A lot of the die-hard Qualcomm bulls hate the whole European "committee/collaboration" approach, and I'm not always a huge fan of it either. However, it does have its benefits from time to time. Take Bluetooth, for example. If Ericsson had tried to single-handedly push this technology on the market, it would be doomed to flounder thanks to the "chicken and egg" dilemma. But since Ericsson decided to let all of its competitors in on the game, it seems to have a very good chance of success.
The Symbian consortium is another example of the committe approach at its finest. Not only does it look like Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, and Matsushita will be able to relegate Microsoft and its buggy, battery-consuming, bloatware to a niche status in the handset OS market, given the ownership structure of Symbian, it looks like they'll also be able to make sure that they don't get held hostage by an OS manufacturer the way the PC manufacturers are held hostage by Bill and Steve.
The device manufacturers have invested lots of time and money into Symbian's Epoc, a very mature OS. Not many apps, though.
Actually, there are a large number of apps available for Epoc, just not in the US. Psion's handhelds, which run run Epoc, are very popular in Europe. Once Epoc-based handsets start coming stateside and to Asia, these programs should be made available in retail outlets in these parts of the world. To be honest, however, I'm not sure how many apps are available when compared to the Palm OS, and given your job, I'm sure you know more about this than me.
I would agree, however, that Palm does have a significant amount of "mindshare" within the Americas, and increasingly in Asia, and thus has to be considered a force to be reckoned with. I think Nokia has the best approach to this problem, which involves running the Palm user interface over Epoc on a given handset, with programs written for both operating systems working on the device:
techweb.com
One last note: the more I think about it, the less likely it seems that smart phones are going to wipe out PDAs completely, at least unless Microvision proves successful in commerecializing its VRD technology. There's going to be a large number of people who will prefer to have a PDA as well as a phone so that they can take advantage of the far larger screen size of the former. There might also be a market for a device that's shaped like a PDA but can act like a phone, perhaps coming with some Bluetooth-enable wireless speakers for a person's ear. Regardless of what happens, the places that Moore's Law and 3G are set to lead the wireless industry should prove quite interesting in the following years.
Eric |
