During his keynote on consumer products failures, New York Times columnist David Pogue shared his personal RIM nightmare story with the audience here at FailCon.
For Pogue, RIM decided to ship the incomplete Blackberry Storm in the Fall of 2008 because it was under pressure to deliver it to Verizon for the start of the holiday season.
“It [Blackberry Storm] was horrible. It was a piece of crap. It was so filled with bugs, I will be on the phone every day with RIM… It just doesn’t work,” explains Pogue.
But what made this a complete disaster for RIM is it continuously denied that the Blackberry Storm had any problems, despite tons of consumer complaints on the Web and a devastating email Pogue received from one of the Storm team member:
“When you wrote that this product was released prematurely, you were absolutely right, and everybody here knew it… Internally, many of us argued that we would be hurting ourselves by rushing it out the door. Obviously, our managers disagreed,” reads the email.
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.
In a report published today, MobileTrax principal analyst Gerry Purdy calls Apple to fix the iPhone 4 faulty antenna design.
Apple will need to fix the faulty design of the iPhone antenna. I can assure you that the iPhone 5 won’t have that problem. It might have another problem, but it won’t continue the antenna problems in the iPhone 4. I’m confident that Apple engineering will ensure the future iPhone (and iPad) products will have antennas that work properly.
Apple’s faulty design has consumers wonder if they should buy Apple’s smartphone or not
It has been a real nightmare for Apple, certainly a cause for consternation with millions of iPhone customers, and perhaps a “Wait a minute, should I buy one of these?’ hesitation for a number of prospective iPhone buyers.
And the real winner of Apple’s “Antennagate” ? Antenna engineers!
Simply holding a device should not interfere in any significant way with the network signal reception. And Antennagate will cause other firms such as HTC, Motorola, RIM and Samsung to increase antenna design capabilities to ensure that they won’t have a repeat of the same problem as Apple experienced. It should be a ‘field day’ for antenna design consultants to help all SmartPhone manufacturers fix antenna problems.
In a quite unusual way, IBM “officially” pre-announced tomorrow’s news at a “Nachos and News” event for bloggers only!
This is the second time Big Blue is pre-briefing bloggers over nachos and “weak” beers. I wish they did that for day 1 announcements which were a lot more interesting: project Vulcan, LotusLive cloud offering, etc.
My guess is that feeding bloggers with second-grade announcements ahead of traditional media for day 3 is not much of a big deal.
Anyway, it was also a great opportunity to mingle with some of the people behind Projet Vulcan, which is nice. More on Vulcan on a later post with our conversation with IBM Fellow Carol Jones.
IBM to surpass Microsoft and Google mobile collaboration with Android, iPhone, Nokia, RIM deals
As for the news, as I said earlier, not much excitement aside from a messaging mobility announcement.
“IBM, with those partnerships and RIM, has the strongest messaging collaboration mobility story on the market. In the past we’ve been deemed to be a follower in a lot of these things and I would assert that we are actually ahead of the game now with the completeness of support for Quikr, Connections and Sametime across multiple devices and the fullness of things like encrypted mail support on mobile devices. Nobody is doing that as a base service. You have to go to third parties to get there with Exchange or Google, or anybody else”, said Notes guru Ed Brill.
Below, a video excerpt of the very casual “nachos and news” event.
MotherApp creates native mobile phone applications from Web sites
Looking for a recession proof business? Try mobile applications, and more specifically for the Apple iPhone.
In just a little more than 9 months, Apple will serve the one-billionth iPhone application from its App Store.
A gold rush that left many companies on the starting blocks, incapable of building their own application, either because of a lack of expertise in Objective-C – the computer language used to develop iPhone applications – or of available iPhone developers.
The Hong-Kong base 7-people startup offers a an automated service that will take any Web application and turn it into a native app for the iPhone, Google Android and/or Windows Mobile devices.
Support for the Blackberry is coming in July and in September for Symbian/Nokia.
All you need is a web site to build a iPhone app!
