Nielsen has released their latest survey numbers on the smartphone market, and it seems that the pace of smartphone adoption is quickly accelerating, with 29.7% of US mobile phone owners having a small computer in their pockets. That shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Also not a surprise: the iPhone, BlackBerry devices, and Android phones are dominating the smartphone space, snagging 27.9%, 27.4%, and 22.7%, respectively. Even Windows Mobile devices (yes, we’re talking old school Start menu Windows Mobile) stand at 14% in the survey, while Symbian accounts for 3.4%, generic “Linux” for 3.3%, and bringing up the rear is Palm (webOS and old school Palm OS) with a paltry 1.3%.

To put that into perspective, for every one Palm owner there are 21 iPhone users, 21 BlackBerry addicts, 17 Android owners, and even 11 Windows Mobile users. Heck, there are 2.5 times as many Symbian users in the US than there are Palm, and Nokia has notoriously struggled in North America.

All this begs the question: what is HP going to do to turn this around? CES is around the corner, and we’re hoping that Palm manages to pull out all the stops with the new hardware releases really needed to prop up the awesomeness that is webOS 2.0 (and maybe some wishful thinking, but we’d like to see a big splash with a feature-packed webOS 2.1 too). At this point HP and Palm are going to need a big splash, essentially rebooting the consumer mindset as it pertains to webOS and Palm. It’s becoming clear that Palm isn’t even in the conversation for most people.

Source: Nielsen; Via: Android Central, Engadget

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Again the awesome power of webOS is demonstrated by others’ desire to emulate it, this time by hacking a Nokia N900 running Maemo to play webOS PDK apps.       

 A video posted on YouTube shows The Sims 3 running silky smooth on an N900. Other users in a Maemo forum said Need for Speed Undercover and Let’s Golf with great success as well, and without much effort. Check out the video after the break.

It is not too surprising when you consider the specs of the Nokia N900 and the Pre are almost identical. Both have an OMAP3430 processor, both have a PowerVR SGX and OpenGL ES 2.0 libs, and both run a Linux based OS. Native apps for the Pre are written with SDL 1.2, which the N900 supports.

The only problem for an N900 user running one of these games is that the N900 does not support multi-touch, which would render some games unplayable unless a hardware work around could be devised, as one user suggested using the keyboard.

The Pre is one of the best gaming devices around. It is rivaled only by the iPhone and porting iPhone games to webOS can be done fairly quickly so there is not much of a disparage between the two devices. The games run just as smoothly on webOS as they do on the iPhone (with the exception of too many cards errors on a Pre minus). So after years of hearing about ‘iPhone envy’, it is nice to see some Pre envy out there.

Source: Maemo.org; Via WebOS Internals (Twitter), PreCentral forums

read more

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

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 >>

We’ve covered the many people who have left Palm in the wake of the HP buyout, but it turns out that there are plenty more to speak of – many of whom have landed at Nokia. In addition to the already-mentioned Peter Skillman, we learn from a PreCentral forum post that Nokia has snapped up some pretty great people from Palm:

• Matt Crowley, former Director of Product Management, Phone at Palm (who you may have seen discuss the meaning behind the name "Pre"), now current Director of Product Management at Nokia
• Karl Townsend, former Principal Architect (focusing on electrical hardware) at Palm and a founding Handspring employee, now a Distinguished Hardware Architect at Nokia
• Phil McClendon, former  Director, Smartphone Product Management at Palm (among other roles – see him talk about Pixi here), now Senior Product Marketing Manager, Nokia Messaging at Nokia.
• Radhika Sarang, former Senior Product Manager at Palm, now Senior Product Marketing Manager at Nokia
• Although he hasn’t been in the Palm fold for some time, we’ll note that Rob Haitani, former director of Product Marketing at Handspring (see him discuss the Treo from way back in 2004) and a Product Design Architect at Palm until 2007, is now a Distinguished UI/UX Architect at Nokia.

