Inspite media reports, HP has no plans to shelve Palm smartphones.
“On the contrary,” insists Tim Pettitt, Palm’s senior product manager of smartphones at a briefing today in San Francisco, Calif. “Palm is going to be the mobility play for HP!”
Expect to see more smartphones coming from HP/Palm as well new mobile devices such as tablets/slates, printers and netbooks, all powered by the company’s mobile operating system, WebOS.
“Our goal is really to expand the form factor. We built WebOS to go on any device. So we knew we’re going to move off smartphones eventually… So definitely you’ll keep seeing things new coming out from Palm.”
It’ll be interesting to see if HP/Palm is able to break in the smartphone market, today dominated by Apple’s iPhone, Google Android and RIM. But you can forget about Nokia. The Finnish company just doesn’t get mobile Internet.
Todd Bradley is the man behind HP's decision to acquire Palm. Bradley heads HP PC's consumer division and is the former Palm CEO
What a deal!
H-P said it will pay $5.70 in cash per share for Palm, when only 2-weeks ago, on April 12, the same shares were worth over $6!
And despite the headlines, H-P is really forking less than $1 billion for Palm, as the smartphone maker has roughly $600 million in cash and short term investments, but $387 million in long term debt.
This really shows just how Palm executives felt confident in the viability of their company!
So why would H-P buy Palm, beyond just being a fire-sale? Here’s analyst Jack Gold top 5 reasons:
The key management of HP’s Personal Systems Group is composed of nearly all the execs previously running Palm, including HP’s Todd Bradley. So the business and operations of Palm is well understood.
HPs Windows Mobile phone business is dying a rapid death and HP would have had to totally revamp its product line in order to stay in the smartphone business. It could have designed new devices with Android or Windows Phone 7, either of which would have taken time and would be expensive. Palm brings HP a modern and competitive platform that is already designed, implemented, and in production. This saves HP many R&D dollars as well as dramatically accelerates time to market.
HP can leverage its production capabilities to get large volumes of product into the market at low cost. Palm was not able to quickly reduce its costs and profitably compete in all areas of the market.
HP gets a substantial IP and patent base it can use as a defensive threat against the competition (especially Apple, but potentially HTC and Google as well). This is not a trivial issue as many legal battles lie ahead in the smartphone and mobile/portable device marketplace. A strong IP portfolio that is defensible is important. Indeed, the IP may even eventually result in license revenues to HP form some of its competitors.
WebOS could easily be re-positioned for tablets and other consumer devices to compete with Android, iPad, etc. This is a key growth area for HP. It has already shown a Windows based tablet. And since tablets are primarily front ends to the Internet, it allows HP to deploy many cloud-based services from which it can generate revenues, including those in an app store, streamed services, etc.
However, HP has made acquisitions in the past that did not really work out, and HP has not always been good at integrating acquired technologies in their business.
While the potential for success is there, we will have to wait and see how well HP does at integrating Palm into their mainstream operations before calling this a win for HP.
The head of HTC's business in the Americas, Jason MacKenzie, explains why competitors' App Store strategy is a crime to developers!
In a keynote style that reminds me of Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer, HTC’s head of the Americas went as far as accusing his competitors (Apple, Motorola, Nokia or Palm) of committing a crime on developers with their App Store strategy.
“A lot of OEMs, a lot of manufacturers talk a lot about apps… Apps, apps, apps, great, cool apps. But what do they do? They relegate all of your hard work and your application to a simple little icon that is in a sea of a hundred of other icons… But unless you’ve got the best icon graphic in the world, when I hold that phone here [about 2 feet away from this eyes] yours look no different than anybody else. We think that’s criminal. Literally,” said Jason MacKenzie, VP Americas at HTC, in his keynote speech the Sprint Open Developer conference yesterday.
On the other hand, the Taiwanese phone maker promotes its Sense framework that let developers put their applications and widgets in front of users, mingled with the smartphone (Android or Windows Mobile) user interface. “We believe that your application should breathe and live on the device and that’s why we developed Sense,” adds MacKenzie.
Early next year, HTC promises to release the Sense SDK (software developers’ kit) for developers to create their own widgets and personalised screens.