“MotherApp is a kind of compiler and it’s a 2 step process. First you develop a Web site using our HTML standard that includes some proprietary extensions to access the mobile phones special hardware, like the GPS radio or the camera. Then send us a link to the Web site and a day or two later, we send back the native application for any or all of the supported mobile platforms,” explains Ken Law, one of the three co-founders and an ex-Googler (pre-IPO) that I first met earlier this month at the Web 2.0 Expo conference.
A MotherApp application costs $1,000 per mobile platform.
The biggest stumbling block in MotherApp service is that customers have not access to the native mobile application source code. “But they can modify it as much as they want for 6-months for free and we are thinking of a business model where companies would pay a $99 a month subscription for example which will let them change their applications as much a they want,” responds Ken.
The other limitation of MotherApp’s technology is the kind of applications that MotherApp can actually “compile.”
“We are focused on client-server applications, like the Facebook, Youtube or LinkedIn apps. And they can be pretty complex like OpenRice, the Yelp of Hong-Kong. But we can not handle “fancy” applications like video games,” confides Law.
Although MotherApp raised an Angel round from Googlers, the startup is mostly self-funded by the 4 wealthy ex-Googlers co-founders and is already profitable.
The company is looking to expand in Silicon Valley, seeking to partner with Web developers with expertise in developing Web sites and gadgets/widgets and looking to offer mobile apps as well, and Web 2.0 companies wanting to turn their web site into native mobile applications.
For Law, MotherApp’s main competitor is open source development tool PhoneGap.
“The PhoneGap is embedding a browser inside the native application. So instead of learning Objective-C, you can use Web standards like AJAX and CSS. But it’s not a true iPhone app and you can not use the camera or access the device’s file-system for example,” warns Law.
Here’s a video excerpt of my conversation with Law in a Mountain View, Calif.-cafe:
Dell's aspiration to enter the smartphone business might be short lived
Entering the highly competitive mobile handset market with a poorly conceived product and little carriers support surely spells trouble for Dell, told Collin Stewarts analyst Ashok Kumar in a note to clients today.
“Dell plans to enter the smart handset market in a unique manner, by launching its products directly to the retailer… Dell committed itself to the handset business with a poorly planned feature set and cost targets,” wrote Kumar.
Although Dell is a newbie in the mobile phone space, the head of its consumer business – Ron Garriques – is no less than the former chief of Motorola’s handset division.
And talking to Garriques on a visit last year at Dell’s corporate headquarters in Austin, Texas, the ex-Motorola executive is focused on not repeating the mistakes done under his watch at Motorola.
But will consumers buy a product that carriers think is not good enough, asks Kumar. “The early verdict appears to indicate that Dell’s handset is more like a “me too” product with a cost structure that offers little advantage over established players like Apple, Nokia and RIM,” suggests the analyst.
On a related news, Dell is reported to launch its smartphone in China, rather sooner than later. What may be a flop in the U.S., may find a public in China, where Dell enjoys a good reputation.
Of course, time will tell. But if H-P was unsuccessful attracting carriers and customers (even its own employees!) to its Windows Mobile phones, its hard to imagine Dell having better luck to crack the world’s mobile market.
Openmoko is not a cell phone, it's a development platform
The maker of the world’s first totally open mobile phone has a long way to go before it can compete with Apple, RIM or Nokia.
At a special session during the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) today in San Jose, Calif., Openmoko CEO Sean Moss-Pultz discussed how developers could use its FreeRunner to create mobile products.
The device is targeted at developers – not consumers – who then can totally change everything, from its physical aspect and hardware components to the operating system, installing Google Android or Debian Linux, for example.
The ultimate open source smartphone: Openmoko+Google Android
“If you want to write applications, buy an iPhone. But if you want to transform the way the physical product looks, then buy a FreeRunner,” said Moss-Pultz. “I don’t think Apple will let you resell their products with a different operator, with a different market, with a different software stack. But we can.”
Moss-Pultz also argued that at $299 (the show’s special for 30 days), the FreeRunner is unbelievably cheap. “It has all the things you will find on a $3,000 development board [...] You have all the major RF components you want to do real development.”
Openmoko doesn’t do 3G because of “monstrous patents issues”
“The moment we try to do a design with 3G, the cost of this device goes up by $200. And then you have serious issues with documentation, etc.
