Interesting email received from George which continues the webOS debate-

Shaun,

I recently had a conversation with a PALM developer about the WebOS. It went something like this …

The WebOS was the wrong move at the wrong time and Palm is not that likely to survive these mistakes. Sad, but true. Yes, its slick, but so was Sonys Beta format and it lost out to the technologically inferior VHS. And its not clear that the WebOS is even technically superior to java environments like Android or mature environments like the Mac OS. If they had been smart, they would have come out with a Linux-based device with a solid JVM – they could have done that 3-4 years ago and that would have been quite a device as it would have run many Java apps out of the box and opened up the vast library of Java applications (not to mention an environment that is familiar to most programmers.

They missed a great opportunity to dominate the market by getting FDH (Fat, Dumb & Happy) as so many companies do (Microsoft has always run scared of losing the market in spite of their early dominating position, and thats why they continue to dominate the market IMHO).

This was in response to a request for a favorite PALM OS app to be ported to the WebOS. The comment really crystalized what happened to PALM and didnt give me a warm fuzzy feeling about the future of PALM.

Just thought I would share it with you guys.

George

SAN FRANCISCO, Mar 09, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Game Developers Conference (GDC) - Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) today announced that a public beta version of the Palm(R) webOS(TM) Plug-in Development Kit (PDK) is now available at the Palm Developer Center (developer.palm.com). Palm is demonstrating new games from early PDK developers in its booth at GDC (No. 2016).

The PDK complements the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK), letting developers use C and C++ alongside the web technologies that power the SDK and mix them seamlessly within a single app. The PDK enables new functionality, including immersive 3D graphics, and gives developers who have built games for other platforms an easy way to bring their titles to the webOS platform. Developers can download the beta PDK and start developing today, but distribution of games built with the beta PDK will require functionality provided in an upcoming Palm webOS update.

“Palm webOS is the go-to platform for great games on two of the three leading carrier networks,” said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. “We have both the developer tools and the hardware necessary for a world-class gaming experience, and an impressive portfolio of webOS game titles from top-notch developers to show for it.”

At CES in January, Palm introduced 12 games built by four leading developers with early access to the PDK:

•”Asphalt 5″ (Gameloft)
•”Brain Challenge(R)” (Gameloft)
•”Glyder 2″ (Glu Mobile)
•”Let’s Golf!” (Gameloft)
•”MONOPOLY” (EA Mobile(TM))
•”Need for Speed(TM) Undercover” (EA Mobile)
•”SCRABBLE” (EA Mobile)
•”Sudoku” (EA Mobile)
•”Tetris(R)” (EA Mobile)
•”The Oregon Trail” (Gameloft)
•”The Sims(TM) 3″ (EA Mobile)
•”X-Plane” (Laminar Research)

Since then, more than 20 exciting webOS titles have been launched by these early-access developers:

•”Apollo” (Laminar Research)
•”Assassin’s Creed(TM) – Altair’s Chronicles” (Gameloft)
•”Brothers In Arms(R): Hour of Heroes” (Gameloft)
•”Castle of Magic” (Gameloft)
•”Deer Hunter 3D” (Glu Mobile)
•”Dungeon Hunter” (Gameloft)
•”Earthworm Jim” (Gameloft)
•”Gangstar: West Coast Hustle” (Gameloft)
•”Giant Fighting Robots” (Laminar Research)
•”Guitar Hero 5 Mobile” (Glu Mobile)
•”Hero of Sparta” (Gameloft)
•”Real Soccer 2010″ (Gameloft)
•”Real Tennis” (Gameloft)
•”World Series of Poker: Hold’em Legend” (Glu Mobile)
•”X-Plane Airliner” (Laminar Research)
•”X-Plane Carrier” (Laminar Research)
•”X-Plane Extreme” (Laminar Research)
•”X-Plane Glider” (Laminar Research)
•”X-Plane Helicopter” (Laminar Research)
•”X-Plane Racing” (Laminar Research)
•”X-Plane Space Shuttle” (Laminar Research)

“The Palm webOS PDK is extremely powerful and far-reaching, as evidenced by the number of titles we’ve been able to bring to the webOS platform in a very short time,” said Baudouin Corman, vice president of publishing, Americas, Gameloft. “It’s quite difficult to make a great phone that’s also an outstanding gaming platform; Palm has been successful delivering both.”

