• pre,  web os

    Palm OS 5 Emulation Coming to webOS

    PreCentral.net is reporting that Palm indeed does have an ace up their sleeves for their new webOS mobile operating system that will debut on the Pre smart(er)phone.

    “I just finished getting a great Palm Pre app walkthrough from Palm (video coming soon!), but this couldn’t wait for the upload to finish. There was one app that Palm didn’t want to talk about (but we suspect will be revealed tonight) the “Classic” icon you see above with a logo of a Palm device and a decidedly “Mac OS 9 Classic” feel to it.

    Don’t blink: Palm looks as though they are going to support PalmOS apps on the Pre and webOS via some sort of emulation app!”

    PreCentral also reports that the emulation layer is being provided by MotionApps. The Classic icon is the third icon in the third column.

    Read the full PreCentral.net article

    Given the fact that today is April 1, you might write this off as an April Fool’s Day joke. The folks at PreCentral are on record as saying this is no joke. I’m really looking forward to this development and taking the new emulation environment out for a spin.

    [Thanks to my anonymous tipster for the heads up.]

  • pre,  rumors,  sprint

    Rumor: Palm Pre Launching in Q2, 2009

    The folks over at PhoneNews.com have gotten their hands on what appears to be the Sprint product road map through Q3, 2009. Of particular interest to Palm fans is that the Pre is scheduled to launch in Q2. If position in the grid has any meaning, and I don’t know if that is true, the Pre could ship in the middle of the quarter. Do I hear May anyone?

    Read the full article on PhoneNews.com

  • pre,  sprint,  web os

    Notes from the Palm/Sprint Pre Event

    Yesterday afternoon I attended Palm and Sprint’s Pre event. The following are my notes from the presentation which featured David Owens, Director of Consumer Acquisition for Sprint, and Matt Crowley, Product Line Manager at Palm.

    The show’s host was quick to clear the air about the Palm Pre’s availability date and pricing; that information was not going to be discussed on this webcast.

    Some of Sprint’s customers are too young to remember the Treo 300?! Zoinks! A statement like that tells me that Sprint and Palm are going to targeting teens with the Pre. Or, more accurately, the paying parents of teens. If customers want to enjoy the full benefits of the Pre’s capabilities, subscribing to a Sprint Simply Everything plan is recommended.

    Sprint also indicated that not all of their service plans will be available for the Palm Pre. Expect Sprint to offer the Individual, Family, and Business Simply Everything plans which start at $99.99 a month with the Palm Pre.

    Sprint will also be encouraging their customers to partcipate in their Ready Now program. If you are not familiar with Ready Now, I wasn’t until I watched the webcast and I’m a Sprint customer, it is a program where you can work with a sales associate one-on-one to select your phone, set it up, and then have them teach you how to use it. This may seem like a waste of time for smartphone fanatics like us, but there is a huge pool of customers who find “PDAs” too complex. 20% was tossed out as the generic industry number for the return rate for PDA smartphones. This return rate was mentioned because most people find smartphones too complicated and don’t want to read a 267 page user guide.

    The Palm Pre Smartphone

    When the Palm Pre was developed, it was designed with a polished river stone in mind. There are no sharp edges on the Pre. Everthing is rounded.

    Contact information can come from Google, corporate Exchange servers via Exchange ActiveSync, or Facebook for example. Palm’s Crowley did indicate that data was stored in a local database on the Pre. That should be good news for people who are worried about losing access to their PIM data when the phone is off or when they are in a wireless coverage dead zone.

    The Synergy data synchronization engine works with email, calendar, and the address book. There was no update as to how the Pre will sync with Microsoft Outlook on a PC desktop computer or how customers will be able to migrate data out of Palm Desktop and into the Pre. There are a few ways to move data around now on the Mac and Windows PCs today, but they require that you know how to export and import data using a comma separated values file (.csv files) or a paid utility that pushes data from Palm Desktop into Outlook. Stay tuned on this point. I believe that Palm is working with Chapura to help liberate data in Palm Desktop 3, 4, and 6 and move it to the Pre. Chapura has been helping customers to synchronize data with Outlook for the last 10 years. DataViz may also have a product to help migrate data as they have some experience in this area with their Beyond Contacts application.

    webOS’ search application is called Universal Search. When you start typing in webOS, the software begins searching your phone for the information you are looking for. If the inforation is not found on the device, you are presented with a screen to begin a search on the Inetnet using Google. In the demo, the user has to trigger the search on the Internet. This should also be a comfort to people who like to keep a tight control on how often and how long their phone is connected to the Internet.

    The zoom in/out controls for webOS is exactly like those on Apple’s iPhone/iPod touch. No wonder why Apple’s COO Tim Cook seemed so upset during the recent Apple quarterly earnings conference call. (I’m on the record as saying that there will be no law suit between Apple and Palm.)