That’s a lot of the Palm brain trust working at Nokia on, as we said, a very similar project: helping a company reinvigorate a linux-based smartphone OS for the 21st century. Now to see if Nokia can get their game back in the US market, eh?

Source: PreCentral Forums, LinkedIn; Thanks HelloNNNewman!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

We are still sad that Peter Skillman left Palm and is now designing for Nokia. What we’re less sad about is that he’s opening up a bit and talking candidly about his time there. Forbes  sat in on a presentation Skillman gave in California last week where he dropped some interesting insights.

Skillman had mixed praise for the Palm Pixi. While he has "always loved [the Pixi] and its scale, size, and authenticity," he did note that it didn’t have much chance with men, "Guys wouldn’t be caught dead using a phone called Pixi." We’re a a little more secure in our masculinity than that, Peter, but point taken.

We noted the similarity in Nokia’s position as a flagging company in the smartphone space with Palm’s position a few years ago, in both cases the companies are/were in dire need of a fresh direction with their mobile operating system. Skillman agrees: "I hope to re-instill some passion about executing at Nokia, the way I did at Palm."

Skillman thinks that there is only room for about 5 players in the US market and that to be one of those players, smartphone makers need to succeed at the "high end" – a message we hope his former employer is hearing loud and clear.

Source: Forbes; thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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 >>

It was a hypothetical question we floated a few months back for a Round Table session, but recently it seems that our hypotheticals are moving more towards the realm of reality. Our friends over at Engadget beat us to the punch on this one, and put together a fantastic list and summary of the companies thought to be considering a bid for purchasing Palm, but we thought it’s something that we should ask to our more targeted webOS audience: who do you think should buy Palm? Poll after the break, as are those comments in which you so want to sound off.

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 >>

As they say with patent lawsuits, you throw everything you’ve got at all the defendants you can find and see what sticks. Today we’ve got defunct chip maker MicroUnity (stopped making chips more than a decade ago) leveling a patent lawsuit against twenty-two companies [pdf] involved in the mobile tech industry. MicroUnity is targeting Acer, Apple, AT&T, Cellco, Exedea, Google, HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sprint, and Texas Instruments in the suit. The allegation is that all of these companies (and some of their subsidiaries) are involved in the production, sale, and/or marketing of MicroUnity patent-infringing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon or Texas Instruments’ OMAP-3 and OMAP-4 processors.

In our case, the Palm Pre and Pre Plus use the TI OMAP 3430 processor and is sold and marketed by Sprint (as well as Verizon, Bell, O2, and Telcel, but they apparently don’t matter). We would say that there’s likely little to worry about as far as Palm and Sprint are concerned – Texas Instruments is the one infringing on patents here, Palm only bought the chips.

Even though MicroUnity stopped making chips more than ten years ago, they still have a hefty patent portfolio that they’ve leveraged in the past. In 2005 Intel settled a patent-infringement lawsuit brought by MicroUnity to the tune of $300 million. At the time, MicroUnity had a grand total of eight employees. We won’t call them patent trolls, but we will at least point out that MicroUnity also has pending lawsuits against a number of other tech companies, including Intel (again), AMD, Sony, and Dell.

[via: EETimes]

Thanks to Lemstil for the tip!

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>

Webos-internals writes to let us know that they’ve wrangled Darron Black onto the team – Black is the developer who created the Qt port for webOS. Qt, if you don’t recall, is Nokia’s cross-platform application development framework, and it’s a major win to see it up and working on the Palm Pre. 

If you open up Preware right now you can find a 7 demo Qt apps (Go to Applications, switch the button at bottom to ‘feeds,’ and then go into webos-internals and demo). 

The plan is for Qt to run on the "WebOS Interals Development Kit," which is essentially the homebrew edition of the Plug-in Development Kit. What does that mean to you? More Qt apps – head on over qt-apps.org for a list of the sorts of apps that currently exist in Qt and start slavering.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE >>