There are a few myths I want to smash, straight off:
1) The iPhone doesn't exist yet...what the hell are you all swooning for? Super-premium cost, closed system, heavy power-requirements/ skinny battery combo, no expansion, forced marriage to Cingular for 2 years...put the Ecstasy away and get some fresh air, people.
2) The Clie' line of PDAs was a failure. Sony stretched the Palm OS, but only for the fanatical few. They were too complicated, too expensive, and were never focused on mass appeal. They deserved to die.
3) Regardless of what Ed Colligan may tell the press, the smartphone market is all about style and sex appeal. If Palm doesn't get some major pheromones into their products, then their customers will die of boredom (but, they'll do it with ease-of-use; so, I guess that's something).
OK...Arts is back on his high-horse, again. But, why? Simple, my friends...I truly believe that there is a partner out there who shares Palm's historical passion for ease-of-use; but, is light-years ahead of everyone else in having a working vision of how to make high-tech simple for the average person. This is the holy grail of mass sales, and only one character has pulled it off convincingly: Mario The Plumber.
Consider that 2 years ago, every one of the digital pundits on Wall Street (you know, the same imbeciles who have predicted Palm's imminent demise for the past decade) predicted that Nintendo was about to bite the dust. They had lost their console mojo to the PlayStation and X-Box; and Sony's new PSP was going to pulverize them in their last stronghold: the personal gaming space.
2 years later, the Nintendo DS, with its inferior graphics and processing speed is outselling the PSP worldwide...2-to-1. In the meantime, Nintendo has patented an OS for the Wii, and added all sorts of WiFi capabilities to its gaming skills, along with goodies like wireless TV. In Japan, people sneer if you show up with a PSP.
This past Christmas, the same 'geniuses' predicted that the Nintendo Wii would come in a poor 3rd behind the new X-Box and the PlayStation 3. Nintendo's doom was sealed...there was no doubt about it.
Here we are in March, and both Sony and Microsoft are running like hell to develop an answer to the Wii's revolutionary controller. Nintendo's Wii was the sales heavyweight this Christmas, and shows no sign of slowing down.
What the heck happened? Nintendo realized that the process of gaming had not changed in years...it was stuck in a paradigm defined by the technical limitations of a decade ago, and simply added more power (processing, graphics). No one bothered to notice that today's technology provided a visionary company with the means to completely re-visit the way that people could use these games, and make them simpler and more fun to use. Does that remind anyone of the traditional 'Zen of Palm'?
So, what does all this have to do with Palm? Palm has lost its Zen. The Treo is still a very competent machine, but it (and all of its competitors) are still using the same processes defined by Jeff Hawkins back in the early 1990's. What is required is Nintendo's attitude that the process of using a PDA and smartphone needs to be re-visited and re-invented, based on the technology of today. That hasn't happened, and as a result, smartphones and feature-phones are still too intimidating for the mass-market.
Were Palm to team with Nintendo's visionaries, the combination could be mind-boggling. Imagine! The process of making a device easier to use, more fun to use and more useful would take precedent over higher resolutions, more powerful processors and Steve Jobs-envy. Palm could do what they did in 1996: kick over the table and send the rascals running for their lives.
There are potential problems though: Nintendo has proven to be less then visionary with their naming conventions, and I fear what Nintendo/ Palm products might be called.
The Palm PS? echhh! Even worse...the Nintendo Pii (I won't say another word on that subject)...
That's it...I'm off the bloody soapbox!