    Palm’s Crowley reiterated the same information from the CES demo: notifications in webOS do not interrupt the foreground application like they do today in Palm OS 5. Notifications push up into the bottom third of the screen, but don’t change the focus away from the application that the customer is in the middle of using. That is such a nice feature.

    Crowley also spent some time talking about the coolest feature of the Pre, the Touchstone charging base. Touchstone is a conductive magnetic base that works with the Pre to change the phone when it is at rest on the pedestal. The Pre’s webOS knows that it is on Touchstone and if a call comes in while it is at rest on Touchstone, the call immediately goes to speaker phone mode. The Pre can be used in portrait or landscape mode while attached to Touchstone. The Touchstone charger will be sold as an accessory and will be available at Sprint retail locations when Pre launches. Customers will not be required to purchase a Touchstone and the Pre will come bundled wiht a microUSB charging cable.

    This week’s Pre event was very much about getting the word out about the Palm Pre smartphone and Palm’s continuing partnership with Sprint. There wasn’t a lot of discussion of some of the technical details about how the Pre will sync with your data that isn’t already in the cloud or in a corporate Exchane server. I encougae Palm to start talking about how customers will need to sync their PIM data before the Pre goes on a sale later this year.

  • pre,  web os

    Palm Reports Preliminary Q3 FY09 Results


    Earlier today, Palm released their preliminary results for their Q3FY09 period which ended back on February 27. The news doesn’t look good.

    Palm states that they are on target to end the quarter somewhere between $85 to $95 million dollars. The reasons for such a low earning quarter? According to Palm, there is continuing decline for the company’s “maturing legacy smartphone products,” a sluggish economy, and “later-than-expected shipments” of the Treo Pro in the United States.

    Allow me to translate: Palm isn’t selling the Treo 755p and Centro anymore; people are worried about paying for the essentials – not smartphones; and Palm and Sprint can’t get the Windows Mobile Treo Pro, which has completely overshadowed the Treo 800w, certified and out the door.

    The silver lining in all of this is that the company is reporting that the new webOS-powered Pre is still on target for a launch in this half of 2009.

    “The much-anticipated launch of the Palm Pre remains on track for the first half of calendar year 2009, but as expected we’ve got a difficult transition period to work through,” said Palm President and Chief Executive Officer Ed Colligan. “Despite the challenging market environment, the extraordinary response to the Palm Pre and the new Palm webOS reaffirms our confidence in our long-term prospects and our ability to reestablish Palm as the leading innovator in the growing smartphone market.”

    And speaking of webOS, a small little nugget was dropped in today’s statement.

    “Separately, Palm indicated that since it expects to periodically provide new software features free of charge to customers of its Palm webOS products, including the recently announced Palm Pre, it will recognize the revenues and cost of revenues associated with Palm webOS product sales on a straight-line basis over the product’s estimated economic life of 24 months. The company will be recording deferred revenues and deferred cost of revenues on its balance sheet, and amortizing them into earnings on a straight-line basis over the estimated economic product life of 24 months. The company will continue to expense engineering, sales and marketing costs as they are incurred. This accounting treatment will have no impact on cash flow.”

    From that statement, we can draw the conclusion that Palm might be returning to a position that the company held years ago to provide free software updates to customers. It also indicates that the Pre will have a service life of about two years.

    Palm will be reporting their full Q3FY09 results on Thursday, March 19. A conference call will be held at 4:30pm ET/1:30pm PT.

  • pre,  rumors,  sprint

    Rumor: Palm Pre Launching Later Than Expected

    PreCentral.net is running a story today that suggests that the Palm Pre may ship later than some had hoped. You will recall in our debate on 1SRC.com Podcast show 205 that Jeff Kirvin, Rick Cartwright, and I where in disagreement about when in “the first half of 2009” the Pre would ship. Rick and I where leaning toward late May for a target launch of the Pre while Jeff was expecting that the Pre would be on sale in just a few weeks; certainly by April.

    PreCentral.net’s Dieter Bohn, writes:

    “While we knew all along (despite crazy hopes) that the February 15th release date was just a pipe dream, we were hoping the persistent rumors (now circulating on the Ides of March) meant that the “First half of 2009″ target would mean something sooner than June. Well, we’re a little less hopeful today. First up an anonymous report which we’re not putting much stock in (yet) claims that testing is taking longer than expected due to some security issues. More interestingly, in our forums we read that the Pre has two more rounds to testing to come, the first of these not slated to begin until April 1st.”

    [Via PreCentral.net…]

  • pre,  web os

    MWC: Palm Pre Update

    Now that Mobile World Congress (MWC) has wrapped up, here is where things stand in regard to Palm’s upcoming webOS powered smartphone, the Pre.

