Heading into 2003, it will get interesting

[Ed Hansberry]

Going into 2003, the PDA market will change radically.<br /><br />• First, the current king of the hill, the Palm OS, will finally ship OS 5 products.<br />• Second, Dell enters the PDA fray with a Pocket PC 2002 device targeted at consumers for $299 this Christmas.<br />• Third, I <b><i>keep</i></b> seeing indicators that in early 2003, there will be an update to the Pocket PC operating system based on thoughts like <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2503">this</a> and <a href="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2134">this</a>.<br />• Fourth, Microsoft's Smartphone should be shipping by then.<br />• Fifth, Foo Fighter will get a Pocket PC with a transflective screen, so traffic here will drop a bit. <img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/forums/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif" /><br /><br />The most interesting and unknown of these is the <a href="http://www.osopinion.com/perl/story/19365.html">success of Palm OS 5</a>. "... Palm's biggest challenge may be migrating its large and valuable developer community, which has populated the handheld landscape with Palm devices and applications. " This is no simple trick. The only OS I've seen that was a radical change from the previous version was Mac OS X, and they still don't have all of their key apps ported from Mac OS 9 to OS X. There are some pretty complex apps on the Palm. There is no porting. It is ground up rewriting to work natively in the ARM based OS. OS 5 isn't where this happens but OS 6. At some point Palm will presumably drop the PACE emulation environment. Rewriting 15,000 apps is a lot of manpower. I suspect some of the 250+ calculators won't get rewritten along with 500+ versions of solitaire.<br /><br />"There's a lot of pressure on this new OS to be a strong answer," Aberdeen Group analyst Isaac Ro said. "This may be Palm's last best hope to recapture dominance in the marketplace."<br /><br />What do you think? Will Palm recoup lost market share with OS5? Will Dell clean everyone's clock with a competent $300 Pocket PC? Will the rumored iPAQ 5000's keep iPAQ the strong product it is today? Will Microsoft trump every conceivable Palm OS 5 option with a Pocket PC 2003 available in early 2003 - one that we could hopefully put on our 2002 devices for $30 or so? Will smartphones come in at a price cheap enough to sway consumers and start eating into PDA marketshare? Will Foo <i>ever</i> be happy with his PDA's screen?<br /><br />Thanks to Foo for the link to OS 5 article, which spurred this thought.

[marlof]

Will Foo ever be happy with his PDA's screen?

Yes. But then he'll find something else he' wouldn't like. ;) Which is great BTW. People like Foo should keep on telling the world what is wrong with the current batch of devices. That's the only way progress will be made.

All in all, I agree with you. These are going to be very interesting times!

[CoffeeKid]

The only OS I've seen that was a radical change from the previous version was Mac OS X, and they still don't have all of their key apps ported from Mac OS 9 to OS X. There are some pretty complex apps on the Palm.

You mean you don't remember all the fun and games going from WfWG 3.11 to Windows 95, and all the app buying it caused because old versions didn't work in the new OS? :)

Mark

[Andy Sjostrom]

Ed!
According to PalmGear.com, you've got only 107 Solitairs and 400 calculators. Facts! :lol:

[JonnoB]

Is year 2003 any different than 2002 or any other year. This industry is in perpetual change... usually indicating improvement. I certainly hope however that the next year is more momentus in the change that takes place. I am kind of getting bored now of the current PDA technology and think there needs to be something really sexy to drive the next wave of adoption. Everything is too predictable right now.

[Jonathon Watkins]

I am kind of getting bored now of the current PDA technology and think there needs to be something really sexy to drive the next wave of adoption. Everything is too predictable right now.
Totally agree - I really want a transflexive VGA screen for my next major purchase – everything else is a bit ho-hum. Like Foo I have been sold on the 39xx series screens. I do hope other manufactures get their hands on those IPAQ style screens.

However if we are going to get a new OS in March isn’t the time a bit tight? We know that there are new IPAQs floating around there – for the Christmas season perhaps. We are also seeing the 310 and possibly the 740 being discontinued – again – for new products around Christmas. March is pretty close to bring out new hardware really. Product cycles are not that close surely? Unless Christmas is the last blast of PPC 2002 with currant spec Hardware and March will be the first of the .NET PPCs with VGA (please, please :D).

I hope I have the willpower to hold off till a VGA screen PPC comes along. :?

