August 27th 2010 | Posted by
Dieter Bohn
Listen, Sprint, you know we love you. You have great pricing on your data and voice plans and, we strongly suspect, you still have the largest contingent of Palm users on any carrier. We’re brought you here because we care about you so much and want to see you happy and doing well. We know that you are being pulled in lots of directions right now and we understand that.
But this is an intervention. We really wish we’d had this talk a long time ago. We would have told you that it was time to switch up the Palm Pre for the Palm Pre Plus. While we can’t understand why some of your most loyal users have been made to use older hardware, at this point we have to hope that you’ll be leapfrogging to a upcoming Palm Pre phone in the near future so the issue will become moot.
We brought you here to talk about something else. The original Palm Pre. You’re still selling it for $149.99. You’re still selling the Palm Pixi – the one without WiFi – for $49.99. That’s after $100 mail-in rebates
No, don’t go. We need you to hear this. Did you know that the Palm Pre Plus on AT&T goes for $99.99 and the Pixi is free? The Pixi is free on Verizon too and the Pre Plus is $29.99 – and Verizon offers free mobile hotspot to their users. No mail-in rebates, either.
Listen, it’s worse than you might realize – if you go to HP wireless central, you can get all of the above for free right now, and sometimes with a $50 gift card to boot. However it doesn’t look like you’re giving them that deal. For Sprint, they have the Pre at $99.99 and the Pixi for $19.99. Heck, even Amazon seems to have to sell the original Pre for $79.99.
It’s time to lower the price for the Palm Pre and the Palm Pixi. We know you can do this, we know you have the strength. The first step is admitting you have a problem. The next step is to boot up your systems and drop your prices.
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August 13th 2010 | Posted by
Robert Werlinger
Google announced at its annual I/O event back in May that it was going to bring a new extension to Chrome and an app to Android Market that would enable users to send maps, articles and videos directly to your phone with the single click of an icon that lives in the Chrome toolbar. The Chrome extension has been available for some time now, and Google officially made the Android app available today.
As Marshall Kirkpatrick over at the ReadWriteWeb opines, this feature should be on every phone, and I’m inclined to agree. It seems given how powerful extensions are in Chrome and Firefox, and how easy it would be to develop an app in webOS that could communicate with said extension, that an enterprising developer could make an extension/app combo that replicates the functionality of Chrome to Phone.
I could very well be wrong about jut how easy it would be to bring this to webOS of course, what with my not actually being a developer and all, but the usage cases for this technology are vast. I’d imagine that the first dev to bring a compelling product like this to market in the App Catalog could very well gain some significant notoriety.
Hit the break of a video overview of the technology.
Via: ReadWriteWeb, Android Central; Source: Google’s Mobile Blog
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August 12th 2010 | Posted by
Robert Werlinger
The App Catalog has been live in various forms for a little over a year now, and Palm has continued to add both features and applications during that time it’s gone from a measly handful of offerings to a marketplace offering over 3,000 applications, including immersive 3D titles like NOVA and Need for Speed, and the inbuilt search algorithms and overall app discovery have improved considerably.
But even with these accomplishments, Palm’s online marketplace lags behind competing offerings – namely the Android Market and the App Store - in certain key areas and needs to rapidly add functionality to bring it up to par. We’ve caught a glimpse or two of where the App Catalog may be going, and here are three features we think Palm should be sure to implement in the next version. What features would you like to see?
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August 9th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
Welcome to Point Counter Point, wherein Derek vents his spleen like the dour misanthrope we’ve all come to know and love, Dieter consoles us all with rainbows and unicorns, and the truth lies – as it always does – somewhere in the middle.
Today’s topic: What to make of all the pie-in-the-sky future talk we are hearing from HP instead of actual product announcements.
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June 30th 2010 | Posted by
Dieter Bohn
Tomorrow, Palm will cease to be an independent company and become a division of HP. Many have said that this is a failure of their new strategy surrounding webOS and their attempt to signal a rebirth of a company. I tend to disagree, to my eyes for the past few years Palm was essentially a startup company and achieved one of the two possible good outcomes for any startup: getting acquired by a larger company who sees tremendous value in your product and your people.
So Palm is dead, but Palm will live on within HP and I hope that the idea behind Palm will live on both inside HP. (Warning: bombast ahead.)
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June 30th 2010 | Posted by
Jonathan I Ezor
To most of us, this HP/Palm merger is taking forever; to a trained eye, however, it’s moving along at a heady clip. Here’s why.
After months of announcements, law suits, hypothesizing and just plain waiting, the long-awaited acquisition of Palm by HP is expected to close this week. For those who have not been involved in the world of corporate mergers and acquisitions, it may not be clear exactly what a closing is, why it has taken so long to get to this point, or what is happening in these final few days. As someone who started his legal career as a corporate associate, I thought it might be helpful to demystify the process a bit.
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June 6th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
One year ago today the most hotly-anticipated phone of 2009 – the Palm Pre – went on sale in Sprint stores across the United States. The past 365 days brought bright spots for Palm, the Pre, and webOS along with, sadly, a fair share of miscalculations and blunders.
Join us as we review the year in Pre.
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April 30th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
With HP poised to bring Palm into their corporate fold, we find ourselves tempering our enthusiasm for the rescue of Palm and webOS with the fear of what corporate culture may entail for the plucky Sunnyvale-based smartphone maker. Specifically, fear that the corporate culture will not just shun, but shut down, the brilliant and creative efforts of the webOS homebrew community that helped prop up Palm to this point.
So HP, while we have faith that you know what you’re doing, we still feel like we need to take a trip down memory lane to make it clear just how much we think homebrew should be important to you. And the story we’re going to tell is yours.
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April 30th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
With HP poised to bring Palm into their corporate fold, we find ourselves tempering our enthusiasm for the rescue of Palm and webOS with the fear of what corporate culture may entail for the plucky Sunnyvale-based smartphone maker. Specifically, fear that the corporate culture will not just shun, but shut down, the brilliant and creative efforts of the webOS homebrew community that helped prop up Palm to this point.
So HP, while we have faith that you know what you’re doing, we still feel like we need to take a trip down memory lane to make it clear just how much we think homebrew should be important to you. And the story we’re going to tell is yours.
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April 29th 2010 | Posted by
Derek Kessler
Going to the chapel, and we’re gonna get pur-ur-ur-chased…
Welcome to Round Table, which is in fact not a table at all. Round Table is a continuing series on PreCentral where we pose a question to the staff and they provide their thoughts and insights. The question could be something simple like “what’s your favorite webOS app?” or something a bit more complicated, like “why did Palm choose the creepy lady?” Or maybe we’ll just end up chatting about our favorite episode of Alf, you never know. Today, however, we’re going to take a crack at the big news of the week: HP is buying Palm, and what does that mean?
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