More information about the beta PDK is available at the Palm Developer Center (developer.palm.com). More information about games for Palm webOS is available at www.palm.com/applications.

Get used to seeing some musings from David. He has kindly agreed to write for PDA-247 and here is his first article- a mini-review of the Palm Pre.

I’ve always loved Palm, I loved my m505, I loved my Treos, but do I love the Pre? Well, yes and no. I love the feel of it in my hand, they were going for the pebble feel and have got that just right but the build quality leaves a lot to be desired! The slide mechanism wobbles from side to side and sometimes won’t open and the keypad area feels cheap and nasty. The track ball thingy is a complete waste of time (and has been removed on the latest “Plus” models) and the screen is plastic, not glass, so will scratch quite easily. I do keep picking it up and turning it over in my hand, (and the last phone that made me do that was a Motorola MPX200), so they must have got something right.

All the usual suspects are here, 3g, GPS, Wi-Fi, accelerometer, camera and 8GB of storage, one missing feature is a memory card slot, but so far that hasn’t bothered me as much as I thought it would. One nice touch is the internal memory can mount as a USB disk, I wish the iPhone could do that. I also love the Touchstone inductive charger, I know it’s not that hard to plug in a wire, but there is something futuristic about just plonking the Pre down and watching it start charging.

I love webOS. It’s as easy to use as an iPhone, five minutes tuition and anyone can use it, and it’s the only mobile OS I’ve seen that makes multitasking so obvious you don’t even notice it: to steal a phrase, “it just works”. The built in apps are about average and with the latest OS update you get video recording, bringing it up to par with the opposition. OS updates are handled nicely, with the phone telling you when one’s available OTA, but application updates have to be looked for. The app store isn’t a patch on Apples, but most of the stuff you need is there and there is a healthy homebrew community, which Palm seem to encourage, so you can find a lot of patches and apps there as well, really adding to the phones functions.

The integration with Google and Facebook (Palm call it Synergy) is quite good, enter you details and a few minutes later all your calendar and contacts information is on the phone. But it could go much further and if you’re not living in Google’s world things are not quite as easy. Getting media on the phone is a pain since Apple blocked the iTunes route, you pretty much have to drag and drop or dig out a third party solution but that’s really no different to everyone else except Apple.

On the whole I think the Pre is a winner, apart from one thing- price. For o2 to try and sell it at the same price as the iPhone is crazy. It maybe almost as good, but the Apple hype makes it a non starter; at that price no one will even notice it. Offer it at half the price or for 99 quid on pay as you go and it will sell loads.

So, on balance I do love the Pre, just not as much as my iPhone.

David has also come up with some thoughts about Palm Synergy- “I’ve been using a Palm Pre for a few weeks now and I’ve just realised something. When webOS was announced with great fanfare last year, much was made of Synergy and that the Pre was the first phone that thought for you: “anticipated your needs” I believe the phrase was. Well I have to disagree. Sure it pulls in contacts from Google and Facebook, but where is the cleverness? Where’s the ability to pick a contact and suggest the best way of contacting them based on location and online status? Where’s the location awareness in the calendar app that warns me I have an appointment in Slough and I’m nowhere near the place? Where’s the ability to mute the phone when I’m in a meeting, or automatically text a reply when I’m driving? Palm had a brilliant opportunity to do something truly revolutionary but all they seem to have done is make all my contacts pictures come from Facebook!“

There are now many rumours surrounding the Palm Elan online and guesses range from a tablet device to an AT&T smartphone to it simply being another name for the Pixi.