    Without much fanfare, Palm was showing off a GSM version of the Pre in Barcelona last week. While there was no press release for the GSM Pre last week, the UK Palm website now has a teaser page posted where customers can sign up to be notified by email when the phone is available. Further, clicking on the press release and details links, visitors are redirected to the US Palm website where they can read the press release from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). About the only difference that we can tell about at this point is that there is a GSM version of the Pre on the way for 2009. We also saw pictures of the GSM Pre sporting a Vodafone SIM card.

    Engadget is also reporting that Palm will be shipping a new matte back plate for the Pre smartphone for use with the Palm Touchstone charging cradle accessory. This will come as great news for fans of the soft touch paint that Palm has been using on recent devices like the Treos 750 and 755p. The glossy back make look cool on the Pre, but I’d much rather have that soft touch backing that makes the phone so much easier to hang on to while using it.

    Palm also announced that they will be working with Adobe on bring Flash applications to the webOS. To help achive this goal, Palm has joined Adobe’s Open Screen Project. The Open Screen Project aims to build a common standard for building applications and web browsing “standalone applications and full web browsing across televisions, desktops and mobile devices taking advantage of Adobe Flash Platform capabilities.” In other words, according to the Adobe press release, “[t]he work of the Open Screen Project will help deliver Adobe® Flash® Player for smartphones on the new Palm® webOS™ platform.” Not to shabby.

    “We’re excited that our customers will benefit from the creativity and broad range of Flash content and applications created by the millions of designers and developers using Adobe’s popular tools and technologies,” said Pam Deziel, vice president, software product management, Palm, Inc.”

    “As an industry innovator Palm will be an important contributor to the Open Screen Project,” said Michele Turner, vice president for Product Marketing, Flash Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We’re aiming to bring a rich, Flash technology-enabled browsing experience to Palm’s impressive web browser.”

    By building in support for Adobe’s Flash Player into the operating system, there should be a surge of new applications and developers for the fledgling webOS platform.

    Lastly, Engadget also reports that games are in development for the webOS platform, however, that for the time being, since “web-style app development will limit gaming options.”

    [Via Engadget Mobile…]

  • pre,  vodafone

    GSM Palm Pre on Vodafone Spotted

    Reports are coming in from Mobile World Congress (MWC) currently going on in Barcelona that a GSM Palm Pre has been spotted with a Vodafone SIM card. PreCentral.net writes:

    “As Dieter mentioned earlier this morning straight from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, there are some GSM flavored Pre’s floating around that are live on Vodafone’s network.

    Palm hasn’t announced the GSM version of the Pre at MWC, but those GSM versions sure have been spotted. Seems that the folks over at Pre Community got a shot (above) of an actual Vodafone Spain SIM card in one of the Pre’s being used for demonstrations at MWC.”

    Check out the full article on PreCentral.net

    [Via PreCentral.net…]

  • pre,  rumors

    Rumor: Palm Pre Unlocked GSM Specs

    Looks like Sprint isn’t the only one jumping the gun and prematurely posting details about Palm’s upcoming hardware. This time the mobile electronics retailer Elite-Electronix has posted what appears to be a pre-order page with the full product specs for Palm’s not-exactly-announced-but-we-knew-it-is-coming unlocked GSM Pre smartphone. The site also lists the unlocked GSM Pre as having a $599.95 USD price tag with an expected ship date as June 2009.

    [Thanks to Mark for the tip.]

  • pre,  rumors,  sprint,  treo

    Rumor: Best Buy to Sell the Palm Pre

    It looks like Sprint is angling to iron out a deal with electronics retailer Best Buy to be retail sales location for Palm’s newest smartphone, the Pre, when it goes live later this year. Information news website Bloomberg.com writes:

    “Sprint Nextel Corp., the money-losing U.S. wireless carrier, is in talks with Best Buy Co. to sell Palm Inc.’s Pre once the phone makes its debut this year, potentially putting the device in more than 1,000 stores.

    “I’m really excited that they’re back in the game,” Score said of Palm in an interview. “We’re working with Sprint on that, but no official announcement as of yet.”

    Palm plans to introduce the Pre, which uses its new WebOS operating software, in the first half of 2009. Sprint spokeswoman Michelle Mermelstein said the company hasn’t confirmed any decisions about its retail partners and declined to give further details on pricing or the date of the release. Palm spokeswoman Leslie Letts didn’t immediately return a call seeking comment. “

    In a separate rumor, it is said that Palm’s latest Windows Mobile smartphone, the Treo Pro, could be coming to Sprint as soon as February 15.

    [Via PalmInfoCenter.com…]