Smartphone Shipments to More Than Double in 2K6

This guy is incredible. With every story, no matter how innocuous, he manages to come up with a post which is loaded with negative connotations for Palm.

This is coming from someone who has described himself as a 'WM Advocate', who regularly posts links to announcements of new WinCE devices and who generally bends over backwards to repeat all the tired old spin about how 'Palm is doomed'.

It's obvious that he spends a huge amount of time every day trawling various mobile computing websites looking for anything negative about Palm.

It's equally obvious that he has never actually used any Palm OS device ... he merely takes things he has read elsewhere and repeats them here ... and yet he tries to pose as some sort of expert and he insists that he is always right.

One example - I remember that a prominent PPC website ran a short article on a new VOIP product about 6 months ago. Someone at that other website posted a comment about how this was yet another reason why WinCE was superior to Palm OS, since there was no equivalent product available for Palm devices. Within 24 hours, our little friend (Surur) was over here at PIC repeating the same thing, without (of course) ever bothering to check his facts - it was obvious he was not aware about the working being done to release a similar product for Palm devices. And since Surur always claims to be right, he would never admit the existence of:

http://www.mobivoip.net/

Surur's performances here are like a nun providing advice on family planning practices - he doesn't know what he is talking about, but he is always ready to parrot what he has heard elsewhere.

The question remains: What motivates this behaviour?

Every industry analyst defining the term differently certainly doesn't help...

The space is pretty confused right now with sort-of-feature phones and kinda-smart phones and so forth, but I expect that it will become more clear as it becomes less crowded as the failed experiments drop by the way side.

May You Live in Interesting Times

people who actually thought a smartphone is a phone smart enough to tell them when their checking account will hit overdraft or how to avoid traffic on some highway.

It's technically possible today, it's just a matter of companies integrating the right applications, infrastructure and systems.

Much better to keep recycling the same old BS, and selling overpriced ringtones to teenagers.

To paraphrase the old saying: it's easy money if you can get it!
:-)

"It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth".
Lord Chesterfield

Cross-functional issues across different organizations can be really challenging

Challenging but not impossible. If they were impossible then we wouldn't have the airline reservation system, electronic money transfer (including VISA, Mastercard and Amex), cellular telephones or for that matter the internet.

As said earlier, it's merely a matter of motivation to implement those ideas, it's not even that challenging to implement. It's stuff that can be done with today's systems, today's smartphones and today's software.

Except the how-to-avoid traffic bit. there's a lot of infrastructure missing for that one.

TomTom have their traffic subscription service up and running now for their navigation devices:

http://tinyurl.com/gaagk

It illustrates my point perfectly, these systems are possible and running today, it's a matter of companies having the finance and motivation to implement them.

"It is commonly said, and more particularly by Lord Shaftesbury, that ridicule is the best test of truth".
Lord Chesterfield

How does Tom-tom know about the traffic accident that occured 10 minutes ago that will cause traffic to stop dead for an hour on the interroute 3?

Here's one way in the UK: www.trafficengland.com
Naturally there are counterparts for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
I can't speak for the rest of Europe.

There are so many roadside cameras, sensors etc in the UK that such a system is possible. Naturally the system can't know of an accident without someone entering the info first!

Having said that, there are sensors in the road at strategic locations which can monitor the speed of traffic flow; I presume they can automatically raise an alert if there was a dramatic fall in speed.

Also don't forget that London has the congestion charge zone where cameras look at your vehicle's number plate and send the bill to your address for entering the zone accordingly.

I think you might be a tiny bit optimistic about how much infrastructure is actually in place in the EU.

I don't know how it is for the rest of the EU; here's how it is in the UK.
Just accept that it's an unfortunate coincidence that the site is down; it was there when I looked at it earlier. Try these other sites as well:
www.trafficscotland.org
http://www.trafficmap.co.uk
http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews

Well, that sure is irrelevant to the point.

Yes, there is "infrastructure" to support what you are suggesting. But in Europe, as in the US, that infrastructure is fairly fragile -- which is my point.

We've got Sigalert here in the San Francisco Bay area. It's on a par with the British system. Manhattan has congested fee zones, although they use different technology than London.

None of this works very well, either in the US or in Europe, for routing people around accidents, for a lot of complex reasons that have to do with traffic control and congestion.

It's worse in the US than it is in Europe, but it's not very good anywhere -- except possibly Tokyo.

It's easier to see the problem in the US, so I'll describe it based on US infrastructure: In areas where traffic density is low enough that alternative routes can handle the route-around, there's not enough money to put in the infrastructure -- and not enough traffic to justify spending the money.

On the other hand, where traffic density is high enough to justify spending the money, there's usually no route-around that can handle the traffic in the event of an accident, so there's not much advantage in knowing about it.

Besides, the low tech techniques, in the form of the drive time traffic report on the radio, work just as well, if not better than the far more expensive high tech ones.

May You Live in Interesting Times