Monthly Archives: February 2011

Anyone who’s watched the television show Fringe, recently, will know their alternate Earth storyline – a parallel Universe with a planet much like ours where things are just that little bit different.

It got me wondering about the big mobile announcements of the last week.   In April of 2010, speculation mounted that Palm was up for sale, due to the failure of WebOS to generate enough sales to keep the company buoyant.  WebOS was a highly acclaimed OS, but the accompanying Pre hardware was derided for poor build quality and Palm’s failure to iterate new models quickly enough.  Potential buyers of Palm included HTC, RIM, LG, Samsung and Nokia.  We all know what happened in the end – HP snapped them up and just announced a new family of WebOS products.

But what if Nokia had bought Palm?  They would have gained a critically lauded OS which many consider to be as slick and beautiful as iOS and could have paired it with the usual exceptional Nokia hardware.  Furthermore, they could have remained masters of their own destiny, controlling a complete, tightly-integrated platform – one of Apple’s massive strengths.  Instead, they just become another Windows Phone 7 licensee, owing royalties to Microsoft, who remain in total control of the software experience, regardless of what PR puff the two parties present to the public.

And what of HP?  They hitched their wagon to Microsoft years ago so it isn’t too much of a stretch to imagine them launching a range of Windows Phone 7 handsets last week.  HP’s Jornado range were early Windows Mobile PDAs, firmly eclipsed in quality by Compaq’s excellent iPAQs.  HP eventually bought Compaq and managed to take the iPAQ range from cutting-edge to market irrelevancy in just a few short years.  Here’s hoping they don’t work the same corporate magic on WebOS.

The theory of the multiverse that Fringe explores has some scientific legitimacy, so maybe it’s not impossible that someone, somewhere, today in a subtly different Earth is unboxing a gleaming Nokia WebOS handset.  I think I like their Universe better.

Peter M.

Today’s comment of the day comes from Zelph- “Good branding is almost invisible. We don’t always know when we’re using it. Examples: Kleenex, Band-Aid, Jell-o. All brand names; all used to describe the generic as well.”

I guess that only Palm ever achieved the level in mobile where people used the company name to describe a product.

The discussions and general commentary for all of you make PDA-247 what it is. With that in mind I am considering changing the commenting system to allow individual post counts, profiles, memberships etc.

So, are you happy with the current commenting mechanism or would you prefer to have a more sophisticated method of commenting on 247, similar to the way forums manage memberships?

Today’s comment of the day comes from Tom- “Palm was more than the OS for me. It was the philosophy behind it. Build something spare and elegant. That’s what I miss, but that had gone out of Palm somewhere along the way. I think it was folks like Rob Hoitani and Jeff Hawkins who really made that part of Palm. Apple has this quite a bit. I don’t get this philosophy much from Android, but some do. Windows Phone and WebOS – yeah, there’s some there too.  As long as the OS’s still try to maintain that simplicity and elegance I won’t miss the Palm name, I guess.”

Great tweet from Ratkat-

MeeGo?

Yup.  And don’t forget your coat.

Peter M.