Nothing too special here, but it must be the end of product life cycle for some early Treos (750 and 680). AT&T is offering the refurb units for FREE. Check them out here.
Showing posts with label treo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label treo. Show all posts
Palm Treo Refurb Sale at AT&T
Nothing too special here, but it must be the end of product life cycle for some early Treos (750 and 680). AT&T is offering the refurb units for FREE. Check them out here.
Palm Mobile Portal Link
Didn't know this existed, found out via backtracking from my previous post regarding to VersaMail 4.01 only being available as a Palm Centro update. In any case, here is a mobile portal for all Palm deviecs. (http://mobile.palm.com/us/)
For all Palm mobile Support, go here.
For Treo 650 mobile support, go here.
For Treo 680 mobile support, go here.
For Palm Centro mobile support, go here.
For Treo 700p mobile support, go here.
For all Palm mobile Support, go here.
For Treo 650 mobile support, go here.
For Treo 680 mobile support, go here.
For Palm Centro mobile support, go here.
For Treo 700p mobile support, go here.
Got my new toy, Treo 680 arrived!
As mentioned yesterday, I've decided to pickup a Palm OS device just for kicks, if nothing else, this will help me round off my mobile experience for this site. I picked up a brand new, unlocked Treo 680 off of eBay for $200 shipped; the seller had a bunch available out of Jersey, so it got to my apartment in NYC within 1 day, amazing. While this phone is brand new as promised, I did noticed the firmware is up to date with a UK version at 2.12 as opposed to the US version at 1.12. Regardless of where its coming from, I got a solid smartphone, unlocked at an amazing value.
In so many ways, I can see where the iPhone has drawn inspiration idea from the Palm Treo such as the user interface, side-mounted button to switch between ringtone and vibrate; as I go on to document my mobile experience and learnings from this smartphone, I will call out the resemblances.The Treo 680 is a sturdy phone; weighing in at 5.6oz, it is drastically heavier than my N95-3 but
feels more solid as well. I really like the construction and feel of it. The one thing I can complain about is that the center button in the 5-way D-Pad feels a little lose, or not precise (compared to a BlackBerry's trackwheel supression). The 320x320 LCD is gorgeous and fully functional as touchscreen; I love between the touchscreen and buttons, I have so many ways to perform basic tasks.Palm OS is vastly different than anything I've ever used before; for the most part, it is best described has having a floating structure. There isn't a centralized home screen, whatever application you are using (phone, camera, calendar, program menu, or etc...), that is the running application for the moment. Because there is no "home screen" to
return to, you can never quit or exit an application. You may simply move on to the next application (and the previous application would be closed out). Therefore, you would not have the ability to switch amongst launched applications. In a sense, I recall having to go through the same realization as I first played with an iPhone. Programs can never be 'closed'; just returning to iPhone's home screen.As far as the default applications that came with the Treo, they are plenty sufficient. The most frequently used app would be the browser, aka Blazer. Using EDGE, it was sufficient to let me check the weather, email and stocks. I read somewhere that one of the
updates in Palm Garnet OS is a cache function which allows visited websites load faster. I noticed a drastic difference with the mobile web experience from when I first launched it and later on in the evening, so it worked! The "World Clock" application is a fun way to look at different times with a globe that very much reminds me of iPhone's clock widget. Camera's simplicity and operation reminds me of the iPhone as well. Versamail, Treo's email application has already gotten a series of POP email profile built-in (again, I can see where iPhone draw the idea from), its unfortunate that Gmail IMAP is not officially supported for the Treo(only Centro) The threaded IM-styled SMS text is again, something iPhone has been inspired from. Palm's supporting software (firmware) and HotSync (Palm Desktop) is pretty easy to use as well. Since I keep my contact and calendar in Outlook 2007, Palm as built an extra conduit software to ensure a smooth synchronization. While Palm may not have an iTunes like efficiency, I find myself enjoying my experience visiting their site and get all the necessary information at my finger tips.
When it comes to third party applications, I was really counting on Google Maps, Gmail Application and Opera Mini. Google Maps runs almost like a default application just as it would on every platform I've ever tried, the only complain is the lack of support on My Location feature (only available on the Palm Centro). Gmail Application is just like the same way it is on a Windows Mobile device where you have to run it as a Java Midlet inside a Java Virtual Machine. Speaking of which, as of Jan 2008, Palm no longer distributes the IBM Websphere Java Virtual Machine, fortunately I was able to find two of the latest versions from here. Once this is installed, Oper Mini will work as well.I will spend more time in the next couple of weeks to test out other third party appolications and other functionalities, as it stands, I like the Treo 680 and very happy to have add it to my smartphone collection. I hope this phone can be more reliable than my N95-3.
A new way to measure the popularity of the iPhone
True story: Back when I was working at Apple, we received a report that there had been a burglary at a company that had a lot of Macintosh computers. The thieves took every one of the Macs -- and left behind all the Windows PCs.
We were delighted. Not about the burglary, mind you. I'm afraid we were pretty callous about that, and besides we figured the company was insured. But we loved the idea that even criminal lowlifes knew which was the better computer.
In fact, we loved that idea so much that we made a commercial about it. It was cool -- deep blue lighting, lots of shadows, and two silhouettes moving silently through the office. One of them starts to pick up a PC, and his companion hisses, "not those, just take these." And he points at a Mac.
