Anyone Care About the Palm?
Amid the excitement about the iPhone (despite its software woes) and the recently-launched Blackberry Bold, you sometimes forget that Palm is still alive (if not well!).
Lest you forget, it wasn’t that long ago that the Palm was the hottest smartphone around. People loved the Treo. I can remember being invited to a REM concert by Palm Canada, and being excited because they gave us a Palm Zire as we headed home.
Today, Palm is pretty much a forgotten entity even though it continues to come up with new products, including the new Treo Pro. In some ways, the Palm’s troubles reflect two harsh realities: it struggled by trying to be all things to all people, and it was probably ahead of its time because the networks needed to have a great mobile experience weren’t around.
As Palm dealt with technical, financial and ownership issues, the smartphone market got away from it. The next thing you know, the Blackberry has gone from feisty Canadian start-up to the device used by millions to get mobile e-mail. Then, Apple moves into the market just as 3G networks are starting to emerge.
Palm’s trials and tribulations are common in nearly every industry but it is interesting that it’s nearly disappeared from the smartphone landscape.
For more thoughts on the Palm, check out Salon’s Machinist, which does a nice job looking back at the Palm’s history.
For more on Palm’s declining stature, check out jkOnTheRun’s post talking about Ryan Block’s open letter to Palm.
Technorati Tags: blackbery bold, iPhone, palm
August 21st, 2008 at 9:55 pm
After seeing my U.S. colleagues with them, I was keen on the Palm Centro as a starter smart phone until I could afford one of the “big guns”. It is meant to be an inexpensive phone, but when they introduced it into Canada (and we even had a cool exclusive colour not found in the US!) the cost unfortunately was no less than the iPhone. So, what’s a girl gonna do? I went for the iPhone.
I think it is unfortunate there isn’t more price differentiation for different audiences.
Cheers,
Connie
August 22nd, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Palm was never one of the hottest smartphones, it was the hottest PDA but that was in the days before the merger of phones and PDAs. You imply that the Palm Zire was a phone but that was not the case - it never had phone functionality..