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

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Pardon us while we offer up our calm and practiced reaction to the "better hardware" chant: duh. The next flagship webOS device is looming large in the minds of all geek-oriented webOS users (after all, it’s been over a year since the Pre was unveiled), and up there with the calls for a larger screen and better battery life is the hope for a beefier processor. Perhaps something like Nvidia’s Tegra or Tegra 2 chip?

Asked about webOS, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told Laptop Magazine that he thinks “the world will want webOS” to be supported in the next iteration of his company’s processor technology, much like they first wanted Windows Mobile and then Android.

And when prompted about the mythical webOS tablet that we all want to believe HP is working on (despite the fact that they have yet to officially absorb Palm), Huang dropped the usual “I can’t comment on that line.” Except that he really wanted to comment on it, “But it sure would be an honor to work on webOS. It’s a great operating system. If you look at the first generation of webOS phones, the Palm Pre, the UI is just brilliant. It’s just too slow. So it needs a faster processor. Otherwise, it’s a great operating system.”

We’re not going to try and read between the lines here, except that Mr. Huang is clearly a man with discerning tastes when it comes to mobile operating systems. Could an Nvidia chip power the next webOS device, be it a new phone or a tablet or a toaster? Sure, there’s the possibility. And yes, HP has worked with Nvidia in the past, but there isn’t a single major computer builder that hasn’t put Nvidia graphics chips in their machines at some point in the last decade.

Thanks to everybody who sent this in!

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While HP is clearly making an enormous investment in Palm and webOS, don’t think they’re giving up on their other operating systems, most notably Windows Mobile. While their current sales of iPaq devices running Windows Mobile are less than lustrous, we can’t exactly say that Palm sales are moving along gangbusters either. So, we won’t fault HP for wanting to continue on with Windows Mobile alongside Palm webOS. Said HP VP of Strategy and Corporate Development Brian Humphries during the conference call today:

“We intend to continue to be a strategic partner for Microsoft. They’re a huge piece of our business today, and will continue to be so.”

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Our friends over at Engadget were able to get on the horn with Brian Humphries, HP VP of Strategy and Corporate Development, and Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, and they had a pretty positive picture painted for them. According to their chat, HP plans to be “doubling down on webOS,” which Engadget confirmed with Rubinstein, saying “that was the whole point.” webOS is our singular most favorite part of Palm and the part we worried most about with the HP merger. Additionally, Rubinstein and most of the Palm executive staff will be staying on board, so for now it seems like Palm will continue to be Palm, but with the assets of the world’s largest technology company behind them.

So what will HP be doing with Palm and the “prized asset” that is webOS? Engadget was told that they intend to scale the OS “across multiple connected devices.” Tablets, anyone? Additionally, Rubinstein believes that HP wouldn’t be taking Palm and webOS “unless they were willing to make the kind of investment necessary to win.” Considering that HP is currently nowhere near winning in the smartphone marketplace (the lone smartphone OS they use, Windows Mobile 6.5, is due to die a slow painful death), the purchase of Palm isn’t just for IP considerations.

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Sprint has updated its buyback program to accept upwards of 900 different wireless devices, regardless of the carrier or manufacturer those devices may have originated from, offering between $5 and $300 in instant account credit for eligible handsets in a bid to drive recovery of handsets sold to 90 percent by 2017. 

The Sprint buyback website now has a substantial amount of new additions including the iPhone 3G S 16GB ($213.90 in account credit), the BlackBerry Storm 2 ($131.10 in account credit), and the Motorola Droid ($147.20 in account credit). To sweeten the deal, up to three eligible devices can be cashed in per device purchased. 

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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.

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It’s a question we’ve been pondering for a while, and with much more intensity in recent days: does Google care about Palm webOS? It is something we have to wonder about, with Google Maps on webOS lagging greatly behind its iPhone and Android counterparts, webOS being at first excluded from the Buzz party and then only invited inside the lobby, and the general lack of effort Google seems to be publicly exerting in getting their products to work to their full potential on webOS.

It all came to a head last week, with Google making a change to the way Google Voice works that ended up breaking webOS Google Voice clients, such as the popular gDial Pro. Nathan, the developer of gDial, learned that the change was not a move to break compatibility with unofficial Voice clients like gDial, but a natural progression of the development of the Google Voice system. In fact, Google has no problems with such unofficial clients and is pretty much willing to turn a blind eye to them so long as they aren’t acting in nefarious ways. Unfortunately, that blind eye doesn’t come with any support.

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It’s the penultimate week of the Smartphone Round Robin and my task this week is to try to understand where Windows Mobile / Windows Phone is at these days.  I’m seeking advice from Windows Mobile users over at WMExperts, so if you’re in that camp, go on and give me a shout-out there.

If you’re looking to get the final word in on the comparative looks at webOS, Rene Ritchie of The iPhone Blog has it this week and he’s looking for assistance himself.

After the break, Phil Nickinson of WMExperts walks me though the latest and greatest Windows Phones

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Looks like the pundits may have been right on this one, as the latest smartphone survey from ChangeWave shows that Android’s mindshare has surged in the last quarter, with 21% of potential customers eyeing Android as their future platform of choice. In September 2009’s survey, Android was tied at 6% with webOS. In the past three months, new releases like the Motorola Droid have catapulted Android’s mindshare over Palm, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry, leaving only the iPhone in its sights.

So what about Palm? According to ChangeWave’s numbers, Palm’s potential buyers were cut in half to just 3% of respondents. Windows Mobile and iPhone also dropped, but their losses were 33% and 13% respectively.

The operative word here is "Ouch." We’ll break down a few more numbers after the break.

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The competition for “most open” software platform will always be a fierce one. It all depends on what your definition of “open” is. Do that mean open and easy development, like webOS, or do you mean completely open source, like Android? Our friend Casey Chan over at sister site Android Central last week got his robot paws on webOS in the form of the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi and was tasked with giving the world his impressions of the platform from the Android point of view.

Jumping headfirst into any platform is a new experience, so thankfully we’ve got the PreCentral forums to help out both novices and experts alike. You all in the community stepped up to the plate to give Casey a crash course in webOS 101.

So what did Casey think about webOS? In truth, there’s a lot on paper that seems very similar about the two operating systems. They both support full multitasking, they both have unobtrusive notifications, the both have application stores, and they both work on capacitive multitouch screens (well, Android is a sometimes in that category). But the similarities end there, and Android does have a year’s start on the relatively fresh webOS. We don’t want to give away all of Casey’s thoughts and observations about the first efforts of Palm’s rebirth, so we’ll just give you a link to Android Central where you can check them out for yourself.

Once you’re done with that, we’re sure you’ll be on a webOS high, so we want to keep it going by giving you a webOS phone. It’s a giveaway! All you have to do to enter the contest is leave a post in a Smartphone Round Robin thread on the PreCentral forums and once this all wraps up we’ll pick a winner. As always, the rules for these contests are suggested reading. Casey has already passed off the Pre and Pixi to Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry.com – Kevin’s going to need the ease of webOS after a week with Windows Mobile, while our own Dieter Bohn is about to get some face time with BlackBerry.

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