Nagel Keynote Opens The PalmSource Conference

and that is one reason I plan on moving to japan

Linux is not a "very small player" considering it has more desktop marketshare than Macintosh computers.

Do you have any references to support these claims? I find this hard to believe. I can see Linux as occupying a large portion of the server market, but not on the desktop.

Jim

>And you would be right. Linux as a desktop OS is for geeks only right now. Windows and Mac are for real people.

Yes, because geeks aren't real people. :rolleyes:

-- jws
(Palm m100 > Palm IIIc > Oregon Scientific Osaris > Palm m125 > Sony CLIE SJ22 > Palm Tungsten|E)

"it is clear that Macs are sadly a dying platform"

Mac being the de facto standard in industrial design and publishing I do not see why you call it a dying platform. Besides, if someone is going to lose share to Linux it is going to be Microsoft and that is going to be for just one reason: If you have apple with say a 10% share and Microsoft with a 90% and you want Linux or unix or Palm for PC or Simbian for PC to gain some market which company's share will you focs on?

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Former Tapwave's Helix fan, now a T|T3 fan.

Quote: If you have apple with say a 10% share and Microsoft with a 90%

Except that Apple has nowhere near 10% marketshare. Currently it is around a mere 3%, and hasn't been above 5% in years.

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Contributing Editor, Digital Media Thoughts
Editor, Pocketfactory.com

With the increasing number of Linux live CDs (good for intro) and with the continuing support of IBM, Sun, Novell, HP etc, Linux is bound to continue rising especially on the server end. Those new to Linux I suggest trying out Knoppix.

Desktop Linux may take a few more years to mature, but right now I am seeing it everywhere. Even 60 year old grandmothers are using them on 100Mhz old PCs.

Do you have any references to support these claims?

Actually, as I understand it, those numbers touted by the Linux camp are for new computer purchases, an area where Apple has been abysmal now for the past decade or so (>3%). The total installed base of Macs is probably significantly higher, at least for now. But a valid point, nonetheless.

As they say buddy, "Go to where the puck is going, not to where it is."

As they say buddy, "Go to where the puck is going, not to where it is."

Who are you... Don "The Femme" Cherry?

I'll bet you've never dropped yer gloves, buddy.

;-)

It's just too big.

Ladies, ladies... why are you b****ing at eachother?

Just enjoy the article...

Folks, :-)/The UGly Truth etc might get some feathers ruffled now & again but he/she/it does make some valid points.

A year ago I thought '03 would be a watershed year for Smartphones. Aside from the Treo 600, I haven't seen *anything* that excites me to any great deal (and the 600 still has room for improvement but it's a helluva good step in the right direction).

I think that a huge hurdle for smartphone acceptance is cost. Your average joe 6-pack consumer will go into his carrier's store with an expired contract. He can re-up for 2 years and get a new flashy T730 or a Kyocera slider or something similarly hip. They have color screens, polyphonic ringers, possibly even a built-in camera (I mean the "free w/ 2 year commitment" phone deals). How on earth can someone like that be persuaded to drop $300-$400 on a Smartphone that might be "harder to use & more likely to break" (in their opinion) than their subsidized freebie that does "more or less the same stuff" (out of the box, they are actually pretty right with that assertion.

I think that as long as the sheer volumes of standard cell handsets being sold continue to refelct a fairly decent features:price ratio, smartphones will at best achieve maybe......20% market penetration amongst the techie/affluent/gee-whiz cell phone crowd? And you'll still have the die-hard early adopters who would rather wield something like a T68 & a T3 and alternate their equipment upgrades (new PDA this year, new cel the next etc).

Rant:
Finally, like :-), I don't see what's so spectacular over Apple's online store, aside from ease of use and decent availability. Who cares if you can download Christina & Britney online? They'r in every new music section and ever used bin in America. What I want to see is a SERIOUS commitment by the labels to drop the price of all new releases-$9.99 would be nice-and make serious inroads to archiving and offerng online all deleted backatalog albums that are no longer in print. As a fan of non-mainstream acts (or once mainstream acts that are no longer "relevant" in the eyes of their labels), it's important that these bodies of work, no matter the lack of mainstream appeal, be preserved for collectors & future generations of fans. In addition to that, there is still a lot of material out there, especially old 7" & 12" singles and whatnot, that has never been released on CD and is likely never to be. Imagine someone like Arista or Warner Bros. opening an online museum, offerng these moldy old tracks for, say, less than $1 apiece. They'd still get *something* for these old tunes (think along the lines of a 25 year old Flock of Seagulls b-side)which is more than you can say for someone buying a used CD off of E-Bay or a used music retailer.