[GregWard]

I think Palm are taking a big gamble on this. I really don't envy their position! Their whole ethos was originally based on KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) and it has served them very well in the past. Readers of this site aside (!) there are a lot of people who just want a mobile diary and none of the more advanced stuff.
More recently Palm seem obsessed with competing with MS - hence all the extra claimed features of v5 and the move to ARM etc. But, as you say, this is a dangerous tactic - they won't get all those apps ported overnight! Although wasn't there talk of a built-in dragonball emulator? I'm a bit out of touch.
Also (ref the other thread and Michael Mace) my experience says that trying to "slam the competition" is always indicative of the wrong focus. Good focus comes from worrying about making YOUR product the best you can. True success comes from BEING better not claiming to be! /end preach :D

[Fzara]

You guys are completely wrong.
No calcualators are being rewritten, and solitare will not be re-written.
OS5 plans to have a simple emulator to emulate most of these applications, which by the Palmsource exec will run the same speed and in some cases, faster than the orig OS4 version.
The only apps being re-written will be things like Docs to Go, Kinoma Vid player, Movie players, and other such things, so they can take advantage of the FULL power of Intel and Motorla's new processors.
Visit http://www.palminfocenter.com for some of the articles.
Being a Palm OS loyalist fan with a Palm M500, im quite jealous of the multi-tasking PPC owners can do, however, I do not wish to support a company like M$ with their evil anti-trust junk.
However, if some of you do know a thing about PPC's...Toshiba E310?
Ipaq 3970?
Your newest PPC member, the Palm OS mutating fan.

[Ed Hansberry]

You guys are completely wrong.
No calcualators are being rewritten, and solitare will not be re-written.
OS5 plans to have a simple emulator to emulate most of these applications, which by the Palmsource exec will run the same speed and in some cases, faster than the orig OS4 version.
Right. That's what I said. However, in OS6 they will start to allow multitasking and native ARM code. Will they keep PACE around forever? I would assume at some point they will drop support for it meaning all OS4 and earlier code will be worthless.

And welcome to the site! :way to go: We have forums on Toshiba and Compaq/HP where you can ask specific questions about the 310/3970.

[DaleReeck]

Microsoft is an evil anti-trust empire?

Imagine if auto makers decided to use 3 or 4 different gas types for "their" car model. Imagine being able to only go to 1 of 3 or 4 gas stations because your car supports only brand "x".

Sometimes monopolies are good.

Applied to computers, imagine having 3 or 4 different OS's, all equal in popularity. Imagine being a developer having to write your product code for each of the OS's lest you be missing out on a major chunk of revenue because your stuff only works on one of those OS's. Writing apps for different OS's like Mac, Win, Unix isn't just a matter of running the code through different compilers. Each code base has to be tailored. Without Microsoft's dominance of one OS, small time developers would all but be eliminated because they can't afford the time and money to code for 4 different OS's (and reach all the potential markets) nor can they afford to code for one or two OS's and sell to only a small part of the market. Only the big application boys with big resources could play.

I think people, when bashing Microsoft, do so because we only can see the present. We can't see the alternative time line of what things would be like with true comptitition, at least in the OS market. I suspect computing would be a lot less farther along if we had legitimate choice. Without Windows, could you honestly say the internet would be where it is today?

I'll take a "lesser" standard over a superior niche anyday.

[mookie123]

Things that I want to see:

1. VGA screen in PDA (Sony has it already, Bsquare too)
2. better battery endurance (never can have enough battery)
3. stylish chasis design. (come on now, iPAQ is getting uglier and uglier by each itteration. And the rest of PPC start to look like PC beige box. No personality what so ever.)
4. Linux has a Palm OS 5.0 emulator fallowed by PPC. (That would be a big laugh)
5. roaming wireless. (finally that built in WiFi has more use beyond an inch of your desktop transceiver)
6. After market modification. (chasis, memory, glowing buttons, etc)
7. PDA software is as good as desktop.
8. Truely original gotta-have-it PDA game instead of another desktop look alike or port.

[Jonathon Watkins]

Things that I want to see:

1. VGA screen in PDA (Sony has it already, Bsquare too)

What Sony PDA has VGA? I know the Clie has 480x320, but VGA is 640x480. So which device has already got this?

[mookie123]

opps,

I guess only Nexio, and that PCphone currently are on the market with VGA. But the BSquare definitely has VGA. and I know Sharp will produce 3.8 inch VGA display.

[Foo Fighter]

Yes. But then he'll find something else he' wouldn't like. ;) Which is great BTW. People like Foo should keep on telling the world what is wrong with the current batch of devices. That's the only way progress will be made.

That's right...the squeaky wheel gets the grease. If someone doesn't berate device manufacturers for their less than perfect efforts, innovation would stagnate. When the next wave of devices hit the market, I'll be right here standing on my little soapbox. :P

These are going to be very interesting times

I hope so, because so far..2002 has proven to be a dud for cool new products (with the exception of Sony). 2003 should be interesting, with new PalmOS 5/ARM hardware, and a potential new release of PPC based on WinCE.net. What I would really like to see in 2003 is LOWER prices on high-end hardware to help drive more wide-spread adoption of multimedia PDAs. We need to purge the market of all these damn grayscale organizers. There are too many low-end Palms floating around out there.

Foo Fighter will get a Pocket PC with a transflective screen, so traffic here will drop a bit.