The Computer for the Rest of Us, indeed.
At the last minute, somebody in the company realized that the commercial might just possibly be viewed as an endorsement of crime, besides which it made us look like complete mercenaries. So I don't think the commercial was ever aired. We just watched it a lot at communication meetings.
I thought of that old commercial today when I was in an AT&T (formerly Cingular) mobile phone store. There was a big video display for the iPhone, but no phones on the counter. "Did they sell out?" I asked the clerk.
"Nope. Someone broke in and stole them," he said. "We saw it on the surveillance video. They were in and out in 30 seconds. They ran over to the iPhones, cut the cables, and left."
"Did they take anything else?" I asked, thinking I saw a new commercial in the making.
"Oh yeah, they took the Treos too."
Sorry, Apple. No commercial.
And sorry, RIM. They left the Blackberries. Personally, I would have grabbed a Pearl on the way out.
By the way, if you're thinking of buying an iPhone on eBay, keep in mind -- the other thing the AT&T guy told me is that the iPhones are all serialized, and Apple can permanently turn off the ones that were stolen.
We were delighted. Not about the burglary, mind you. I'm afraid we were pretty callous about that, and besides we figured the company was insured. But we loved the idea that even criminal lowlifes knew which was the better computer.
In fact, we loved that idea so much that we made a commercial about it. It was cool -- deep blue lighting, lots of shadows, and two silhouettes moving silently through the office. One of them starts to pick up a PC, and his companion hisses, "not those, just take these." And he points at a Mac.
The Computer for the Rest of Us, indeed.
At the last minute, somebody in the company realized that the commercial might just possibly be viewed as an endorsement of crime, besides which it made us look like complete mercenaries. So I don't think the commercial was ever aired. We just watched it a lot at communication meetings.
I thought of that old commercial today when I was in an AT&T (formerly Cingular) mobile phone store. There was a big video display for the iPhone, but no phones on the counter. "Did they sell out?" I asked the clerk.
"Nope. Someone broke in and stole them," he said. "We saw it on the surveillance video. They were in and out in 30 seconds. They ran over to the iPhones, cut the cables, and left."
"Did they take anything else?" I asked, thinking I saw a new commercial in the making.
"Oh yeah, they took the Treos too."
Sorry, Apple. No commercial.
And sorry, RIM. They left the Blackberries. Personally, I would have grabbed a Pearl on the way out.
By the way, if you're thinking of buying an iPhone on eBay, keep in mind -- the other thing the AT&T guy told me is that the iPhones are all serialized, and Apple can permanently turn off the ones that were stolen.
Palm Foleo: It's a PC, dummy
Wow, what an interesting day this was in the mobile and web world:
--Apple hinted that it will allow third party developers to add applications to the iPhone, potentially overcoming one of the device's biggest shortcomings (link).
--Google announced Gears, an open source project to enable web apps to work offline -- injecting Google into the growing effort to make PC operating systems irrelevant, and linking Google with Adobe (link).
--Livescribe previewed its pen computing device, the latest in a long series of efforts to turn Anoto's pen sensing technology into a commercially viable product (Livescribe link, Anoto background).
And oh yeah, Palm finally announced Jeff Hawkins' secret project, the Foleo.
A lot of the online commentary on the Foleo hasn't been enthusiastic. Engadget called it the "Foolio" (link). Ars Technica's article was headlined, "Palm officially out of ideas, debuts 1990s palmtop concept" (link). The discussion on the Palm Entrepreneurs Forum (an e-mail list for Palm application developers) was more balanced between admirers and detractors, but even there a lot of people were very lukewarm.
I think a lot of this is Palm's fault. They're trying to position the Foleo as a "mobile companion,"* a device that smartphone users can carry with them when they need a keyboard and bigger screen. In other words, it's for a small subset of the smartphone market, which itself is a small subset of the phone market. A niche inside a niche. The Stowaway keyboard folks should worry.
But I don't think the Foleo really is a "mobile companion." Back when I started to work at Palm (before the turn of the century) one of the old veterans of the company pulled me aside and passed along a little wisdom. "Michael," he told me, "Ya gotta think in terms of real estate. If you're in another device's real estate, you're competing with that device. Palm lives in your pocket; it competes with other things that go in your pocket. If you get bigger than the pocket, you're living in the briefcase, and you're competing with the notebook computer."
Foleo lives in the briefcase. It's displacing the notebook computer from your bag. I don't care what they call it, I don't care if Palm fully realizes it yet, but the fact is that Foleo's a notebook computer.
More to the point, Foleo is the most significant new consumer PC platform introduced in the US since the Macintosh. All you Linux heads who have been asking for a true consumer Linux PC, you finally got your wish.
Wow. That's kind of cool. It may be crazy, but it's a craziness I like. Palm has reimagined the PC for the wireless Internet era, simplifying and stripping away everything they thought was no longer necessary. So since most people carry a phone, you use the phone as your wireless modem. The device also has no hard drive. Since everything is stored in flash RAM, you never actually shut it down -- you just turn off the power, and when you turn it on again all your data and apps are still there, waiting for you. This is normal in a handheld, but it's long overdue in a PC.
How well will the Foleo sell?