"Here's a suggestion - take your best two handles, The Ugly Truth and face icon, and combine them into one great super-handle that fits you to a T - The Ugly Face."

Good one, Bosco! You had me ROTFL... Like hoodoo did for his 32K x 32K post the other day, you deserve some kind of award.

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M100==>M500==>T|T==>T|T2==> ?

I cannot speak for the US market, bu tin Europe smart phone take-up is going very well indeed. Sony-Ericsson 610's are hard to come by, and the new T630 almost impossible becaues they are selling so fast, with the Z600 and P900 also proving popular. As for bluetooth, the take-up is going very well indeed. A recent search for an acceptable quality IR receiver was met recently with a near universal reply of "sorry, we don't do IR stuff anymore, it's all bluetooth". And indeed it is. The bluetooth keyboards and mice now available are also selling reasonably well, and Bluetooth in phones is proving a major selling point, not least because data cables are often hard to come by and always expensive, and Ir devices have a terrible track record of screwing your machine. The only brake to further expansion is that the network operators are charging extortionate rates for data calls, although this should improve once the market reaches saturation point and the price wars start.

T3=>T610

Well, you've got to admit that a T630 and a T3 are not quite in the same league. The T3 has way more powerful software, a lot more memory, and a lot more multimedia power.

But it is true that something like the T630 probably needs just a tad more memory and a screen a bit larger in order to run something like Linux+Qtopia (which will fit fine in 5M Flash and 8M RAM, including PIM and MicroJava) and then the gap will close a lot. I don't expect waiting a lot for this to happen.

You can get a T630 for about 130¤ (low-end Zire terrain) from Vodafone. I'm sure that next year, the device I'm talking about will be there at that price, and the war will heat up.

iPod is overrated.

Bluetooth is underrated. I use it all the time from my first bluetooth phone T39m paired with a handset to controlling my PC with my T3 with PalmVNC.

---
Generic Casio > Psion 5> Palm Vx > m505 > Sony N770C > T625C > NR70V > Toshiba e310 > T/T > HP h2210 > T/T3

StarTac > Ericsson T28m > T39m > T68m > T610 > T630

Next PDA/Phone: T/T4 or VGA PPC or Treo 610/S-E T650

1.) Notwithstanding the fact that your comments regarding apple´s success may be right or wrong, please bear in mind that Nagel said was that in 2003 the iPod and iTunes were a huge success. I think that you can not say much about that because the 20+ iPod wannabes and the 10+ iTunes wannabe that appeared from companies as Rio, Creative, Gateway, Dell, Real Networks among others may prove you wrong. As a matter of fact, HP has licensed iPod and iTunes, that "is just too big".
2.) About the Bluetooth comment, from what I've heard this technology is not very popular in the US but it sure is in Europe. Probably your comment is based on an US bias.
3.) About the smartphone issue, I have no idea whatsoever.

1) iPod is a nice piece of industrial design Apple had an outside shop create. No more, no less. It's done well because of looks + timing - not because it's a particularly brilliant piece of engineering.

2) Correct.

3) Smartphones aren't even a blip on the radar. I used to think PalmOS phones had a chance. Then I saw phones like the Sony Ericsson T630. In a year we'll see a phone wth the P900's features in a package around the size of a T630. At that point, Treo becomes the answer to a question NO ONE'S asking.

It's just too big.

1.) Apple's iPod is a nice piece of engineering. There are no movable parts (except for the hold button) the touch sensitive scrollwheel by it self is a "tour de force". Anyway this issue is not ment for this site so lets close it.
2.) Regarding the smartphone, I agree with you to some extent. I would rather have a fully featured Palm and a separate phone that I can synchronize with the palm (via bluetooth preferably).

2) Sony Ericsson T630 + the new CLIE UX = laptop replacement. This will be the combo power users everywhere will be carrying in a few months.

Smartphones like the Treo 600 are just too big and have too many disadvantages to make it.

It's just too big.

Or another way of looking at it:
PalmSource is a very small company looking to reduce its costs as much as possible and raise its revenues as much as possible.

They are resource constrained in a way the MS is not. They must focus on the critical success factors first. Going forward they really have to focus everything on how to make the best OS for the smartphone market.

They cant do everything, they cant even do many of the things they should do and that leaves a lot on the list of things they want to do.