yeah - I'm with AT&T/Cingular now too - my contract is up in November 2005. I'm probably switching to Verizon - they have the best voice coverage on the East Coast. THE PHONES SUCK compared to AT&T/Cingular!!!!! BUT - Voice/Coverage comes first, bells and whistles come second.
I love Nokia and have a STRONG brand loyalty to them - my last 5+ phones have been Nokia. I love their user-friendly GUI, excellent RF reception, great sound quality, and great build-quality/durability. I'd love to see Verizon offer a tiny Palm OS Nokia (and No Thumboard/No NVFS) - but we know that ain't ever going to happen.
One thing that does suck about every Nokia I've seen is that both the IR and the BT will only accept ONE contact at a time! So if you IR/BT your "Send Category" list of Contacts - the Nokia will turn off the connection after ONE contact! This takes away a big advantage of the Nokias. It's my understanding that the SonyEricsson models have no problem with multiple contacts.
I guess I'll be stuck with the Nokia 6015i if/when I move to VZW.
Looking forward to your JAM review.
Have a nice Memorial Day. Go have a few drinks tonight.
The Jam, on the other hand is thin and light, has WMP10 and MS Reader, and it works with MS Voice command.
Yes, but unfortunately JAM isn't upgradeable to WM5, so you're stuck with 2003se.
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Phone, media player, and ebook reader are three devices I own and can consolidate into one with the Jam. Add in a Yahoo music subscription and a 1Gb SD card and I have a compelling package for *my* needs.
I'd like it even more if had a VGA display. I hate to say this but PPC's QVGA resolution looks primitive compared to even a HVGA Palm.
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Price is a bit high but I still might bite the bullet.
True, but I look at this way; you're still paying about the same as you would for two separate devices, even less in some cases. I'm less concerned about price and more concerned with am I getting a device that will truly serve my needs without sacrificing features/functionality/style/design, etc.
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(right now I'm waiting to see what the story is on WM5 and the Jam.)
Which story? Upgradeability? Not going to happen. But if you're wondering if there will be new JAM model(s) running WM5, the answer is yes...later this year. I was told that by the folks at iMate.
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The thing about Palm and the Treo, though, is that it is not a volume device. (Neither is the Jam, but the Jam is part of a broad ecosystem that sustains many compatible devices.)
Another factor is that confidence in PalmOS is eroding. Not simply because of the rise of Windows Mobile, but because of the schizophrenic platform strategy by PalmSource. They sank their fortunes into Cobalt and then Osborned the OS by announcing a radical shift to Linux. Not only will this clumsy approach ward of potential licensees (which is already happening), it will even give third party software developers reason to pause and question the long term viability of this platform. PalmOS is already a mess to program for.
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Palm once had 100% of the PDA market.
Now its down to 29%.
There are still those who believe that much of this decline is due to a collective "wait and see" stance by consumers and business users waiting on Cobalt devices. I don't subscribe to this theory myself, especially in light of the fact there probably won't BE any Cobalt devices, at least no here in the States anyway.
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Treo is not going to grow that.
No, the only impact Treo is having is cannibalizing standard PDA sales. Which in itself is significant because it means higher revenues for Palm, and signals the general decline of PDAs in the face of Smartphones.
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LifeDrive won't either.
Agreed. Frankly I think LifeDrive is going to be a flop. It's too expensive and offers no real advantage over other Palm devices, save for higher storage capacity. An embedded 4GB HD is nothing to sneeze at, but LifeDrive is NOT part of some revolutionary new category of mobile device. There is no such animal as a "Media Manager". That moniker exists only in the minds of Palm's marketing team. LifeDrive is little more than a Tungsten T5 with a built-in HD.
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Which means that that 29%, which is still dominated by Zire sales, is never going to be higher.
Actually Tungsten E/E2 series dominates sales, not the Zires. The T|E is PalmOne's single best selling handheld.
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Palm essentially bet the farm on volume and market share; to turn around this late in the game and go for high-margin low volume products will only feed the market share decline and the perception of a death spiral.
And, alas, history has shown us that nothing starts a death-spiral faster than the "perception" that one is under way.
I kind of disagree with you here, just a bit. Agree with the death spiral perception, but PalmOne isn't dying. In fact, if the company plays its cards right it could become a thriving powerhouse handheld/smartphone vendor. How? First they need to end their dependency on PalmOS. Right now their single biggest problem is that their entire fortunes are pinned on the health and vitality of PalmOS in the marketplace. If PalmOS is thriving and growing, consumers and business users will gobble up Palm-powered handhelds. If PalmOS is in decline (which we already know to be the case), then Palm handheld sales will decline (which we also know to be the case). Palm needs to cease this practice at once and begin offering products based on "other" software platforms. Not talking about ditching PalmOS here, just offering Windows Mobile, Symbian, Linux, or perhaps even Blackberry (if RIM decides to license out its OS) devices that exist in parallel to Palm's Palm-powered offering. Think about it...Palm would be the only hardware vendor in the entire industry that offers a buffet of software platforms. Of course, to do that would require original thinking and a willingness to depart from the company's old school Palm DNA.
When I was testing the Treo 650 for review, dozens of people I know said the same thing when I showed it to them: "Great device...too bad it doesn't run Pocket PC". There is a serious market opportunity (especially in corporate environments) for a Treo running Windows Mobile. I believe it would outsell the Palm model.
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Kent Pribbernow Elitist Snob, Contributing writer for Wired's Cult of Mac
I dumped Verizon earlier this year and went with Cingular
How's your signal strength with Cingular? And as part 2 of the question, I know it's none of my damn business, but what part of the country are you from? I'm thinking of switching to Cingular now that they're getting the Audiovox SmartPhone, but my sister and her husband use Cingular in our area in the Midwest and they always seem to have trouble with weak signal.
