Newsweek on Palm's New Reach

This is vs. the traditional meaning of "vaporware" as something that is announced but never actually seen in use and/or in the flesh like...Cobalt, Copland, ALP etc?

What exactly are you prediction/envisioning/suggesting here? Palm pulling the plug on the Pre at the 11th hour ala the Fooleo in order to tweak the hardware? Or the Pre shipping with Garnet with the Linux-based version coming "later"? Or the Pre simply never materializing?

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

To kill it at this stage of the game would be corporate suicide for Palm. It's far from perfect, sure, but it's got the market whipped up again over Palm in exactly the way Colligan hinted at a few months ago when he gave that nebulous comment about "starting to see some buzz".

While I don't want to speak for anyone else, I think it's definitely safe to say that I am less "sold" on the device than Ryan or Tim at this stage of the game (because I can be very curmudgeonly and set in my ways about certain things, such as being in Verizon, and having SD cards, styli, 5-way navigators, and Hotsyncs) but there's no questioning the fact that Palm has some tangibly good concepts going on amongst the smoke & mirrors and you canot question the device's sleekness and aesthetic appeal. If they just wouldn't cheap out on the hardware so much...

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

The Pre is vaporware.

When it actually ships, it become real.

Wikipedia defines vaporware as:

Vaporware is a term used to describe a software or hardware product that is announced by a developer well in advance of release, but which then fails to emerge after having well exceeded the period of development time that was initially claimed or would normally be expected for the development cycle of a similar product.

So going by that, Pre becomes vaporware if, say, it doesn't come out by the end of the year (as that would be having "well exceeded" the "first half '09" release schedule).

In other words: not vaporware.

By this strange and loose definition, all launches are for vaporware until they are not. I can't remember the last time there was a launch event for any device that was already shipping. Maybe Apple did an ipod event once where the devices were available in apple stories immediately afterwards. But definitely the exception to the rule.

Look, you can have a Pre in your frikkin HAND and WAVE it in front of SV's puss and he'd STILL wail "Vaporware!"

He is becoming a self-inflicted joke now.

BTW, SV, what Palm device are you using right now? Do you plan to upgrade to the Pre when it becomes "real"? Is there even a slight possibility that you will use a Palm device in the future? Inquiring minds want to know!


"twrock is infamous around these parts" (from my profile over at Brighthand due to my negative 62 rep points rating)

Again, this is a rather hazy recollection from something he posted ages ago to PIC so I may be fairly off in this story and so apologize if I'm terribly off.

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

Agreed, but it's a helluva lot farther along than anyone anticipated. "Vaporware" is better than "slideware," which is what I believe the skeptics expected.

Pre has yet to qualify as vaporware.

Palm III -> Sony NR610C -> Sony NR70 -> Sony NX80 -> Palm T|X -> HTC Kaiser -> HTC Fuze

Pre:
Multitasking better exposed in the UI
A better camera
A physical keyboard - for those who like those things

Iphone:
Better hardware and software ecosystem
A real SDK - not just javascript/css/html web apps

The Pre is a compelling piece of hardware, as long as Palm doesn't go cheap on the hardware (like they have in the past) and doesn't release a bug-ridden device without timely updates.

Apple has consistently updated the OS on the iphone, and added new features (itunes, app store, etc.)

While I doubt Apple will leapfrog the Pre in a few months, it would be insane to assume that Apple doesn't have newer stuff in their labs.

However based on their track record, I assume they will eventually release an "iphone 3.0" - my prediction is June.

* I need GSM, preferably T-Mobile, but I'll switch to AT&T if necessary. I don't think I can be talked into going Sprint.

* I need a Rhapsody compatible music player. I don't pirate music, and I can't imagine *buying* it any more when I can simply have it on-demand. If it was Rhapsody on the handset compatible, all the better!

* I need a reasonably powerful media player like CorePlayer for video.

* I need to be able to open MS Word and Excel documents, and PDFs. Editing would be even better. While I can do PowerPoint on my Nokia E71, I never have.

What are the odds that any of these features are available on a Pre-like device soon? I gave up my Treo 680 for an E71 recently, and while the phone is much nicer and can do many more things, it is totally missing the Zen of my Palm, and I miss the Zen tremendously. WebOs looks to have Zen all over the place, but can it do the things it needs to? Does anyone outside of Palm even know?

AFAIK, there's only one standard in use for DRM music (not standard as in protocol, standard as in can work on more than one category of device unlike an iPod or Zune) and that's Microsoft's "Plays for Sure." Rhapsody, the now deceased Yahoo! Music, Napster, MTV, and all the rest of the bit players use this protocol. My 680 supported it with PocketTunes, my E71 supports it out of the box. We know the Pre supports Windows Media, but does it support encrypted Windows Media?

As for DataViz, you don't like Documents to Go? What's better?

Oh yeah?

I once lived in a small city. The race for Mayor was ferocious. I mean, we expected blood in the streets.

Two days before the election, a local paper ridiculed one of the candidates because he had a beard, somehow indicating he wasn't "one of the people" and somehow stuck-up.

The day before the election, that candidate was on a street corner - WITHOUT his beard.

Given the toilet that the economy is being flushed down, Palm could see itself out on a street corner begging for buyers - with StyleTap *included in ROM* as a very last-minute thing.

And, like the guy who took off his beard, it might actually work *against* them.