The company’s OS does what is required within restrictive parameters and does it well
David Shapshak
“Palm is a religion, not a technology,” I once tried to explain to a non-user.
Consumers of the world’s most popular handheld computer are a somewhat fanatical bunch, bettered only by the 9000 or so programmers who make mostly free “shareware” software available for them.
The only other bunch of true information technology fanatics are the much-maligned Mac users and the followers of the open source Linux. Like Apple, Palm makes both the hardware and operating system; but unlike the computer maker, the former division of networking giant 3Com has licensed hardware production to, among others, Sony and Handspring.
Phone maker Qualcomm makes a phone model with a flip open screen that reveals a Palm interface; while Nokia, which has the largest cellphone market share in South Africa, has also licensed the Palm OS.
This is Palm’s advantage. It makes, and has been successfully making, robust operating systems (OS) designed specifically for mobile devices. The Palm OS does what is required of a handheld computer within the restrictive parameters (size, processing power and battery life) and does it well.
The Pocket PC runs a slimmed-down version of the Windows operating system originally called Windows CE, for consumer electronics the reason it is more familiar to desktops users. It has “pocket” versions of the popular Office productivity suite, most notably Word and Excel, as well as Internet Explorer and Outlook (which handles your e-mail, diary and contacts).
One of the principle things I hear said in the “Pocket PC is better than Palm” debate is that the former, being a Windows OS, lets you play videos, MP3s and other digital media.
But, my question is, why would you want to watch a video on your handheld? MP3s maybe, as handhelds have a better interface for such file selections than the stand-alone music format players. What’s more, previous CE versions have required most of their resources for running their operating system and battery live for powering the colour screen.
What I like about Palm is that it is a true portable operating system. When I hit any of the hot buttons, it’s on. Unlike the Pocket PC, which gets enough juice for a day, the Palm battery last two weeks I use it frequently as well as using a power-draining foldout keyboard.
There’s a Palm program I often show non-users to explain the unbelievable lateral thinking that goes into programming for such a small device. It’s a common scientific principle, but the application is quite something, and its size is just seven kilobytes (a fraction of space compared to what memory is needed for PC applications).
All this little application does is turn the screen black thereby turning the Palm into a mirror. Simple, innovative, and in the right circumstances, invaluable.
The economic downturn that followed the dotbomb implosion earlier this year hasn’t been kind to techno- logy in general and handheld computers in particular. Psion, maker of the original clam-shell “super-calculator”, has stopped making its electronic personal organisers.
Announcing the end of the road for the British firm in July, CEO David Levin said: “There is a plethora of products on the market, prices are falling quickly and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate. It’ll end up like the PC market, where none of the hardware manufacturers make money.”
The company’s founder and chairperson, David Potter, put it bluntly at the time, saying the personal digital assistant (PDA) market was “grossly oversupplied”.
Palm was rumoured to be considering using its unsold inventory as landfill when the sudden hand-braking of the global information technology spend and a bungled product range transition saw it caught with more stock than it could sell and a new range of handhelds waiting to ship.
The threat of the Pocket PC has also eaten into its market share, although Palm is still dominant.
Palm last month reported first-quarter revenues of $214,3-million for the 2002 fiscal year, which ended on August 31. This was down 47% from the $401-million it reported during the same quarter a year ago but up 30% from the $165,3-million reported in the fourth quarter of the 2001 fiscal year.
Announcing the results, Carl Yankowski, Palm’s CEO, summed up his firm’s position: “The Palm brand, customer satisfaction and loyalty continue to be robust. Our device and OS leadership remained strong over the quarter in the face of significantly increased competition.”
He’s not joking. Microsoft and its hardware partners have mounted a strong drive and a new version of the Pocket PC OS is due to be launched with the new desktop operating system, Windows XP, soon.
But research firm IDC estimates Palm’s market share is 77% in the United States and 69% worldwide; while the IDC expects the Palm-licensed smartphones-PDA combination to gain 58% and 19% of the US and global markets respectively by the end of this year.
So Palm has reason to feel optimistic and the recent launch of its new range of PDAs has helped as has shipping about 750 000 Palm-branded devices bringing its cumulative shipments to more than 14-million.
The entry level m125 has just been released, while the top-end m500 series all feature eight megabytes of memory an expansion slot for either of the postcard-sized Secure Digital and MultiMediaCard cards that can hold an entire dictionary, a games pack, a travel guide, or just 16-megabytes of storage space and a new release of the operating system, version 4.0.
Built into this OS are many of the features that were available to Pocket PC users but required an additional download for the Palm. These include the ability to copy and use Microsoft Word and Excel files, a digital picture and video viewer, and a Palm reader to read e-books. The existing e-mail and Internet software has been beefed up, giving it better wireless and telephony functionality, as well as the ability to send the other messaging “killer app”, SMSs.
Even though the top-of-the-line m505 has a colour screen, I found it did not adversely drain the battery one of the main criticisms of the Compaq iPaq for instance.
Whether or not my eyes can perceive all 65 000 colours the m505 screen emits, the quality of photographs is unbelievably good. Wallets are no longer the preserve of family nostalgia, when a colour image of your wedding day or a clip of your baby’s first steps can be seen on screen.
I was impressed by the newness and ease of version four’s enhanced navigation but even more so by the latest version of DataViz’s Documents To Go. I used the longest, graphics-heavy Word document and the most complex Excel spreadsheet I could to test it and was pleasantly pleased with the ease of using it, and how well it converted back on to my laptop. It will also display a PowerPoint presentation.
Other new features are a USB docking cradle which, according to the manual, syncs 4,5 times faster than the old serial port one and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery.
The m500 has everything the m505 does, except the colour screen a useful option where you are working in harsh daylight or simply don’t require the colour.
And Palm has a good spread with its range of models, priced from R1299 to R5999, that appeal to the young and funky entry-level market the m125 has clip-off coloured face plates and the smaller, lighter m500 series, for which there are a variety of wireless cradles that will use the emerging wireless technologies, such as 802.11b and Bluetooth, to connect to other devices and the Internet.
Also the so-called smartphones, combining PDA and cellphone into one device, will start emerging soon, but with wireless networking becoming increasingly available, I would prefer to have a separate phone and PDA that use the Bluetooth wire replacement technology to transfer data between them. Cellphones and PDAs have differing needs and requirements, and as a result different screen sizes. But that is a whole other debate.