I don't know. It's not the product I would have built (my long wait for an info pad continues). The most successful mobile devices in the last decade have been specialized products that solve one problem for one type of customer -- iPod plays music for entertainment hounds, GameBoy plays games, BlackBerry does e-mail, Palm Pilot does your calendar, etc. The Foleo flies in the face of that. Although Palm talked a lot about e-mail today, the device also has a browser built in, and clearly has ambitions to be a general-purpose computer. I think we should judge Foleo on those terms, not by measuring it against other products we all imagined or wanted. Here are a couple of quick thoughts, and I'll probably post more in a few days after I've had more time to think about it...
Palm can now succeed even if Treo fails. Palm implied that the Foleo will be able to work with any smartphone, not just the Treo. This potentially gives Palm a larger market, and also sidesteps the operators, since Foleo can be sold through consumer electronics stores. Palm execs have been very public in saying that they are happier selling through retail rather than through operators, so today they must feel a little bit liberated.
Beware the Windows CE factor. I have seen many products very similar to Foleo fail over the years, and that worries me a lot. For years Microsoft and the Windows CE hardware companies produced a series of sub-notebooks that looked eerily like the Foleo. Like Foleo, you were supposed to use them to do light browsing and e-mail. They all died quickly, mostly because they looked so much like Windows that people expected them to run Windows apps. When people didn't get the full Windows experience, there was an immediate backlash.
Foleo's a little different because it doesn't pretend to be any flavor of Windows. But the hardware design looks an awful lot like a Windows PC, and that's going to create the wrong impression. Maybe Foleo looks nicer in person, but in the photos it looks like an anonymous gray box, disturbingly like a Dell subnotebook. It doesn't seem to have the lust-inducing look of the Treo 600, let alone the Palm V. I wish they'd made the case more distinctive, or at least a different color, because then people might expect different things from it.
Success probably depends on the apps. Like other PCs, Foleo doesn't do all that much out of the box. It apparently comes with Documents to Go (a well respected suite of Office apps, ported from Palm OS), an e-mail client, and a browser. That's all nice, but it's definitely not enough to make me put down my notebook computer. I think Foleo will eventually live or die based on whether it attracts a lot of third party applications that do interesting things you can't do with a notebook PC.
Palm has been evangelizing a number of developers to create apps for Foleo, but for some strange reason it excluded them from the Foleo announcement today. Instead, the announcements are going to be dribbled out one by one over the next few weeks and months. I presume the idea was that they'd create a sense of momentum, but I think instead what Palm did is make today's announcement less impactful than it could have been.
That means we haven't heard the full Foleo announcement yet. There's more to come from the third parties. We won't be able to really judge the device until we see the totality of what it'll do at launch.
My bottom line, based on what I know today: As a standalone mobile data device, the Foleo is uninspiring. As a potential challenger to the notebook PC, I want to believe, but the proof will be in the third party apps.
_______________
*By the way, the term "mobile companion" is perilously close to "PC Companion," one of Microsoft's early terms for Windows CE devices. The phrase gives me hives, but I think that's just me.
--Apple hinted that it will allow third party developers to add applications to the iPhone, potentially overcoming one of the device's biggest shortcomings (link).
--Google announced Gears, an open source project to enable web apps to work offline -- injecting Google into the growing effort to make PC operating systems irrelevant, and linking Google with Adobe (link).
--Livescribe previewed its pen computing device, the latest in a long series of efforts to turn Anoto's pen sensing technology into a commercially viable product (Livescribe link, Anoto background).
And oh yeah, Palm finally announced Jeff Hawkins' secret project, the Foleo.
A lot of the online commentary on the Foleo hasn't been enthusiastic. Engadget called it the "Foolio" (link). Ars Technica's article was headlined, "Palm officially out of ideas, debuts 1990s palmtop concept" (link). The discussion on the Palm Entrepreneurs Forum (an e-mail list for Palm application developers) was more balanced between admirers and detractors, but even there a lot of people were very lukewarm.
I think a lot of this is Palm's fault. They're trying to position the Foleo as a "mobile companion,"* a device that smartphone users can carry with them when they need a keyboard and bigger screen. In other words, it's for a small subset of the smartphone market, which itself is a small subset of the phone market. A niche inside a niche. The Stowaway keyboard folks should worry.
But I don't think the Foleo really is a "mobile companion." Back when I started to work at Palm (before the turn of the century) one of the old veterans of the company pulled me aside and passed along a little wisdom. "Michael," he told me, "Ya gotta think in terms of real estate. If you're in another device's real estate, you're competing with that device. Palm lives in your pocket; it competes with other things that go in your pocket. If you get bigger than the pocket, you're living in the briefcase, and you're competing with the notebook computer."
Foleo lives in the briefcase. It's displacing the notebook computer from your bag. I don't care what they call it, I don't care if Palm fully realizes it yet, but the fact is that Foleo's a notebook computer.
More to the point, Foleo is the most significant new consumer PC platform introduced in the US since the Macintosh. All you Linux heads who have been asking for a true consumer Linux PC, you finally got your wish.
