All: Today's analysis: Read (LONG)
After all of today's news I have to say these announcements feel like incredible news for COM$. As a PalmPilot user from the first version, I think these added functions are great. With all this news I decided to do some internet research and determine where this new Palm 7 fits in. I'll let you all in on what I discovered…
Price will limit audience for this device to business users located in cities and travelers who frequent these cities. The unit price hopefully comes in significantly lower than the $800 proposed. With cell phone prices (as a comparison) at $200, this price level is high. The service price could also be high depending on usage.
While some of the features look cool (Web clipping, iMessenger) there are some downsides.
At 8K, this is horribly slow. I realize this is only text data but this very slow compared to other wireless technologies. CDPD (or Wireless IP) can achieve rates of 19.2k. I don't understand why they would not have just used the existing Wireless IP infrastructure. There are nationwide providers like AT&T. One can currently buy a wireless modem from Novatel and achieve many of the same functions.
The integration of the wireless into the Palm has benefits in reducing the Form factor and allowing better feature integration (raise the antenna to turn on net features). The fact that product, modem and connect service all comes from one vender has positive attributes. But it does not leverage other companies' efforts here very well. It starts as a closed network operated by Palm. Imagine if one company tried to become the access to point to the internet when it started – it would not have grown very fast. Hopefully this is a short-term strategy until there is a critical mass of users. Although the flip side here is that it does represent a portal like business to be the access point of all these users to the Palm net.
I would not use this platform to access my POP server on the internet. I'd use the Wireless IP modem and PALM III. While the PALM 7 may support the app, I wouldn't be happy with 8K performance. So the Palm 7 platform becomes a specific purpose platform. It will be great for field automation apps, data collection, communication to field reps in corporations.
The BellSouth Mobitex network also has some advantages for people who travel all the time. It is a nationwide network, which means that there are no roaming hassles – Wireless IP requires manual intervention to be recognized in a new area for someone who travels a lot. This is not a general-purpose application platform until the network bandwidth is increased (if it is even possible).
The on-line brokers will have some work to do to make this a usable platform. There's a lot K bytes going over the internet when I do a stock order now – even with the all text screens. With network overhead it may take 10K to do one stock order. Granted this can be reduced but there will be re-design need for this to be effective by all the on-line brokers.
As with any wireless technology (except iridium), coverage will limit functionality. This platform is for the urban worker. Although 93% of urban areas are covered the vast majority of the country is not covered in terms in land area. So this does limit the applications usefulness to urban areas and business centers. So it may or may not work if I take an hour drive to go play golf while I'm on my sales trip in Arizona.
One big important reason to do this product and release is mind-share. We all know that wireless is the future, this firmly plants 3Com into a leading role for wireless handheld computing. It is a good product with a reasonably large potential customer set.
It is a focused solution rather than a general-purpose solution. This completely leverages the strengths of the PALM OS rather than trying to stretch the OS to solve a whole slew of general-purpose problems. The PALM OS is not deep OS with a broad API. It is fairly simple and thin. Of course this leaves the general-purpose apps (spreadsheet, rich browser, Word processor, e-money, Java runtime engine etc) to other platforms – there lies the danger.
MS Window CE has been trying to be all things to all people for some time now and pursue the general-purpose approach while letting 3rd parties supply support for infrastructure like the Palm 7 announcements today. This has not worked yet. Someday these handhelds will have much more computing power. CE is much more suited to that type of environment than Palm OS. It can offer more functionality and more features.
There are at least 3 distinct opportunities for the handheld market today: The communicator, the general-purpose handheld platform (in a palm sized form factor), and the consumer device. The Palm 7 meets most of the needs of the communicator (maybe they should call it the PalmComm). And the Palm III can meet many others with a modem or combined in the Qualcomm phone. MS CE could win if one device can meet all 3 needs but it has to start building some critical mass to do this. The PalmComm offers a tactical product that meets customer needs today. This will drive more current customers (especially business) to the Palm platform and continue to be in the driver seat in this arena.
The upcoming razor will do that on the consumer end. It will take longer for CE to become light and thin enough to get down to a really thin device like the razor. This market will continue to migrate towards smaller and smaller form factors. A small-thin OS will be the winner here. So Palm does have an advantage for some time in this arena.
The question for the long term is how does the Palm OS meet the general-purpose needs. Does it become a bigger OS with broader support for building more complex applications? Does it become a segmented OS (different versions for consumer vs business use?
Keeping in mind that the PC still exists and will continue to be useful, perhaps the right answer is that the Palm devices do not take on hosting complex applications. The Palm OS will need to grow in functionality for sure but it should adopt functionality (size) judiciously. As PC use fragments among many different types of computing devices, it will become the host of the complex part of any application working in tandem with the devices like the PalmComm, Palm III, Razor and many others.
Build the application on the PC but get 80% of its functionality by having the data represented and communicated on the Palm devices.
Tim |