So we decided that for the first version – to get this concept out there – the free networks like Wi-Fi or Bluetooth were more important for development early on than 3G.
Our stand on 3G is that it is something that at some point we will make. But really, we use this device first to see what markets are interesting out there. And then based on those markets, someone will come back to us and say “I want to place an order for 50,000 of these things with 3G.” And we’ll make it.
That would be for a specific project that they would not care about the openness of the mobile part.”
Here’s a video excerpt of Moss-Pultz presentation at ESC’09:
Microsoft prepares a revamp of its mobile strategy that looks like an Apple copycat.
In a keynote at next week’s Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Microsoft’s chief plans to unveil Windows Mobile 6.5, the latest version of the company’s smartphone operating system, as well as an application store a-la iTunes and the free My Phone wireless “over the air” (OTA) synchronisation service.
However, just like for Windows Vista vs Mac OS X, Microsoft is years behind Apple in its smartphone strategy, despite its 10+ years head start, and this interim 6.5 version still pales compare to the iPhone or even the Palm Pre.
Users will have to wait next year, with the release of Windows Mobile 7 to catch up with Apple’s current generation of iPhones. By then, you can expect lots of improvements coming from the Cupertino, Calif.-company.
No wonder that Windows Mobile slid from its position as the world’s second-most popular mobile operating system a year ago to now be number four, behind Nokia’s Symbian, Apple’s OS X Mobile, and RIM’s BlackBerry. And by next year, Windows phones might slid even one more notch behind Palm’s Pre!
The new Blackberry Storm costs Research in Motion $202.89 to build, according to an iSuppli tear down of the phone.
The Storm represents a win for Qualcomm
The phone is the first from RIM with a touch-screen display and sells for $249.99 with a $50 rebate from Verizon, illustrating how wireless carriers subsidize handsets.
The Storm, for the most part, matches up with Apple’s iPhone 3G. Its touch-screen is made possible with a $15.50 capacitive touch-screen overlay from Synaptics, iSuppli said Thursday.
Yet, “RIM has added a special differentiating feature from the iPhone: the ‘clickable’ screen. The one thing that existing touchscreens lack is the feedback mechanism users get from a conventional keyboard that clicks when a key is depressed, letting you know quickly that your choice has been registered,” said Andrew Rassweiler, principal analyst.
However, it doesn’t have multi-touch technology.
“The Storm uses a simple physical button under the primary touch-screen to serve to provide haptic feedback,” says Senior Analyst Tina Teng. “This allows one physical key press at a time, meaning there is no double-tapping capability with the Storm.”
The phone represents a big win for Qualcomm. RIM uses a $34.82 Qualcomm baseband processor for the first time. RIM has used Marvel chips in the past.
Also in the handset are an $11.50, 8 GB MicroSD memory card from SanDisk and a $7.50 8 GB multi-level cell memory chip package from Samsung Electronics.
Palm's Pre smartphone is shorter than its competitors but not thinner
Looks like Palm is back innovating after a 4-years hiatus.
Today the Sunnyvale, Calif.-company announced at a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas its new Pre smartphone, along with a cool magnetic recharging dock, Touchstone.
Palm's CEO Ed Colligan is showing off the "Pre"
The Palm Pre has a nice round design that looks a bit like the HTC Touch HD but with a user interface that makes it easy to switch between applications.
I also liked how it groups the phone, email, IM and social network information making it seamless to communicate with somebody using one of the communication tools.
The smartphone has a sliding keyboard, a touchscreen, EVDO/Wi-Fi/GPS, an ARM processor (like the iPhone)… A direct competitor to Google’s G1 than the iPhone or RIM’s Blackberry Storm.
A GSM version should be unveiled next month
It will first be available in the U.S. on Sprint’s network. While a GSM version is expected later this year. Probably as soon as next month, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona
Not much details on webOS – is it compatible with existing PalmOS applications? – or no word on the price which I think will not be higher than the $199 8 GB iPhone 3G
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
Posted by TechPulse 360 
In a report published today, MobileTrax principal analyst Gerry Purdy calls Apple to fix the iPhone 4 faulty antenna design.