Follows the video excerpt where MacKenzie talks about competitors’ app strategy and HTC Sense:
DoubleTwist has been characterized as an iTunes for Android, Google’s phone software.
DoubleTwist also hints at Xbox support
But it is more. That’s because the desktop software also works with the Palm Pre, the Blackberry, Nokia phones, the Kindle and the Sony PSP, acting as a management center for music and media the way iTunes does. Want to share with another device? Just drag and drop. DoubleTwist is multi-platform
Now founder Monique Farantzos says the service is coming to the cloud. Within “months” DoubleTwist will allow content to be uploaded and stored on DoubleTwist servers for portable access, Farantzos said late last week during a presentation at an SDForum event.
She also suggested DoubleTwist’s list of compatible devices would soon include Microsoft’s Xbox game console.
The 20-person company has been creating a storm of interest – in addtion to $7.5 million in venture capital from the likes of Index Ventures.
Its software has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times since in launched in February, according to a post last month on TechCrunch.
The GSM version of Palm's Pre has surfaced in Vietnam. Next, the UK?
Palm Pre second act is set to begin in Europe, a month after its launch in the U.S.
According to British daily newspaper The Guardian, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-company choseO2 as the exclusive operator for the U.K. market. A press conference will be held next week to unveil the news.
O2 is also the sole distributor in the UK for the iPhone 3GS which comes free with an 18-months contract (for the 16GB version), spurring rumours that the Pre will also be available for free with an 18-months contract.
Palm GSM Pre has been ready since February
Palm first showed the “world” version (or GSM) of its smartphone last February at the Mobile World Congress last February in Barcelona.
Indicative of an imminent launch – presumably in September – Palm’s GSM Pre has recently been seen “in the wild” in Vietnam and reviewed by a local reseller.
However it first appears that Palm’s Pre data transmission speed will not match that of the iPhone 3GS.
Here’s the video excerpt of the Palm GSM Pre review from a local Vietnamese reseller:
HP Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web: an all-in-one printer glued to an iPod touch, with a capacitive touchscreen and an App Store!
It’s been a very very long time since I was exciting about using a printer. A bit like using an uninterruptible power supply or a backup system!
But with it’s latest all-in one printer/scanner/fax, H-P makes printing cool again.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web (with the money H-P spends in marketing, it could have easily found a more shorter and sexier name!) uses the same printing engine than the currently shipping Photosmart Premium C8180 – a Wi-Fi/Bluetooth multi-function printer which it will be replacing – but with an iPod touch-like capacitive touchscreen instead of the current smaller screen and series of buttons, and combined with H-P’s Apps Studio; yet another applications store.
H-P takes a page from the iPhone playbook and starts an Apps Store for printers
And just as with the iPhone, Palm Pre, etc., it will soon be possible to download apps for your printer!
At the launch event earlier today hosted at Al Gore’s Current TV studios in San Francisco, H-P showed apps from USA Today, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, DreamWorks Animation, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku, Weathernews as well as the company’s online site Snapfish.
With these apps, you’ll be able to customize, choose, print… daily news, maps, coupons, coloring pages, movie tickets, recipes, personal calendars and more – all at the touch of a finger.
Under the hood, the Web printer is running Linux with Nokia’s Qt application and graphical-user interface framework.
The Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web will be available in the U.S. in September for $399 (the current Photosmart Premium, model C8180, is being discounted at less than $250 on Amazon.com) and next year for the rest of the world.
Here’s an excerpt of our exclusive interview with product marketing manager Ravikiran Adusumilli, going into more details on the printer capabilities (Wi-Fi setup, touchscreen, micro-transactions, auto-duplex printing…) that took 1.5 years to get to market:
The Palm Pre stands no chance to compete against a cheaper iPhone 3G. And even less so against a much better featured but equally priced iPhone 3G S
The $200 Palm Pre and its 18 applications stand no chance against a $99 iPhone 3G with 50K+ applications and even less so against a souped up iPhone 3G S.
In announcing the newest iPhone at the company’s software developer conference – where pundits thought there would be no hardware news! – Apple further extended the gap with its competition, at least for another year.