Wow. That's kind of cool. It may be crazy, but it's a craziness I like. Palm has reimagined the PC for the wireless Internet era, simplifying and stripping away everything they thought was no longer necessary. So since most people carry a phone, you use the phone as your wireless modem. The device also has no hard drive. Since everything is stored in flash RAM, you never actually shut it down -- you just turn off the power, and when you turn it on again all your data and apps are still there, waiting for you. This is normal in a handheld, but it's long overdue in a PC.
"Desktops and laptops were too large, expensive, complex. You're not going to build billions of these complex machines, you build mobile computers....But it became clear the smartphone wasn't going to fill that role....You need a full size screen and keyboard." --Jeff Hawkins, quoted in Engadget
How well will the Foleo sell?
I don't know. It's not the product I would have built (my long wait for an info pad continues). The most successful mobile devices in the last decade have been specialized products that solve one problem for one type of customer -- iPod plays music for entertainment hounds, GameBoy plays games, BlackBerry does e-mail, Palm Pilot does your calendar, etc. The Foleo flies in the face of that. Although Palm talked a lot about e-mail today, the device also has a browser built in, and clearly has ambitions to be a general-purpose computer. I think we should judge Foleo on those terms, not by measuring it against other products we all imagined or wanted. Here are a couple of quick thoughts, and I'll probably post more in a few days after I've had more time to think about it...
Palm can now succeed even if Treo fails. Palm implied that the Foleo will be able to work with any smartphone, not just the Treo. This potentially gives Palm a larger market, and also sidesteps the operators, since Foleo can be sold through consumer electronics stores. Palm execs have been very public in saying that they are happier selling through retail rather than through operators, so today they must feel a little bit liberated.
Beware the Windows CE factor. I have seen many products very similar to Foleo fail over the years, and that worries me a lot. For years Microsoft and the Windows CE hardware companies produced a series of sub-notebooks that looked eerily like the Foleo. Like Foleo, you were supposed to use them to do light browsing and e-mail. They all died quickly, mostly because they looked so much like Windows that people expected them to run Windows apps. When people didn't get the full Windows experience, there was an immediate backlash.
Foleo's a little different because it doesn't pretend to be any flavor of Windows. But the hardware design looks an awful lot like a Windows PC, and that's going to create the wrong impression. Maybe Foleo looks nicer in person, but in the photos it looks like an anonymous gray box, disturbingly like a Dell subnotebook. It doesn't seem to have the lust-inducing look of the Treo 600, let alone the Palm V. I wish they'd made the case more distinctive, or at least a different color, because then people might expect different things from it.
Success probably depends on the apps. Like other PCs, Foleo doesn't do all that much out of the box. It apparently comes with Documents to Go (a well respected suite of Office apps, ported from Palm OS), an e-mail client, and a browser. That's all nice, but it's definitely not enough to make me put down my notebook computer. I think Foleo will eventually live or die based on whether it attracts a lot of third party applications that do interesting things you can't do with a notebook PC.
Palm has been evangelizing a number of developers to create apps for Foleo, but for some strange reason it excluded them from the Foleo announcement today. Instead, the announcements are going to be dribbled out one by one over the next few weeks and months. I presume the idea was that they'd create a sense of momentum, but I think instead what Palm did is make today's announcement less impactful than it could have been.
That means we haven't heard the full Foleo announcement yet. There's more to come from the third parties. We won't be able to really judge the device until we see the totality of what it'll do at launch.
My bottom line, based on what I know today: As a standalone mobile data device, the Foleo is uninspiring. As a potential challenger to the notebook PC, I want to believe, but the proof will be in the third party apps.
_______________
*By the way, the term "mobile companion" is perilously close to "PC Companion," one of Microsoft's early terms for Windows CE devices. The phrase gives me hives, but I think that's just me.
Seven Companies That Aren't Rumored to be Buying Palm, But Really Should Be
This afternoon I heard from a reporter that Google and Microsoft are now rumored to be interested in buying Palm. I have no idea who starts these rumors, or whether there's any truth to them, but they're not nearly creative enough. Here's my list of other companies that have absolutely no interest in buying Palm, but ought to be in the rumor mill anyway. Feel free to re-use these if you want to manipulate the stock market. No need to credit me; I don't want to be visited by the Feds.
7. Airbus
Compelling business rationale. I hear Airbus has a lot of trouble with the wiring in the A380, and there's a bunch of wires and stuff inside a Treo, so this seems like a good match. (Hey, it makes as much sense as Google buying Palm.)
6. eBay
Compelling business rationale. Most Treos end up on eBay eventually, after their owners upgrade to a new model, so this is an opportunity to "significantly integrate the value chain," as we say in the business. Each Treo could come with an eBay account, enabling the user to offer it for sale whenever they're ready.
As an added benefit, a Skype client could be bundled with every Treo sold. (By the way, this is apparently the only way to get Skype to port its full native client to Palm OS.)
5. Ben & Jerry's
Compelling business rationale. What if Jeff Hawkins designed ice cream flavors?
4. Cisco
Compelling business rationale. Apparently not required for a Cisco acquisition.
3. DaimlerChrysler
Compelling business rationale. I propose a straight-up equity swap: Palm for Chrysler. Daimler would give away a company that's talented at design, but whose products have fallen behind the innovation curve, and that has problems with execution. In exchange, it would get...exactly the same thing. But as a bonus, Daimler could build a Treo and sync cradle into every car it sells. This fits with the whole convergence thing that's supposedly driving all industrial development in the western world, so this merger is a natural.
