Palm CEO: Palm, Apple, RIM Have an Advantage Over Everyone Else
Today is the day when Microsoft goes live with Windows Mobile 6.5, the long-awaited next step in the platform. While largely acknowledged to be a step on the road to WM7, the real “next big thing” from Redmond, 6.5 adds interface changes to bring the platform more in line with the competition. Today should also see the grand opening of the Windows Mobile Marketplace, the app store for the Windows phone owner.
GigaOM interviewed Jon Rubenstein, CEO of Palm, to ask about the current state of the smartphone market, and to get insight into the company’s plans to deal with all of this competition. It turns out that Palm is not very concerned about Windows Mobile, GigaOM had this to say about the conversation with Palm:
Rubenstein told us that he considered Palm, Apple and RIM as “three companies that have an advantage to everyone else in the space” because they deeply integrate its hardware and software together into a complete smartphone package. He noted that there’s room for three to five other players in the mobile business.
That’s a heady statement, coming from Palm who is by anyone’s account struggling for survival. Palm does recognize the importance of the developer community, and intends to bend over backwards to help them build apps for Palm’s WebOS. Rubenstein told GigaOM that over 7.5 million apps have been downloaded for the Pre to date.
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All I know is I took my upgraded at&t Fuze out for a ride on the new Marketplace yesterday and I wasn’t impressed. I found the UI ugly, awkward and hard to navigate.
One developer wanted $20 for Tetris and there wasn’t really much material posted to convince me I wanted to drop that much cash for it. It’s one thing to drop $.99 practically sight un-seen, something else entirely to get me to drop that much money sight un-seen.
I didn’t find a single GPS application.
They did have Madden NFL 2010 and several other of the big box franchises though.
I wasn’t able to try the cloud services (MyPhone) yet, they were still down.
And despite all the “your apps are worth more here” hype: they had $.99 apps.
Even though they chased developers since Feb the thing that has to burn the most for Microsoft was only having 20K apps. They’ve been in the market for over 10 years.
at&t’s network is just as overloaded downloading apps onto the Fuze as it is downloading them to the iPhone. The Fuze just gets warmer than my 3GS doing it.
All in all a much needed improvement over the scattered means of downloading content onto the Fuze previously. I just wish they could have made it prettier and easier to utilize, more like Win 7 would have been nice.
But in the end I think the final word is: I didn’t actually buy anything, just grabbed freebies. Nothing really said “Buy me” it was the same over priced corporate ware you could find elsewhere and corporate purchasing has to buy that. The non-corporate iPhone-esqe “snackable content” was mostly MIA.
Maybe they’ll have something today.
Are they really struggling for survival? They’ve got several hundred Pres out there and big cash infusion(s).
Hundred thousand that is. ;)
Every time a read a new analyst report they always mention that Palm is still in a tenuous position. I hope they make it.
they need to come out on GSM and do it quick before android drowns them.
developers, developers, developers – give them the tools… how about a palm pre Dev phone?
Licence this the os out to tablets/netbooks/mid/etc makers
remember HTC shift with the dumbed down windows mobile as anohter OS