Entries tagged with “palm pre” from Paul Lopez Unwired

Palm's press conference at CES will be Thursday January 7^th where they'll likely announce the Palm Pre 3 with Verizon. It's taken almost a year since I first recommended Palm needed another carrier. Palm's stock performance this year was certainly improved by the original Pre introduction but it failed to translate into meaningful revenue and profit growth. I believe Palm's Webkit and friendly developer tools still make it a viable device but Verizon will have to position it against the highly marketed Droid and quite possibly by summer, the Apple CDMA iPhone 4G. The New Year is shaping up well for Verizon as they seem to be placing their bets across the smartphone "blue line." When you have real spectrum, you have nothing to worry about. I would be concerned with how the unlocked Google phone would perform on T-Mobile. Even a subsidized T-Mobile handset would be dependent on wide spectrum availability (>100MHz) in thin metro spots. With the new Verizon deal, Palm needs to show it can grow revenue and profit margin. Verizon could have the Pre 3 at the low end, the Droid in the mid-range and the iPhone 4G at the high end. The CDMA communication logic for the 4G might not be ready in time for the Apple Tablet (should it have built-in WWAN support in the first place), but I'd like to see Verizon pick up the Apple Tablet early on. No doubt, January will be a busy mobility month!

Rather than launching Windows Mobile 7.0, Microsoft introduced an intermediate step in its quest to stem the Smartphone market share decline during 2008. The new platform has a touch-friendly honey-comb style main menu, wider menus with big icons and an online service called Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The success of the Apple App Store has prompted other manufacturers such as RIM and Nokia (Ovi Store) to follow suit in promoting the developer community. Before the iPhone, Microsoft had split the Smartphone market with RIM. Now it competes in a crowded marketplace (i.e., smaller world) where creating separation from competitors becomes a challenge. They should let RIM battle Apple and focus on differentiating against the Palm Pre. To me, "Pre" means "Pre-iPhone" and "Pre-Blackberry," I'm watching out for Palm, they're still getting noticed. 

By building upon their heritage in personal information management devices, Palm has extended good functionality to popular websites that appeal to business users with the new Palm Pre. I believe this is the last Hoo-Haa for Palm as they have struggled for several years (stock was $1.50 in December). They redesigned the operating system, WebOS, from the ground up and many industry observers like the new user interface. It makes use of MEMS to support tilt like the iPhone. It received a lot of attention at the Consumer Electronics Show this week. The browser is based on WebKit and developers who know XHTML, Javascript, XML and Cascading Style Sheets should be able to develop for the device without learning any new languages. Palm has many loyal users. Their carrier partner, Sprint has experienced a severe drop in subscriber growth recently. So you have two weak players making another go at it. If Verizon gets a hold of it, that would help it flank AT&T's iPhone. We're not out jumping in the stock yet, it went from $3 to $6 in a couple of days, mostly a short-covering rally.