2. HP
Compelling business rationale. No, wait, this one actually makes sense. Never mind.
1. JetBlue
Compelling business rationale. Give a Tungsten to every employee, pre-loaded with a datebook alarm that says, "Time for the airplane to leave now." The acquisition would pay for itself within three months.
7. Airbus
Compelling business rationale. I hear Airbus has a lot of trouble with the wiring in the A380, and there's a bunch of wires and stuff inside a Treo, so this seems like a good match. (Hey, it makes as much sense as Google buying Palm.)
6. eBay
Compelling business rationale. Most Treos end up on eBay eventually, after their owners upgrade to a new model, so this is an opportunity to "significantly integrate the value chain," as we say in the business. Each Treo could come with an eBay account, enabling the user to offer it for sale whenever they're ready.
As an added benefit, a Skype client could be bundled with every Treo sold. (By the way, this is apparently the only way to get Skype to port its full native client to Palm OS.)
5. Ben & Jerry's
Compelling business rationale. What if Jeff Hawkins designed ice cream flavors?
4. Cisco
Compelling business rationale. Apparently not required for a Cisco acquisition.
3. DaimlerChrysler
Compelling business rationale. I propose a straight-up equity swap: Palm for Chrysler. Daimler would give away a company that's talented at design, but whose products have fallen behind the innovation curve, and that has problems with execution. In exchange, it would get...exactly the same thing. But as a bonus, Daimler could build a Treo and sync cradle into every car it sells. This fits with the whole convergence thing that's supposedly driving all industrial development in the western world, so this merger is a natural.
2. HP
Compelling business rationale. No, wait, this one actually makes sense. Never mind.
1. JetBlue
Compelling business rationale. Give a Tungsten to every employee, pre-loaded with a datebook alarm that says, "Time for the airplane to leave now." The acquisition would pay for itself within three months.
The shape of the smartphone and mobile data markets
With all the new mobile devices coming out, I thought it would be useful to give an overview of the market for mobile data. I covered some of this information in a post written about a year ago, but this one has a lot of new information, plus diagrams.
I believe the market for mobile data devices (smartphones, PDAs, mobile game machines, iPods, etc) is not structured the way most people think it is. A lot of new mobile products fail because they're not designed for the real market, or because they target imagined customers who don't really exist in large numbers.
There are two big erroneous assumptions that I think many people make about mobile data:
First incorrect assumption: Mobile data is for everyone. Most people assume that mobile data devices like smartphones will eventually be used by everyone. The idea is that they're being bought by early adopters now, but as prices drop they'll soon be adopted by the whole population. The market is supposed to look like this:
Higher prices are to the right. Smartphone sales start with the early adopters at the right, and then as prices drop everyone switches to smartphones and starts using all their features.
The only problem with this idea is that there's no evidence to indicate that it's true, at least not in the US and Europe (where I've done research). In fact, almost all of the evidence I've seen to date shows that the market is deeply divided into two groups. When surveyed, most people in the US and Europe say they will not pay anything extra for mobile device features other than voice and SMS. They'll use those features if you give them away for free, but as soon as you ask them to pay, about 65% of the population drops out. This makes them very unpromising targets for device companies that want to sell value-added devices, operators who want to sell advanced services, and software companies that want to sell mobile data apps.
Fortunately, the other 35% of the US and European population is willing to pay extra for mobile data features.
So the real market looks like this:
The people I labeled "value-added users" are the mobile data market. But that's only the beginning...
Second incorrect assumption: There is one smartphone market. Most people assume that there's just one market for smartphones, and that eventually we'll see the emergence of a single ultimate smartphone that everyone uses. I can't tell you how many times I got that question from press people and analysts when I worked at Palm: "Which is the device that everyone's going to use?"
The answer is, that device doesn't exist, because the people who are willing to pay extra for mobile data features don't all want the same features. They want conflicting things, and are very unwilling to pay extra for the features they don't want. The ideal hobile device for me might be completely repulsive to you, and vice-versa.
This misconception has fueled an uncounted number of online debates in which people argue why the device they like ought to be adopted by everyone. What they're really arguing is that everyone else should think and feel like them, which is why these online debates never reach a conclusion.
Rather than looking for the mobile market to "converge" the way that most PCs converged to Windows, I think we should expect mobile devices to diverge into different segments. The right analogy for the mobile market isn't PCs, it's cars. As the car market grew in the 1900s, it stratified into trucks and minivans and SUVs and sports cars and so on.
The same divergence is already underway in mobile data.
There are at least three segments in mobile data
If mobile data isn't for everyone on the planet, and if the market is divided into segments, the most important question to ask is what those segments are. What are the equivalent of the sports car, SUV, and minivan for mobile?
We researched that extensively at PalmSource, in a series of surveys that eventually talked to more than 12,000 people in the US, France, Germany, and the UK. In that research, we found at least three big groups of mobile data customers, each with different needs and tastes: people who focus on communication (e-mail, messaging, conferencing), people who focus on entertainment (games, video, music), and people who focus on managing information (databases, documents, note-taking). Each was about 12% of the population.