It took 2-years for the first real competitor to the iPhone to show up a.k.a the Palm Pre; and it will probably take at least 2 more years for Palm to catch up on the software side, if ever.
Developers can’t go wrong with the iPhone
Actually, I think the game is over for Palm. Why would a developer bother? The users are on the iPhone, new business models (subscription, micro-payments) are now available.
Perhaps Android – which Apple mentioned during the keynote – might have a chance to grab enough market share and become a distant second, with its open source model.
But for Palm, RIM, Nokia/Symbian, they are relegated to be niche players in an mobile Web world dominated by iPhones.
For the Palm Pre, Sprint offers a cheaper unlimited everything monthly plan than AT&T for the iPhone... plus a free keyboard!
2 weeks ago we wrote that iPhone users could save up to $1,200 over 2-years by switching to Sprint’s wireless plan and the Palm Pre.
Today, BillShrink – the free online personal savings advisor that helps people find the right phone at the best price – confirmed this with its own analysis of the true cost of the Palm Pre vs. the iPhone.
BillShrink calculates the “true” cost of the Palm Pre vs. Apple iPhone
So, to help determine if the switch is the right financial move, as well as the right move based on unique usage habits, the folks at BillShrink put together this apples to apples comparison feature available here.
At first glance, it looks indeed that Sprint offers a better overall value than AT&T for their respective unlimited plans. However their 450 minutes plan (including unlimited data) cost the same, at $70/month.
Palm Pre (Sprint) Cost
$199: cost of phone with $100 rebate
$100/month: Sprint Unlimited data + voice
$69.99/month: 450 voice minutes and unlimited data
$89.99/month: 900 voice minutes
$129.99/month: Family plan for 2 Pre phones ($19.99 for additional lines to family plan)
$169.99: 3000 minutes shared plan
$189.99: Unlimited family plan ($89.99 for additional lines to unlimited everything family plan)
iPhone (AT&T) Cost
$199+: cost of phone
$150/month: AT&T unlimited data + voice (this includes unlimited texting, without unlimited texting it is $129.99)
$69.99/month: 450 voice minutes and unlimited data
$109.99/month: 900 voice minutes+ unlimited messaging (without messaging that number is $89.99)
$129.99 (for 700min and unlimited everything else) Family plan for 2 iPhones ($39.99 for additional lines to family plan)
$209.99 3000 minutes shared plan
$259.99 Unlimited Family plan ($129.99 for additional lines to unlimited everything family plan)
Palm hired Hollywood stars to boost its image and create even more buzz around its upcoming smartphone.
A week before the Pre official launch, Palm and its partner Sprint enticed comedians Jerry Seinfeld and co-star Jason Alexander to host their Pre-launch (sorry for the pun!) party in Hollywood, Calif.
The celebration will feature an interactive California Farmers’ Market (I wonder if we’d able to actually buy some organic produce) benefiting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars veterans of America.
The Palm Pre launch celebration will benefit Iraq and Afghanistan U.S. war veterans
Sprint's unlimited plan can save you more than $1,200 over the 2-year contract vs. AT&T's
It’s now official, Sprint will launch the much-anticipated Palm Pre on June 8th – in 20 days – for $200, with a two-year service agreement and after a $100 mail-in rebate (I hate those!).
The Palm Pre will be available nationwide in Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, in some Wal-Mart stores and online at Sprint.com.
Palm Pre is $1 more expensive than Apple iPhone, but Sprint’s unlimited plan is $50/month cheaper than AT&T’s!
At $200, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-company latest smartphone is a tat more expensive ($1!) than Apple’s 8GB iPhone 3G.
However, if you look at the monthly phone bill – the most important expense over the contract agreement – Sprint’s Simply Everything plan (unlimited voice and data) is $50 per month cheaper than the equivalent plan at AT&T or a $1,200 savings over two years!
Can’t beat that.
Bottom line, if you’re a heavy phone user, and don’t have an iPhone yet or looking to stop being a cash cow for AT&T, the Palm Pre/Sprint combination is an attractive alternative.
Can anyone @IBM fix the WiFi network at #IOD11 ? It's been terrible for the past 2 days and everybody I talked just can't stand it anymore 7 months ago
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