Microsoft CE Checkmate: (Sigh!)
My feelings of the below article are clear now. I was asking anyone, begging anyone, up to last night -- to explain why the Palm O/S offered such inferior 1) screens, 2) applications -- compared to the Microsoft C/E O/S. This article tells it all. My questions are answered. My thoughts were all wrong (i.e., component shortage or simply a desire on Palm's management to not want to offer a color product with applications -- competing against the C/E.)
I feel that to understand the situation, one has to have used both the Palm O/S and the latest Microsoft C/E O/S. One has had to actually go shopping for a PDA, and actually bought one. I have and feel that my usage is typical of the common user. I am by no means a computer wizard -- rather just an average person who wants the best value for the money.
The Palm O/S clearly does not have the ability, at the present time, to match the superiority of the MSFT C/E O/S.
Palm is simply playing catch up at this point to produce a better O/S.
My initial thoughts:
1) Palm clearly has won the market share for the past.
2) The past is the past. Microsoft is #1 now in terms of value and applications.
3) MSFT C/E offers more applications (Word, Excel, MP3, multimedia, etc.) that the Palm simply can not do -- at this point.
4) MSFT will gain market share in the PDA market (also with a higher average selling price).
5) A major periodical will break the news in a review, the Microsoft CE O/S is superior and offers more value.
6) The situation can not change until Palm shows the ability to produce a more powerful O/S. Until then, the match has been won by Microsoft CE.
7) The article is swell in describing that Palm is working on the issue. In other words, "Mrs. Lincoln, other than the shooting, how was the play?"
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New Handheld Computers Improve on Quality
Oct. 16 (San Jose Mercury News/KRTBN)--Here comes more color.
Two new handheld computers hitting store shelves today are pushing the Palm operating system to its limit with their higher-quality screens, and could help Handspring Inc. shake its image as a player in the low end of the market.
Palm-compatible handheld computers from Handspring that begin hitting store shelves today have a quicker processor under the hood, allowing them to think faster and display more detailed images. The $300 Visor Platinum has a screen that displays 16 levels of gray, while the $450 Visor Prism has a high-quality color screen.
But that performance has a price.
Analysts say the Prism -- primed for multimedia with its 16-bit, 65,536 color display -- is about as much as the Palm operating system, a 16-bit-32-bit hybrid OS, can handle. The number of bits that an operating system supports can be roughly compared with the number of lanes on a highway -- the higher the number, the more data traffic the machine can handle at once.
Applications such as video work better when the data moves in bigger chunks -- and that requires a wider highway.
So in the future, in order to compete with Microsoft's more powerful 32-bit Windows CE Pocket PC operating system, the Palm OS will have to undergo a significant overhaul.
For now, Palm-OS devices have a big lead in the race to dominate handheld computing, with about 85 percent of the market.
"A lot of us think the Palm OS is going to run out of steam pretty quick," said Rob Enderle, vice president of desktop and mobile technology at Giga Information Systems. "That's one of the shortcomings of the Palm platform right now. Palm's really good when it's light. It starts falling apart when you start using a heavier implementation -- photography, video, sound and the rest."
Santa Clara-based Palm Inc. said that overhaul is in the works.
Just last week, executives from Palm met with Palm OS licensee Sony Corp. to talk about how the Palm platform will support multimedia in the future. All of the new devices Palm plans to introduce next year will have 16-bit color, said Palm Chief Technology Officer Bill Maggs. "We're going to come out with a lot of applications that are targeted specifically toward color," he said. "We're not going to run away from it at all."
Beyond just color though, Maggs said the Palm operating system will get two significant updates next year, allowing Palm devices to better handle heavy-duty tasks like wireless networking, audio and video. The operating system updates will happen at about the time when Palm switches to Intel's more powerful ARM processor.
After the updates, the operating system will "push information around just as fast as CE or anything else out there," Maggs said.
In the upcoming holiday season, the Handspring Visor Prism is likely to offer the first real test of how much consumers value a Palm-compatible device that can display high-resolution photographs and maps, and play flashy video games.
The Prism will also further change the complexion of Palm devices, since until now, all but the Palm IIIc have had monochrome screens. The IIIc has sold about 100,000 units through traditional retail channels since its release in February, a tepid performance. Industry watchers have criticized the IIIc for being less than trend-setting; it displays 256 colors while others display thousands.
Meanwhile, Palm's not giving up on the IIIc.
Palm made a hurried announcement late Friday that it is slashing the IIIc's price from $400 to $330, and include a free software CD as a holiday promotion. Also, customers who buy both a IIIc and a Kodak PalmPix camera will receive a $30 rebate.
"It's inevitable that everybody's going to want color eventually, just like people want color monitors," said Stephen Baker, analyst at PC Data, a market research firm. "But I would say that while people want color, the sales are going to be driven as much by the price as anything else."
To market the color Prism, Mountain View-based Handspring will offer a $40 package that includes a space-shooter game called Zap2000 and a new Visor attachment called GameFace. GameFace fits onto the front of the Visor and provides a little joystick and two buttons for video game play, leaving the Springboard expansion slot accessible.
The GameFace isn't that complicated -- it's a piece of plastic that presses down on a combination of the six buttons on the face of the Visor.
The Visor Prism and Visor Platinum are the first Palm handhelds on the market to use Motorola's 33 MHz DragonBall VZ processor; others use a slower version. The DragonBall VZ is marketed as 50 percent faster than the processors in the other Palm OS handhelds on the market today, but for some applications, such as sorting through databases and calling up large files, it is more than twice as fast.
The Visor Platinum has the same dimensions as other Visor models, while Prism is a half-centimeter thicker at the top. Both have 8MB of memory. The Prism's 65,536-color display is on-par with the Cassiopeia Pocket PC, and better quality than the other color handhelds on the market, which are 12-bit color or less.
Ed Colligan, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Handspring, said the company is still on track to sell more than 1 million of its products by the end of the year. He added that he expects the 2-year-old company to hold its first developer conference in the spring of 2001. That conference will focus on developers who create products that fit into the Springboard expansion slot on Handspring's devices.
Handspring is also scheduled to report earnings after the market closes Tuesday. |
