After a very large number of Palm employees headed to Nokia to work on Meego, perhaps its only fitting that somebody from Nokia heads to Palm. So reports John Paczkowski of All Things D, who writes that that Nokia’s head of the Meego division, Ari Jaaski, will move to the bay area and become the new Senior Vice President of webOS for Palm / HP.

Paczkowski also notes that Palm is pulling in Victoria Coleman from Samsung R&D to oversee platform and app development as well as a few execs from within HP to run product marketing, sales organization, and product management.

webOS has perhaps been lacking engineer leadership since Mike Abbot, Matias Duarte, Mike Bell, Peter Skillman, and many others left Palm after the HP acquisition.

Back to Jaaski, we don’t know much about him (yet), but the most linked piece on his blog happens to be this PDF white paper on "Building consumer products with open source" where he describes the basic work behind creating the Maemo OS for Nokia tablets (the precusor to Maemo). In it, he brings up many points that should get developers (and lovers of open source) excited, including sponsoring the development of existing open source projects, hiring open source developers, and jointly developing code with the open source community. Some of our faves: "it is very beneficial to use open source in consumer product creation," "Licensing is simpler with open source," and, "we can combine open communication and product confidentiality."

Here’s what Jaaski had to say about the Palm Pre in May:

I used to use a Palm Pre a lot. What a great device. What an astounding software. I was so disappointed to see it not getting the traction it deserves. I really hope that now that it has found a new home @ HP it will rise again! And by the way, I have an extra sweet spot for Pre. It shares a lot of stuff with Maemo and N900.

Welcome to Palm!

Source: All Things D

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Right now Nokia is hosting all sorts of bloggers and media at Nokia World, showing off their latest wares – check out Matt Miller’s coverage at our sister-site Nokia Experts.

Nokia is widely thought (at least to people statesite) to be in dire need of a complete reboot and many expect Meego, their linux-based operating system, to be the new high-end. We’ve even seen some webOS-esque elements to Meego.

Looks like that in addition to a brand new CEO, Nokia is bringing somebody on with plenty of experience rebooting a smartphone company with a new linux Operating System: longtime Palm designer Peter Skillman. We felt the sting when Skillman left Palm, and now as the VP Meego Ux and Services at Nokia, we expect him to bring some much needed elegance (dare we say sanity) to the Nokia user experience. Game on, everybody.

Source: LinkedIn; via Engadget; Thanks Charles!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Development of MeeGo, the operating system that’s the result of the marriage of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo platforms, is pushing ahead full steam.  Being that its a Linux based open source project, I’ve been able to catch a few presentations and even handle some preproduction hardware and software here at OSCON.  It’s been relegated to netbooks so far in its short time on the market, but its set to hit handsets in October of this year.  It’s more similar to Android in terms of how it’ll be distributed (and it’ll likely be just as open), but there are similarities to webOS in terms of what developers can do with the platform.

The most striking of those is the obvious choice of WebKit as the layout and rendering engine that will allow developers to write applications in CSS/Javascript/HTML applications like they can with Palm’s Mojo SDK, in addition to a robust C/C++ SDK.

Like Android and webOS, MeeGo is designed to scale across any number of connected form factors.  As mentioned above, MeeGo can only be found on netbooks currently, but the organization promises a 6 month release cadence, meaning that a handset-centric build of the OS will be available in October with version 1.1.  And to increase the range of devices the operating system can be deployed on, Intel mentioned that it’ll work on both ARM and x86 architectures during one of the sessions I attended here at OSCON – something that should also be possible with webOS. 

It’ll be interesting to see how the smartphone market will adopt MeeGo this fall. With a good number of OEMs already hard at work developing the next generation of Android and Windows 7 phones, MeeGo is going to have a very difficult time breaking into the market in a meaningful way as rapidly as it needs to in order to avoid being an also-ran.  I’m also convinced that the vertically integrated approach enjoyed by Apple, RIM, and soon HP, is the one that offers the best value proposition to consumers and the best profit proposition as a business practice. But who knows, maybe Intel will side step that issue by making its own hardware – the tech did giant just had Michael Bell, who was previously Palm’s SVP of Product Development, join the company as director of Smartphone Product Development in the company’s Ultra Mobility Group (UMG).

Hit the break for a very brief video of a pre-alpha handset build of MeeGo running on an engineering prototype at the Intel booth.  You’ll get a feel for the basic UI, but there’s a lot missing – clicking on the calendar icon brings you to a screen that’s a placeholder for the actual calendar app – and you’ll see an early build of Fennec running on the device. 

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

I caught an excellent presentation by Aaron Williamson from the Software Freedom Law center here at OSCON yesterday examining why smartphones built on open source software aren’t as open as they possibly could be. What Williams talked about was often eye opening, though there were a few points I found myself disagreeing with him on.

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

There are two things that Palm owns that are of true value: webOS and a giant bucket full of patents. Either would be good reason for a larger competitor to purchase Palm, and according to some analysts, either is good reason to declare Palm to be undervalued (Palm stock plus Elevation Partner’s 1/3 share equals approximately one billion dollars).

That Montana-sized basket full of patents is good for several things. Especially when that basket of patents contain things like "Integrated Handheld Computing and Telephony System and Services," i.e. smartphone. For one, Palm can claim royalties when other companies use that patent. It also, at least to this point, has served as a barrier against most serious patent infringement cases (Hello, Cupertino). Having a lot of patents is also good for something else: when those patents are licensed by many companies, it gives the holder significant value. Palm’s veritable trove of patents has lead PatentVest CEO Anthony Mazzarella to declare to Investors Business Daily that, “Based on our metrics, the value of Palm’s intellectual property is along the same order of magnitude as Apple. The market is overlooking the IP value in Palm, which has great value.”

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Announced at MWC was yet another partnership between the world’s cellular carriers that will end up resulting in, well, very little. Networks around the world have banded together to create the Wholesale Applications Community, which in essence will be a global cross-platform app effort. And here’s why it’s going to fail: manufacturers, particularly the ones that are invested in an operating system (such as Apple, Palm, and Nokia), will have no interest in participating. Especially those that have created an app store, Apple in particular.

The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) will end as a failure, at best withering away as a token gesture to interoperability. There are a million political reasons why it won’t work, but the biggest hurdles to overcome are the technical ones: programming languages and APIs. While we can see feature phone manufacturers rallying around the WAC, nobody buys a T9 flip phone to run apps. They lack the hardware to properly execute – that’s why they’re feature phones.

App developers too aren’t interested in feature phones, because the meager hardware will limit what they can do. Not to mention the varying screen sizes, processors, radios, keypads, and everything else. App developers are interested in smartphones, and that’s where the WAC starts to fall apart.

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>