The results were very consistent across countries, so I'm comfortable that the same segments probably exist in most European countries. The only significant difference was Germany, where the percent of the population who said they were willing to pay for entertainment features was smaller. I don't know if that's a real difference in usage, or if folks in Germany are just less willing to admit that they might use a computing device to play games.
The results probably can't be projected to other places like Japan and China; somebody else needs to do that research (or I'll do it if you want to fund it ;-) .
Here's a little detail on each of the three mobile data segments:
The entertainment-focused users are generally younger than average; many are in college or their 20s. They see a mobile device as a lifestyle choice, and they're willing to pay extra for a device that'll help keep them entertained. Different people want different forms of entertainment, so there are sub-segments in the entertainment mobile market. The biggest division is game-playing vs. media (music and video). But entertainment can also include things like social messaging with your friends. It's anything you do for fun rather than a paycheck.
The communication-focused users are extroverts who live to communicate with others. They're often in people-facing jobs like sales. They're willing to pay extra for a mobile device that lets them keep up with others in multiple ways. E-mail, SMS, voice, conferencing, video calling -- basically, anything communication-related is compelling to them, and they will pay extra for a device that does it well.
The information-centric users are more introverted. Rather than focusing on their dialog with others, they tend to do a lot of thinking on their own, and want their mobile device to be a memory supplement and a means to capture new information. They're not by any means recluses, but ideas rather than social interaction are what really gets them energized, and so they're willing to pay extra for features that help them capture and remember ideas and information. What they really want is a brain extender. They often work in information-heavy jobs like medicine, law, science, and academia.
Of course, there's always some overlap between markets -- for instance, you might have a doctor who also wants to stay entertained when off work. So if you draw the three mobile data markets, they overlap a bit, like one of those Venn diagrams you drew in primary school:
Understanding the products
Now that we've mapped the customer landscape, we can start plotting various products on the chart. This is where we'll start to get some interesting insights. But first, we have to add one technology overlay: in the mobile world, some mobile devices have phones built in and some don't. So add a gray circle in the center:
Now let's chart some products.
The communicators:
This is the most crowded market (in fact, I left off a number of products because I ran out of space on the chart). Although there used to be communicators without phones built in (RIM's early products were an example), putting all communication in one place is a huge benefit to a communication-centric user, so merging the phone and communicator was an obvious move in this market.
I classify the Danger Hiptop as a borderline product between the entertainment and communication markets because it's focused on social communication for young people. Sony Mylo is another borderline product, this one without a phone.
The Palm Treo, SonyEricsson p900 line, and touchscreen Windows Mobile products are on the border between communication and information management. They all have touch screens and a lot of information management features, but also attempt to deliver robust e-mail. At this point, they are being outsold by the much more communication-specialized RIM Blackberry line.
In the entertainer market, you can see the strong role of sub-segments. The game-player market has been dominated by Nintendo's GameBoy, with the recent addition of Sony's PSP. The media market is ruled by the Apple iPod.
The iPhone is an attempt to create a phone + media entertainment device. It'll be interesting to see how the iPhone does in the market -- it was an obvious move to combine a communicator with a phone, but it's not as obvious that the entertainer is a natural match with a phone. The danger to Apple will be if users see iPhone as the worst of both worlds: a phone that lacks a good keypad and an iPod with very small memory.
Information managers are an underserved market. Early PDAs targeted these users, but the device features were too limited to build a lasting franchise. The main champions of the PDA market, Palm and Microsoft, have now both focused most of their effort toward communicators. As a result, information manager innovation has basically ground to a halt, and the users in this space are very frustrated.
What it means: Opportunities and dangers
Some types of convergence are better than others. Combining phone technology with a mobile data device can be very successful when you stay within a single usage market. You tailor both the phone features and the data features to the needs of that particular type of customer. But trying to converge two markets is an extremely risky idea, something mobile companies should avoid. The needs of the markets conflict, so there is an extremely high risk that you'll end up being cannibalized on either side by products designed specifically for the needs of single markets.
The communicator market is over-crowded and therefore risky. When you realize that the communicator market is only about 12% of the population, there are probably more communicator products shipping now than the market can support. Communicators are likely to face price pressure, and some of the products will probably sink like a stone. The RIM and Palm OS products are probably a little safer here because they have more unique features and loyal customer bases, and Nokia may do okay if it can add some differentiation. But Windows Mobile communicators are likely to be a happy market only for mobile companies that can live on commodity margins.
This is not a place where I'd be looking to build new devices, but many companies are introducing new communicators because they'd rather pursue an established market than build a new one.
The iPhone is not a Blackberry killer. One of the things I like about this chart is that it shows immediately why the iPhone is not a major threat to Blackberry sales. They're in very different markets. If RIM is hoping to move into the entertainment market with devices like the Pearl, iPhone definitely interferes with that. But the immediate impact of the iPhone is on the products closest to it, meaning Microsoft Zune and the SonyEricsson music phones.
If you don't fit in one of the segments, it's very hard to sell. One of the messages of the market segmentation is that people will pay extra for great solutions to the needs they have in a particular segment. If your product doesn't solve any of those problems, there's not a market for it. Many failures in the mobile data market have been products that focused on features rather than solving specific problems. They may be beloved by technophiles, but there aren't enough of those people to drive a lot of sales. See Nokia's 770 Internet tablet for a good example.