Here is what pre central thinks- “Never underestimate the investigative search prowess of PreCentral members. Shadow-360 tips us to let us know that he’s done some digging based off some information dropped by TopTongueBarry and the results bring us a sliver of hope that the full-touchscreen, slate-style, high-end halo webOS device we’ve been hoping for could indeed be a reality in the coming months.

It begins with TopTongueBarry, a self-professed AT&T IT employee who posted saying that not only has testing finished for the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus, but that testing will soon begin for a mystery device codenamed ‘Elan.’ That matches up well with previous forum sluethery, wherein ToniCipriani noted that May 10th looks like as good a date as any for AT&T to release the Pre and Pixi…”

If Palm’s PDK allows iPhone developers to port their apps over to webOS in a matter of days we could see some interesting moves over the next few months. From everythingpre- “Perhaps more importantly, the PDK will allow devs to rewrite mobile apps that they’ve built for other platforms to run on webOS with minimal modifications. iPhone apps can be ported over in a matter of days, sources close to the company tell me, and they don’t really suffer any degradation in performance.”

Facebook for webOS has been updated with some new features and smaller changes. More at the official Palm blog-

A completely revamped version of the free Facebook for Palm app for all Palm webOS phones is now available in the Palm App Catalog. Download (or update) the app and you’ll find enhancements to help you:

• Stay current: You can keep up to date with your Facebook inbox, latest Facebook events, friends’ birthdays, and your news feed. You can now view your friends’ Walls, Information, and Photos, and keep tabs on your own Wall.
•Stay in touch: Reply to messages in your Facebook inbox or compose new messages, Like and Comment on items in your News Feed, and find friends (old and new) with new Search functionality.
•Share photos: You can show off your photo albums to friends, as well as view, like, and comment on photos and albums. You can also quickly upload photos directly from the Facebook application.

Palm has updated the webOS SDK to v1.4 which brings the following changes-

•webOS now incorporates WebKit 4, which features enhanced CSS support and numerous other improvements.
•The webOS implementation of the HTML 5 Media API has been updated, bringing closer conformance to the specification, and improvements to audio performance.
•The Camera API has been extended to let an application initiate video capture, in addition to image capture.
•The V8 JavaScript engine used in webOS has been updated.

A good Acid3 score means that a web browser is highly compliant with web standards and it appears that the recently updated webOS 1.4 does very well in this area. From pre central- “There is this test call the Acid3 Test, and it is designed to test a web browser’s compliance with web standards, with an emphasis placed on Document Object Model and JavaScript. For an operating system based on web standards, you might think that webOS would have been scoring fairly highly with the test from day one. Not so, it would seem. In the early days of webOS, the browser scored a pitiful 1/100. With the update to webOS 1.3.1, the browser scored a 73/100 – better, but still not great.

Now, with webOS 1.4 out and about, the browser’s standards compliance has taken another step forward, scoring a 92/100. Obviously, that’s a great step forward as far as the browser is concerned, and we have been receiving reports of better performance and rendering on all manner of sites as a result…”

No matter what happens in the smartphone industry, Palm has always been there with headline grabbing activity (good and bad) which keeps the brand in the spotlight. Without doubt the leader in early PDA usage and again the leader in early smartphones usage, but one which never failed to kicked itself where it hurt time and time again.

The early PDAs, and especially the operating system, were practical and well designed which quickly grew a large user base that could look no further than Palm OS. The V series showed an understanding of style and this was the very first PDA to attempt to make the genre fashionable. Despite the presence of Sony, Palm continued to gradually improve its product, but eventually followed Sony in certain areas and we ended up with PDAs that could perform multiple tasks albeit with some issues. The same applied to the early smartphones, all of which had substantial problems, and all of which were soon overtaken by competitors. If I look back at my own experience with Palm OS products the overall impression is one of almost perfect, but not quite the full ticket-

Palm V / Vx- a PDA which was beautiful to look at and great to use. The same applied to the m500 series.

