The smart-phone wars are heating up. Handset makers are releasing a wave of new devices backed by a flood of advertisements, as some fight for survival in the fast-growing but increasingly crowded market.
Companies such as Motorola Inc., Palm Inc. and HTC Corp. are hoping new phones will help them reclaim market share from the reigning iPhone and BlackBerry.
A few days after the Palm Pre was released, I wrote a couple of programs for it: a restaurant Tip Calculator, and a port of Dali Clock. These were, as far as I’m aware, the 2nd and 3rd third-party applications for Palm WebOS that were ever available. I got on this boat early.
For two Canadian guys who’ve spent the past 17 years together building one of the world’s most important tech companies, Research in Motion co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have surprisingly little in common.
Recently, Palm came under fire when programmer Joey Hess discovered the Pre’s smartphone OS was sending users’ GPS locations back to Palm on a daily basis.
The best days for the Palm Pre may already have past. That was the implication of the Sell call on the stock this morning from Morgan Joseph – and the same theme can be found in a similarly bearish note this morning from Collins Stewart analyst Ashok Kumar.
Sales of the Palm Pre smartphone may be creeping up to 30,000 a week this week versus a prior trend of 25,000, writes Pali Capital analyst Walter Piecyk in a blog post this morning.
Since Palm to date has refused to give any hard data on sales of the much-ballyhooed Pre smartphone, the Street has resorted to some alternative methods to get a read on how sales are going. While the company still has plenty of fans, the sharp run-up in the stock combined with the lack of information has created a large pool of skeptics.
Kaufman Bros. analyst Shaw Wu this morning launched coverage of Palm with a Hold rating and a $16 price target. He writes in a research note that the company is well-positioned in the smart phone sector with its WebOS software, but that the valuation is expensive; he also is concerned about ongoing operating losses and a weak balance sheet.
Contrary to previous public statements by the company, Palm CFO Douglas C. Jeffries has not been registered as a certified public accountant in the state of California since 1984, records from the California Board of Accountancy show.
Here is the latest comic from our Joy of Tech friends at Geek Culture, Nitrozac and Snaggy. Joy of Tech appears three times a week in the Voices section of this site. (Click on the image to see a bigger version.)
To say Palm has a lot riding on the Pre smartphone is an understatement.
As recently as late 2008, Pandora Networks’ Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad still had big doubts about the prospects for smartphone maker Palm. In November, Conrad was among a coterie of software developers invited to Palm headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., to take an early, up-close look at an operating system for use in the company’s phones. “I was totally skeptical when I walked in,” says Conrad, who met Palm execs along with representatives of MySpace, Intuit, movie site Fandango, and Epocrates, a maker of mobile software for physicians.
The cellphone is the world’s most ubiquitous computer. With the dominance of the cellphone, a new metaphor is emerging for how we organize, find and use information. That metaphor is the map.
MediaMaster, a free Web-based application that allowed users to upload music from their hard drives and listen to it online or on their mobile devices, made the decision to shutter its doors, and explained on its Web site that “it is not possible to keep a service like this up for free without some sort of large scale userbase to get ads to pay for it.”
Apple and Palm kicked a lot of dirt at each other last week–acting Apple CEO Tim Cook flatly told analysts that “We will not stand for people ripping off our IP” when asked specifically about competition like the Palm Pre, and Palm responded with a similarly explicit “We have the tools necessary to defend ourselves.”
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