Ha! I keep waiting...and waiting...and waiting. :)

[scrinch]

Things that I want to see:

1. VGA screen in PDA (Sony has it already, Bsquare too)

The PC-EPhone (http://www.PC-Ephone.com/feat.html), which hasn't seemed to find a market, has a VGA screen and has several interesting design features:

VGA touchscreen (sorry Foo, not transflective)
CDMA (but not CDMA2000 1x)
Bluetooth with available handset (but not headset)
Flip-up clear plastic screen protector
Interesting (but slightly awkward) form factor

I hope that the first version of this product finds enough success in the US that its designers are willing to go through a couple more design iterations. With the right upgrades, this could be a killer machine.

[fundmgr90210]

Another question for the coming quarter. Will HP-Compaq recover from it's 32.8% drop in market share for the 2nd Quarter of this year?

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jhtml?containerId=pr2002_09_06_153434

I'm sure we'll be seeing a posting on this soon.

[PPCRules]

This has been touched on already, but I'll push it a little further.

It is ground up rewriting to work natively in the ARM based OS.
Herein is the hole Palm has dug themselves, which will make this

At some point Palm will presumably drop the PACE emulation environment.
not happen for a loooong time.

If current apps work well in the first OS5 release, they, of course, won't be touched by their developer. Ever. You know the type most of the "15,000" Palm apps are. The person that wrote it has grown up, or graduated from college, or switched to PocketPC long ago, or died. These apps won't be written. If it works good enough, people won't even seek a native replacement. But as long as people use the emulator, they can't drop it (that's the 'hole' I mentioned above).

The ones that will get rewritten are the serious apps that can make use of the StrongARM horsepower, are written by professional developers and will sell for $50+ (to a few dozen people).

Now games are a different matter. Developers can suddenly do what they couldn't do before, so new apps will be written. But again, since these can only be used by people with new devices, sales will be small and prices high. Not the things that gave the Palm OS it's original success.

[Jason Dunn]

I'm sure we'll be seeing a posting on this soon.

You know, we're not psychic - submit it to the news@ alias, and we'll take a look. :wink: I don't like the thinly-veiled accusation that we only public "good Pocket PC news". Submit it, and THEN point fingers if we don't publish it, ok?

[Ed Hansberry]

You know, we're not psychic - submit it to the news@ alias, and we'll take a look. :wink: I don't like the thinly-veiled accusation that we only public "good Pocket PC news". Submit it, and THEN point fingers if we don't publish it, ok?
I'm actually working on this already.

[Timothy Rapson]

Microsoft is an evil anti-trust empire?

Imagine if auto makers decided to use 3 or 4 different gas types for "their" car model. Imagine being able to only go to 1 of 3 or 4 gas stations because your car supports only brand "x".

.

Your example is an apt one. But, imagine one person had the patent on a gasoline combustion engine in 1900. All the car companies had to pay him a royalty and ingratiate themselves to this person to use his patent. In fact this almost happened, but Henry Ford fought the guy who had the pattent and won. What would the world of autos have been like if this had not happened? It would have been set back 20 years just as the PC world was. Hundreds of millions perhaps billions of people the world over have not gotten computers as they have gotten cars, TVs, and VCRs. Why? Because of Microsofts pathetic OS. XP and 2000 have finally arrived with stability and the power to do really useful things in a somewhat user friendly fashion, but it is long in coming and it has been painful and expensive. We could save 10 more lost years if Linux would pass MS in the desktop OS this year as it did in the server OS a couple years back, but that doesn't look like it will happen.

Just my vision of what has and might have happened. It is really too complex a question to really answer definitively.

[Timothy Rapson]

I think Toshiba has really nailed PDA design. One high end model with lots of RAM, fastest processor available, jog dial, and two slots. They could have the nicer screen of the Ipaq 3900 and a decent flip plastic cover as in the Jornadas, but as it is they can undercut Ipaq 3900 on price every time.

Model #2 is the smaller single slot model that cost far less and gets lost in a pocket. What they need for it to really succeed is a little less blockiness and perhaps that low power X-Scale to double battery life.

But, I think they are leading the way for PDA model categories. Palm set out these two *sizes* of PDAs (Toshiba added the right slots to the larger model) and I think the dual line Palms will be around for some time. I prefer the large for myself and eventually would buy one of the smaller ones for each of my family.

By December, Dell, Palm, Sharp, Sony, Zayo, and perhaps a dozen others may have a full set of these models (Sadly, it looks like Compaq is going to keep the lame expansion sleeve to get the dual slot models.)

I see, full Video, sound recording, optional Blue Tooth or WiFi, QVGA or so screens, 200 MZ ARMS, and 32-64 meg on each. The only real question is going to be which OS will win out. PPC, Palm, or Linux.

I still think Palm is the player to beat, because they will have the broadest price range from $99 OS 4 mono models to $600 Clies with full video camera function built in. Unless they really messed up the OS change, they are still in the pole position because of the variety and the feeling that most people have about Windows Desktop. By now, PPC would have had to reached 50% of market with at least one really super desireable model to be in position to unseat Palm OS anytime soon.

Or not. We will know January 2003 or so.