Palm T series- the T3 was ridiculously good at the time and despite some battery issues was about as complete a device as you could hope for at the time.

Palm T5- a utter disaster in my experience. Highly unreliable despite the presence of a decent hardware setup.

Treo 650- a great, great phone with a huge battery and superb data input. The lack of dbCache memory was a big problem for many power users.

Treo 680- should have been great as well, but the battery life was a killer for anyone who actually needed to make phone calls.

All of the Windows Mobile phones from Palm followed similar lines and never quite stood out from the crowd.

Palm Pre- a superb OS married to average (at best) hardware. Battery issues persist and the overall build quality is less than stellar. The inability to offer all of the third party apps to people outside the US irks some of us and rightly so.

The fact remains that Palm is sitting on what is potentially the best smartphone OS in the market and that the word ‘potential’ is what dominates here. Palm has not realised the potential and has concentrated far too much on the OS. Good software needs good hardware and vice versa- forget one and you may as well forget both. I still believe that Palm could do very well indeed, but it is sad to say that it is more likely that it will be swallowed up by a competitor who sticks some better hardware behind the OS. Is that such a bad thing considering Palms record on hardware delivery? I think not.

And then Carel came up with some more reasons for the current problems- “I’m not a marketing or logistics expert, but why didn’t Palm enter new markets when earnings started to fall in the handful of countries the Pre is currently available and instead offers the Pre with HUGE discounts? Why do they offer an improved Pre in the states but still announce the old one in France (rumors say the Pre is about to be released in France soon) and the rest of the world?

Why isn’t there any kind of ETA for other countries? Although i thought it was 8 months….the Dutch Palm site is telling the Pre is “available soon” for over THIRTEEN months. There are some people on their marketing department who should look for another job. When I buy an unlocked Pre only a handful of applications (150+) are available….most of them not very useful.

I was a Palm fan for over 10 years but it’s hard for me to understand what they are doing. I even bought myself an “unlocked” German Pre a few months ago but it was a horrible experience. Palm did accept my Euro’s when I bought my device but refused any help (No 3rd party apps and No data connection and very hard to setup in a not supported country) because I live in a “not supported” country. Luckily the shop I bought my Pre had a return policy.

So it’s not a surprise for me Palm is having a hard time.”

Palm Pre: why Palm’s innovative handset failed in the UK over at wirefresh sums up what went wrong for the Pre in the UK. I have still yet to see one person using one over here and walking into an O2 shop is exactly as decribed; iPhone, iPhone, iPhone.

“The news from across the Atlantic is looking grim for Palm, with sales well down on initial estimates, and a profit warning issued – and if things are bad there, it’s hard to imagine how much worse they must be in the UK.

Put bluntly, you’re more likely to see a juggling polar bear unicycling down the High Street than see a Palm Pre being used in the UK.

So what happened? Why did such a great phone not get the attention it deserved in the UK?

The disastrous UK campaign

We fell in love with the operating system – still unsurpassed anywhere else as far as we’re concerned – when it was first announced back in January 2009 and looked forward to an enthusiastic UK roll out.

Signed to an exclusive deal with o2, we anticipated an aggressive advertising campaign to persuade users bedazzled by the iPhone that the Palm was a worthy alternative.

And then we waited. And waited, and waited until the Pre finally made it across to the UK, nearly half a year later when the initial buzz had been reduced to the tiniest of fizzes, and the rave magazine reviews a distant memory…”

It is rather irritating that non-US webOS users cannot install US App Catalog apps to their devices, but IPKfletcher changes all of that. From PUGcast- “App Catalog dowloads under webOS are restricted to the user’s origin and thus, Northern American webOS users see different apps as we over in Europe.

There are ways to trick the App Catalog and install the apps by their ID from the within the webOS’ command line, but this is uncomfortable and not easy done by everyone.

