.
While Palm has acknowledged there’s a difference between what it promised and what it delivered, Palm’s Marlene Somsak said the company will "aggressively fight" the lawsuit, which was filed in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County.
Further, Somak said, "The company is working on a plan to compensate customers," but refused to say whether refunds were being considered. She did say replacements aren’t part of the plan since the product isn’t defective.
I guess that depends on how you define defective. If you buy a 6-cylinder car and get home and discover it’s a 4-cylinder machine, is it defective? If you buy an 1.8GHz computer and get home and discover it only runs at 1GHz, is it defective? If you buy a computer with 512MB of RAM and get home and discover there’s only 384MB, is it defective?
If you buy a handheld that’s supposed to generate 65,000+ colors per pixel and it really only generates 4,096 colors per pixel, is it defective?
Is it defective, or is it something more ominous? We’ll be watching this one closely.
But what about the future? What about the new Palm OS 5.0, due out in some newer Palm models, maybe as soon as this fall?
It should be faster. After all, it will be running on a new, faster ARM microprocessor, the same brand of processor that the Newton ran on all those long years ago, and the very same processor that some Pocket PCs run on now.
Of course, a new processor means a new instruction set, which means that the HUGE library of Palm OS programs won’t run directly on the new machines. Instead, they’ll run in emulation, a process by which the new processor simulates the old processor, a software simulation running the current Palm OS applications on the new chips.
In theory, if your new processor is sufficiently fast that it can absorb the overhead of emulation, an emulator, as a way to move people to the new hardware and keep backwards compatibility, is a good idea. Apple’s been doing this stuff for years: first on its move to the PowerPC architecture, and then on its move from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X.
Of course, that’s theory. Your reality may vary.
How should you interpret all this? Should you buy Palm handheld devices? Should you buy Palm OS devices?
To be honest, I’m very hard pressed to recommend Palm-branded hardware right now, except at the very low end. You can definitely pick up a nice, genuinely useful Palm-brand Palm OS device for under a hundred bucks. And if Palm went whole hog and touted this to the world, they’d go gangbusters. But they’re not, probably because the profit margins on these products are tight.
If you’re not looking for the cheapest solution, Sony and Handspring have far sexier and far more useful offerings, and they’re in color. Again, unless you’re on a strict budget, there’s no good reason to use a machine that’s not color. This is 2002, and, frankly, your working experience will be better on a color device.
What about Palm OS vs. Pocket PC? Honestly, I use both. I use the Palm OS handheld (a Visor Prism) as my PIM: it carries all my critical information and it travels with me pretty much wherever I go.
My HP Jornada rarely leaves my bedroom. That pup is equipped with 802.11b and a Thunderhawk Web browser, so I can high-speed wirelessly connect to the Web, IM (Instant Message) my friends, and otherwise check on the state of the world without leaving the comfort of my warm blankey. OK, I’m a geek. I admit this.
.BEGIN_KEEP
I can’t yet recommend a Pocket PC device over a Palm device for day-to-day work. In my experience, Palm OS devices work more smoothly and more reliably. On the other hand, you have to look at the robustness of the companies producing the devices. While Handspring hasn’t tanked as hard as Palm, they’ve had a rough ride, as well. And no matter how you cut it, neither Handspring nor Palm are of the caliber of an HP/Compaq or a Dell. Dell has recently announced their own Pocket PC product.
All in all, it’s been a tough year for almost everyone, financially, operationally, and emotionally. It’s been just about a year since the events of September 11, 2002, and most of us are still here. I’m not sure what the next twelve months will bring, but here’s hoping for a good year for all.
— DG
PS: Just for the record, I own no stock and haven’t owned stock in any of the companies mentioned, except for Apple. I owned some of their stock many, many years ago. For now, my entire portfolio is in ZATZ, which tells you which horse I’m betting on.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Apple Computers, visit http://www.apple.com.
For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com.
For more information on ZATZ:Pure Internet Publishing, visit http://www.zatz.com.
.H1 Easy, flexible article reprints
ZATZ now offers a quick, easy, flexible and inexpensive way to use article reprints in your marketing and promotion efforts. You can now get article reprints for a one-time fee of only $200. For details, visit http://mediakit.zatz.com/reprints.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@@.ee701bf
.END_KEEP