Yes, but unfortunately JAM isn't upgradeable to WM5, so you're stuck with 2003se.
Which would not kill me.
I'm looking to buy applications and functionality, not tech per se.
I might want to see a bit of a price drop, but 2003se is fine for me as long as wmp10 is part of the deal.
And you're right about the price being the same as two separate devices, but I'd be willing to pay a *small* premium for a single box solution.
If I simply wanted two separate devices, I could go get a free Razr cellphone and a dell 50v and be $200 cheaper than the Jam.
The other thing I'm thinking of is there are rumors of a Jam follow-up coming. That might do the trick.
As for Palm dying, I don't think it will.
However, they are falling into the same trap as pre-pod Apple where the company is profitable while the market share (and its market relevance) withers away.
Apple used to own up to 20% of the PC market at one point but the bungled transition to PowerPC (where they didn't get a proper native OS for the architecture until OS/x came out) got them into a death spiral that has them stuck at 1.5% market share today.
Its a profitable 1.5%, mind you, and in the eyes of the general media they get the hype that goes along with a 60% market share, but its still only 1.5%. They get outsold 60-to-1 every single day of the year.
So the company survives but the product is a footnote.
Palm is headed the same way.
They still have time to tun it around but they don't have *much* time.
A year at most.
First they need to decide if Palm is a brand, a platform, or a product.
If it is to be a brand, they need to diversify as of yesterday.
Doesn't matter if its Radio Shack-style diversification; get new Palm products out there that are not PDAs.
Get a camera.
Get a music player or three.
Get a pure cell-phone line.
Just find a way of breaking away from the tired old Palm OS product.
Now, it may be that a Palm-branded PocketPC might help but I doubt it.
All it would achieve is to drive home the point (factual or not, it doesn't matter; I'm talking perception) that even the people making Palm PDAs admit PPC is the way to go.
The danger of falling into a death-spiral is that it is a self-fulfilling prophecy; once the perception is out there that you are a company in decline, people start to stay away, thereby making the decline real. And when you're talking about a single product company, the risks go way up. Most of the time, even doing the right thing is useless because once the coolest of cool stops being cool, nothing can bring cool back.
Simple test: Is Word Perfect Office a good product?
Does anybody care?
Jeff is such a partisan that listening to him is pretty much a waste of time. He uses misinformation, half-facts, and false equivocations in his attempts to validate his beliefs. When confronted with real facts, he has avoided to respond to some of my questions to him. He can blog, podcast, or publish all he wants but he already compromised his credibility so I really don't react to much of his spin and propaganda.
Really? Care to cite some of the "misinformation, half-facts and false equivocations"? Any questions for me now that I'm actually "in the room", so to speak?
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Originally Posted by pgh1969pa
Now that the Lifedrive has wifi, he probably thinks that wifi on a pda is good. The last time he and I chatted, he felt the bluetooth was all you'll ever need and wifi was a waste.
Eh, take it or leave it. It won't stop me from buying a LifeDrive, but I expect to leave the WiFi radio off 99.9% of the time. Saves a lot of battery life that way, and I personally don't spend much time at all in hotspots (YMMV).
Now after hearing him in this podcast, I have mental images of him in a large tent on a hot Sunday in the Dust Bowl, holding a rattlesnake in one hand and a LifeDrive in the other, saying "Repent, sinners..." Rock of Ages is being played (or perhaps pounded is the more accurate term) from an old upright piano in the corner.
Dude, it's radio, it's a performance. Who would have listened to Howard Stern if he sounded like Ben Stein?
I've read his website sporadically for a few years now
I had never heard of Jeff K until this thread. I was reading the original front page post wondering who the heck he was. I guessed that he was a Palm executive of some sort.
I almost was. I flew out to San Jose in March to interview for the Director of Competitive Analysis job. Didn't get it, but the trip was fun and I enjoyed meeting the folks at PalmSource face to face.
Thanks for clearing that up... the clever disguise fooled many of us.
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Originally Posted by Jeff Kirvin
Who would have listened to Howard Stern if he sounded like Ben Stein?
Probably as many people who will continue to listen to you if you continue to sound like you. Which is best described by pointing out your obvious homage to that other award-winning piece of performance art, "Gilbert Gottfried Hits Puberty - Puberty Hits Back."
But one thing has changed... Tara Reid in "Alone In The Dark" now has some serious competition for this year's definition of "painful". And may I point out that you mentioning Howard Stern and your podcast in the same breath is kinda like Ashton Kutcher mentioning Marlon Brando in a discussion of his performance in "Dude, Where's My Car?" In fact, even mentioning Ben Stein in the same breath is kinda like that.
Anyway, if they give awards for these things, like the Poddies, you could be up for best impression of having an extended on-the-air incident with one's thong after drinking 3 Starbucks Vente Komodo Dragon Blend Lattes. A more apt description suggests itself, but after all, this is a family site.
Oh, and in case you're still totally unclear about the intent of my first message, what I described was also a performance... dude.
"Gentlemen, please! You can't fight in here, this is the War room!" - Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove
Well, Foo, Jeff apparently thinks that I'm too clueless to realize that his podcasts are what some people may refer to as a "performance". I just wanted to make sure that he's entirely clear on the fact that I'm fully aware of what he's attempting to do, and have been all along. As for how successful he's been, well, I've already made my opinion on that abundantly clear.
By the way, a quote from Dr. Strangelove couldn't be more appropriate here... I think this whole discussion is surreal enough to fit very well into the actual movie.
Gotta run... I'm busy babysitting. My niece just took my nephew's stuffed animal away and the poor little guy is pitching a performance.
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