Palm Showing at Cannes Film Festival

Posted By: Ed Saturday, May 12, 2001 9:23:28 AM

The Cannes Film Festival is going on now and Palm OS handhelds are there. Several companies have also released new content to mark the occasion.

Palm's chief marketing officer Satjiv Chahil, said, "The worlds of technology and film are converging. The film industry has continually embraced and enhanced new technologies, from the advent of sound and color, to video and DVD. Palm is now taking the Palm platform and the entertainment industry to the next level with the latest wireless and media technologies. With the new SD and MultiMediaCard expansion slot on the m500 series we're laying the foundation for the day when the latest Cannes film hit could be available on an SD card, ready to watch on your Palm handheld."

Palm Inc. is giving out a on-Palm festival guide to attendees as an alternate to the bulky paper one. They are also giving out a free CD with Ginger 2.0, which allows filmmakers to describe shots as visuals when and where they come to them and then sketch them. Ginger also allows users to keep track of where and when shots will take place. The CD also has the Movie Pack database bundle from Handmark with six movie/video databases and the Moviefone PQA.

PalmTec Ltd has released the Internet Movie Database in TomeRaider format. The IMDB is the largest and most current movie guide available. They had to reduce the file size by limiting it to films which had a UK or US cinema release. Still, there is information on nearly 30 thousand films. They will release new versions of the data every two months.

Generic Media is giving entertainment and media luminaries, studio executives, and actors Palm Vx's pre-installed with their gMovie Player and a gMovie format trailer of 20th Century Fox's Moulin Rouge, a movie appearing at Cannes.

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Movies on SD/MMC

I.M. Anonymous @ 5/12/2001 10:08:55 AM #

Imagine what kind of crappy quality of a movie that was compressed to fit at least a 64 MB SD/MMC card.

RE: Movies on SD/MMC

I.M. Anonymous @ 5/12/2001 10:12:10 AM #

Manufacturers are promising SD cards will be up to 1GB by 2003. By then the Palm's screen will be higher resolution. Still pretty small, tho. People do buy Watchman TVs but I doubt this is for me.

Why ?

Gepeto @ 5/12/2001 12:10:41 PM #

I mean what is the point of having a movie on your PDA?
And the 1gb cards will cost a lot, even in a couple of years !
PDA companies should stop trying to do too much with a PDA.

RE: Why ?

GregGaub @ 5/12/2001 1:17:46 PM #

The other side of the coin is that if they DIDN'T try to do "too much with a PDA" we'd still be using PalmPilots with 256k of RAM. I mean, what do you really need a PDA for other than events, addresses, todos, and memos? Oh yeah, there's spreadsheets, ebooks, maps, web pages, etc... Those were all things that people said PDAs weren't made to do, but they did them anyway. Now, no one would even consider a PDA that didn't at least have the ability to do all those things with 3rd party software.
Yes, movies will look like crap on a PDA... at first. But if they didn't try, it would certainly never get better. Personally, I'm surprised there isn't already a TV springboard module so that Visor users can watch the tube on their PDA. Given how small "watchman" TVs can be, I'm not it wouldn't be that difficult.
-Greg

RE: Why ?

MadMax @ 5/13/2001 9:28:11 PM #

Product demos, training videos, as well as on site analysis & inspections (not to mention video record). Vertical market solutions using an "over the counter" device is a very attractive route; The hardware has many other day to day uses thus, making it a very cost effective solution--[almost] Everybody already owns a Palm hand held.

Palm 505 at Cannes Film Festival

I.M. Anonymous @ 5/12/2001 12:20:44 PM #

Well, I guess we now know where all those 505s, that aren't at the Palm Store, went to.

While I'm waiting on a rerplacement of a defective 505, bimbos, er starlets are playing with my replacement unit, in the south of France. So to speak.

Unfair, life is so unfair.

Stop Complaining!

PalmLuver @ 5/13/2001 6:33:13 AM #

Why fuss over such petty matters? If everyone shared the same views that there should be a limit to PDA expandability, I shudder to think what would happen to the Visor Springboard modules business (not that I care cos' I use a Palm)! We should feel lucky that we are not stuck with the software/hardware that came in the box.

Sound?

I.M. Anonymous @ 5/13/2001 11:51:56 AM #

who would want to watch a movie on their palm w/no sound?

RE: Sound?

I.M. Anonymous @ 5/13/2001 12:36:30 PM #

If you're watching it on a new Sony Clie with 320 x 320 screen you can listen to it on the stereo headphones.

I don’t like where this road is leading . . .

I.M. Anonymous @ 5/14/2001 1:48:18 PM #

Maybe I don’t get it (but I think I do - especially after the introduction of the m50x series). Whatever happened to, “Simply Palm?” If I’m not mistaken, the original success of Palm was that their products were focused, intuitive, minimal and relatively inexpensive. I’m all for revising and updating a product, e.g., the Vx is a great product, but I thought Palm would do more in the area of battery life, wireless connectivity, onboard memory, screen size and resolution, overall size and price, rather than trying to sell me on their products because, “The worlds of technology and film are converging.” What the hell is that? How ‘bout this Palm - before you get to putting full-length movies on a Palm, how about dropping the price on the m500 to about $250 and include (steal) the soft-graffiti idea. If people wanted this on a handheld device, there’s already a product on the market for that - Pocket PC. More and more, it seems HandEra, despite making a “butt-ugly” product, is the place to go if you hold true to the original Palm concept, especially if they can find some way to slim it down a little.