News that Palm is in the Windows Mobile business is not that big a deal.
Palm has been faltering for years. Even before it split off from its operating system unit, PalmSource, it was losing market share in big hunks. Palm was killed by steady investment from Microsoft, which took away its corporate market, and by mobile phones, which took away the rest of the market.
The fact that Palm owners are going to be orphaned, left without upgrades, is not even tragic, since Palm for years has offered a Palm Desktop program that lets users transfer their files directly to a PC.
What's happening is that Microsoft, which continues to flail about in the mobile phone space, is putting out yet-another mobile phone, and dragging the Palm name along for the ride. Palm has nowhere else to go, so it's going.
But this is not big news. Want to know what the big news is?
It's that Windows continues to fail in the mobile market.
Windows has been at this since the Atlanta Braves were bad. I wrote about their early models in my 1992 book "A Guide to Field Computing," which is now so ancient even I have forgotten about it.
Windows finally took over the PDA market a few years ago, but only after that market was on the verge of disappearing, which it now has.
Despite all these years of work, Microsoft has not yet come up with a user interface that has any "wow" factor to it, for the mobile user. We still need one.
The phone I use today, a Nokia 6610, is in many ways inferior to the PDAs of 10 years ago. The 10-key interface is terrible. There's no way to hand-write into it. The only good thing about it is that it's a one-handed interface. When I put appointments into it, however, I still need to put my full concentration into the task. The same is true for anything else having to do with data.
So far as I can see, we've been spinning our wheels here for a decade and a half, and Microsoft has been spinning along with us, going nowhere.
This should be news. That it's not speaks volumes of how shallow the computer press was, and is.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Thuktun on September 28, 2005 12:48 PM writes...
From the point of view of a potential PDA consumer, I think it comes down to cost.
PalmOS ran on highly reduced hardware compared with mobile versions of Windows. The PalmOS PDA I own has a paltry 8 MB of RAM and a 16 MHz CPU that I got for under $200 in early 2001. The Windows CE devices of the same time required about four times as much memory and cost 3-4 times as much as that.
This differences doesn't appear to have decreased. What remains of PalmOS PDAs still sell for close to $200, while Windows ones sell for $400-$500. I personally don't have any uses right now for a PDA that justify that kind of price. Without higher demand, I doubt they can scale up production enough to lower the price significantly.
Interestingly, Apple might be able to make its own entry into the PDA market in the not-too-distant future, if it chose to. What is an iPod if not a specialized PDA?
Permalink to Comment2. Jesse Kopelman on September 28, 2005 03:42 PM writes...
Killing off the Newton was Job's biggest mistake ever.
Permalink to Comment3. Russell Shaw on September 28, 2005 07:25 PM writes...
BlackBerry has that interface.. the ideal phone-PDA. New mods in pipeline.
Many third-party apps for full Word, Excel, PPT attachment viewing, and even editing. PDF support as well.
SSP but my BlackBerry Blog on weblogs, inc. is at www.bbhub.com
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