The biggest opportunity is in information management. This market is about the same size as the communicator market, but no major player is investing in it today. This segment is out of favor because of the decline in PDA sales, but remember that people thought the MP3 market was a backwater until Apple introduced the iPod. I can tell you from personal conversations, and the market research, that there's a substantial market here, and the people in it are very frustrated. I think the ideal product for this market would be a minitablet note-taker, which I refer to as an "info pad." You can read more about it here.
What about the middle of the chart?
The other segment we haven't discussed is the center of the chart, the place where information management, communication, and entertainment all come together. Some people like to think of this as the home of the ultimate converged device, and every now and then you'll see a hardware company try to tackle it.
They all fail.
In reality, the center of the chart is a market dead zone. To use the car analogy, designing a mobile data device for all three markets simultaneously is like trying to build a sports car that doubles as a minivan and a tractor. The result is not pretty, and won't be bought by anyone except gadget enthusiasts like me. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of us to make a significant market.
That's my view of the mobile data market. I'm sure other people have different perspectives; please post a comment and share yours.
I believe the market for mobile data devices (smartphones, PDAs, mobile game machines, iPods, etc) is not structured the way most people think it is. A lot of new mobile products fail because they're not designed for the real market, or because they target imagined customers who don't really exist in large numbers.
There are two big erroneous assumptions that I think many people make about mobile data:
First incorrect assumption: Mobile data is for everyone. Most people assume that mobile data devices like smartphones will eventually be used by everyone. The idea is that they're being bought by early adopters now, but as prices drop they'll soon be adopted by the whole population. The market is supposed to look like this:
Higher prices are to the right. Smartphone sales start with the early adopters at the right, and then as prices drop everyone switches to smartphones and starts using all their features.
The only problem with this idea is that there's no evidence to indicate that it's true, at least not in the US and Europe (where I've done research). In fact, almost all of the evidence I've seen to date shows that the market is deeply divided into two groups. When surveyed, most people in the US and Europe say they will not pay anything extra for mobile device features other than voice and SMS. They'll use those features if you give them away for free, but as soon as you ask them to pay, about 65% of the population drops out. This makes them very unpromising targets for device companies that want to sell value-added devices, operators who want to sell advanced services, and software companies that want to sell mobile data apps.
Fortunately, the other 35% of the US and European population is willing to pay extra for mobile data features.
So the real market looks like this:
The people I labeled "value-added users" are the mobile data market. But that's only the beginning...
Second incorrect assumption: There is one smartphone market. Most people assume that there's just one market for smartphones, and that eventually we'll see the emergence of a single ultimate smartphone that everyone uses. I can't tell you how many times I got that question from press people and analysts when I worked at Palm: "Which is the device that everyone's going to use?"
The answer is, that device doesn't exist, because the people who are willing to pay extra for mobile data features don't all want the same features. They want conflicting things, and are very unwilling to pay extra for the features they don't want. The ideal hobile device for me might be completely repulsive to you, and vice-versa.
This misconception has fueled an uncounted number of online debates in which people argue why the device they like ought to be adopted by everyone. What they're really arguing is that everyone else should think and feel like them, which is why these online debates never reach a conclusion.
Rather than looking for the mobile market to "converge" the way that most PCs converged to Windows, I think we should expect mobile devices to diverge into different segments. The right analogy for the mobile market isn't PCs, it's cars. As the car market grew in the 1900s, it stratified into trucks and minivans and SUVs and sports cars and so on.
The same divergence is already underway in mobile data.
There are at least three segments in mobile data
If mobile data isn't for everyone on the planet, and if the market is divided into segments, the most important question to ask is what those segments are. What are the equivalent of the sports car, SUV, and minivan for mobile?
We researched that extensively at PalmSource, in a series of surveys that eventually talked to more than 12,000 people in the US, France, Germany, and the UK. In that research, we found at least three big groups of mobile data customers, each with different needs and tastes: people who focus on communication (e-mail, messaging, conferencing), people who focus on entertainment (games, video, music), and people who focus on managing information (databases, documents, note-taking). Each was about 12% of the population.
The results were very consistent across countries, so I'm comfortable that the same segments probably exist in most European countries. The only significant difference was Germany, where the percent of the population who said they were willing to pay for entertainment features was smaller. I don't know if that's a real difference in usage, or if folks in Germany are just less willing to admit that they might use a computing device to play games.
The results probably can't be projected to other places like Japan and China; somebody else needs to do that research (or I'll do it if you want to fund it ;-) .
Here's a little detail on each of the three mobile data segments:
The entertainment-focused users are generally younger than average; many are in college or their 20s. They see a mobile device as a lifestyle choice, and they're willing to pay extra for a device that'll help keep them entertained. Different people want different forms of entertainment, so there are sub-segments in the entertainment mobile market. The biggest division is game-playing vs. media (music and video). But entertainment can also include things like social messaging with your friends. It's anything you do for fun rather than a paycheck.
The communication-focused users are extroverts who live to communicate with others. They're often in people-facing jobs like sales. They're willing to pay extra for a mobile device that lets them keep up with others in multiple ways. E-mail, SMS, voice, conferencing, video calling -- basically, anything communication-related is compelling to them, and they will pay extra for a device that does it well.