A German member from Germany’s Number one Palm forum www.Nexave.de today has provided a so-called IPKfetcher tool for download, which retrieves any free app from within the app catalog and installs it by precentral’s webOS Quick Install as regular as any other file installation. Make sure you take the latest quick install version 2.03. The downloader is written in JAVA and thus is crossplatform…”

The Wall Street Journal has posted a letter from Palm CEO, Jon Rubenstein, to employees. Here’s an extract- “I realize this news is difficult to swallow. We made this announcement today to prevent a surprise for Wall Street when we announce quarterly earnings in March. In the meantime, the entire executive team has been working extremely hard to improve product performance, and have implemented a number of initiatives to increase awareness and drive sales.

Dave Whalen and I just returned from a very successful meeting with Verizon Wireless, where they acknowledged that their execution of our launch was below expectations and recommitted to working with us to improve sales. To accelerate sales, we initiated Project JumpStart nearly three weeks ago. Since then, nearly two hundred Palm Brand Ambassadors, supplemented by Palm employees from Sunnyvale, have been training Verizon sales reps across the U.S. on our products. Early results from the stores have already shown improvement on product knowledge and sales week over week. You may have also seen a growing number of Palm ads on billboards, bus shelters, buses, and subway stations—all getting the word out about Palm…”

Reports are emerging that some GSM users have started to receive the latest webOS update. Excellent news if so (Yours truly will let you know when it arrives at mine – not yet!).

The latest update is supposed to bring performance enhancements, some new features, and importantly, support for Flash (Note: Flash to be available later, as a separate download). Support for European App Purchases is also due, Palm said March (Though maybe its part of the update?).

More information to follow…

The latest results from Palm are not looking good at all, especially in an industry where momentum is everything.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb 25, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) Palm, Inc. (NASDAQ:PALM) today indicated that it expects that revenues for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010 will be in the range of $285 million to $310 million on a GAAP basis and in the range of $300 million to $320 million on a non-GAAP basis.1 Revenues for the quarter and full year are being impacted by slower than expected consumer adoption of the company’s products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods. Accordingly, Palm expects fiscal year 2010 revenues to be well below its previously forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion. The company will provide more detail on its financial results during Palm’s third-quarter financial results conference call currently scheduled for Thursday, March 18.

“Palm webOS is recognized as a groundbreaking platform that enables one of the best smartphone experiences available today, and our work to evolve the platform and bring industry-leading technology to market continues. However, driving broad consumer adoption of Palm products is taking longer than we anticipated,” said Jon Rubinstein, chairman and chief executive officer. “Our carrier partners remain committed, and we are working closely with them to increase awareness and drive sales of our differentiated Palm products.”

The Company expects to close its third fiscal quarter with a cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments balance in excess of $500 million.

Palm will announce its third-quarter fiscal year 2010 financial results on Thursday, March 18, shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern (1 p.m. Pacific), followed by a conference call for the public at 4:30 p.m. Eastern (1:30 p.m. Pacific).

Also, this from Business Insider doesn’t help matters- the stock has tanked already. Thanks to Trevor- ”

Palm is slashing its guidance, confirming that its Pre and Pixi smartphones and WebOS platform have been off to a slow start. Palm shares are down 18% on the news.

Since there’s no obvious way that Palm is going to boost its market share — even selling its phones at Verizon Wireless, the top U.S. carrier, hasn’t helped much, and we doubt AT&T will make a big impact — it seems that CEO Jon Rubinstein would be best off looking for a buyer now.

So who wants a next-generation smartphone platform? RIM? Nokia? HP? Dell?

Palm expects third-quarter sales to be in the range of $285 million to $310 million on a GAAP basis and $300 million to $320 million on a non-GAAP basis. The Street was expecting $425 million.

Palm also expects full year sales to be “well below” its forecasted range of $1.6 billion to $1.8 billion; the Street was expecting $1.6 billion.

“Revenues for the quarter and full year are being impacted by slower than expected consumer adoption of the company’s products that has resulted in lower than expected order volumes from carriers and the deferral of orders to future periods,” the company said in a statement.”