The information-centric users are more introverted. Rather than focusing on their dialog with others, they tend to do a lot of thinking on their own, and want their mobile device to be a memory supplement and a means to capture new information. They're not by any means recluses, but ideas rather than social interaction are what really gets them energized, and so they're willing to pay extra for features that help them capture and remember ideas and information. What they really want is a brain extender. They often work in information-heavy jobs like medicine, law, science, and academia.
Of course, there's always some overlap between markets -- for instance, you might have a doctor who also wants to stay entertained when off work. So if you draw the three mobile data markets, they overlap a bit, like one of those Venn diagrams you drew in primary school:
Understanding the products
Now that we've mapped the customer landscape, we can start plotting various products on the chart. This is where we'll start to get some interesting insights. But first, we have to add one technology overlay: in the mobile world, some mobile devices have phones built in and some don't. So add a gray circle in the center:
Now let's chart some products.
The communicators:
This is the most crowded market (in fact, I left off a number of products because I ran out of space on the chart). Although there used to be communicators without phones built in (RIM's early products were an example), putting all communication in one place is a huge benefit to a communication-centric user, so merging the phone and communicator was an obvious move in this market.
I classify the Danger Hiptop as a borderline product between the entertainment and communication markets because it's focused on social communication for young people. Sony Mylo is another borderline product, this one without a phone.
The Palm Treo, SonyEricsson p900 line, and touchscreen Windows Mobile products are on the border between communication and information management. They all have touch screens and a lot of information management features, but also attempt to deliver robust e-mail. At this point, they are being outsold by the much more communication-specialized RIM Blackberry line.
In the entertainer market, you can see the strong role of sub-segments. The game-player market has been dominated by Nintendo's GameBoy, with the recent addition of Sony's PSP. The media market is ruled by the Apple iPod.
The iPhone is an attempt to create a phone + media entertainment device. It'll be interesting to see how the iPhone does in the market -- it was an obvious move to combine a communicator with a phone, but it's not as obvious that the entertainer is a natural match with a phone. The danger to Apple will be if users see iPhone as the worst of both worlds: a phone that lacks a good keypad and an iPod with very small memory.
Information managers are an underserved market. Early PDAs targeted these users, but the device features were too limited to build a lasting franchise. The main champions of the PDA market, Palm and Microsoft, have now both focused most of their effort toward communicators. As a result, information manager innovation has basically ground to a halt, and the users in this space are very frustrated.
What it means: Opportunities and dangers
Some types of convergence are better than others. Combining phone technology with a mobile data device can be very successful when you stay within a single usage market. You tailor both the phone features and the data features to the needs of that particular type of customer. But trying to converge two markets is an extremely risky idea, something mobile companies should avoid. The needs of the markets conflict, so there is an extremely high risk that you'll end up being cannibalized on either side by products designed specifically for the needs of single markets.
The communicator market is over-crowded and therefore risky. When you realize that the communicator market is only about 12% of the population, there are probably more communicator products shipping now than the market can support. Communicators are likely to face price pressure, and some of the products will probably sink like a stone. The RIM and Palm OS products are probably a little safer here because they have more unique features and loyal customer bases, and Nokia may do okay if it can add some differentiation. But Windows Mobile communicators are likely to be a happy market only for mobile companies that can live on commodity margins.
This is not a place where I'd be looking to build new devices, but many companies are introducing new communicators because they'd rather pursue an established market than build a new one.
The iPhone is not a Blackberry killer. One of the things I like about this chart is that it shows immediately why the iPhone is not a major threat to Blackberry sales. They're in very different markets. If RIM is hoping to move into the entertainment market with devices like the Pearl, iPhone definitely interferes with that. But the immediate impact of the iPhone is on the products closest to it, meaning Microsoft Zune and the SonyEricsson music phones.
If you don't fit in one of the segments, it's very hard to sell. One of the messages of the market segmentation is that people will pay extra for great solutions to the needs they have in a particular segment. If your product doesn't solve any of those problems, there's not a market for it. Many failures in the mobile data market have been products that focused on features rather than solving specific problems. They may be beloved by technophiles, but there aren't enough of those people to drive a lot of sales. See Nokia's 770 Internet tablet for a good example.
The biggest opportunity is in information management. This market is about the same size as the communicator market, but no major player is investing in it today. This segment is out of favor because of the decline in PDA sales, but remember that people thought the MP3 market was a backwater until Apple introduced the iPod. I can tell you from personal conversations, and the market research, that there's a substantial market here, and the people in it are very frustrated. I think the ideal product for this market would be a minitablet note-taker, which I refer to as an "info pad." You can read more about it here.
What about the middle of the chart?
The other segment we haven't discussed is the center of the chart, the place where information management, communication, and entertainment all come together. Some people like to think of this as the home of the ultimate converged device, and every now and then you'll see a hardware company try to tackle it.
They all fail.
In reality, the center of the chart is a market dead zone. To use the car analogy, designing a mobile data device for all three markets simultaneously is like trying to build a sports car that doubles as a minivan and a tractor. The result is not pretty, and won't be bought by anyone except gadget enthusiasts like me. Unfortunately, there aren't enough of us to make a significant market.
That's my view of the mobile data market. I'm sure other people have different perspectives; please post a comment and share yours.
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