Palm OS looks to voice
Published: 21 Jul 2003 11:17 BST
With mobile-phone orders outpacing slumping handheld sales, PalmSource is bent on making a bigger splash in the converged phone/PDA market.
In an in-depth interview with ZDNet, David Nagel, chief executive officer the Sunnyvale, California-based software subsidiary of Palm, said he aims to find favour with more phone makers and have mobile operators around the world fired up about carrying Palm OS-based products.
For this to materialise, Nagel admitted it was crucial for licensees to come up with better designs for converged devices, but this could be a challenge, as PalmSource has little formal control over their industry design process.
"I have no formal influence but I certainly jawbone our licensees like crazy. Some of them listen and some of them don't. Look, this is an extremely important area for us. The size of the market for phones is an order of magnitude and a half times the size of the market for PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and handheld computers and, frankly, we think this is our future. We're putting a lot into it," he stressed.
This statement comes at time when handheld shipments around the world continue to decline. According to market research firm IDC, global shipments were down more than 21 percent, to 2.45 million units in the first quarter of 2003 compared with 3.1 million units in 2002.
However, some industry experts believe voice could be saving the feature for handheld makers. While global sales of pure handhelds are shrinking, shipments of converged PDA-telephony devices are rising, IDC Asia-Pacific analyst Bryan Ma told CNETAsia in a previous interview.
"As far as I can tell, things are going pretty well. We're getting some traction on the phone side. We've got some really great products like the stuff from Samsung that's coming out," said Nagel.
While the converged phone/PDA market may yield significant business potential for PalmSource, other IT giants are also fiercely vying for a share of the spoils.
Currently, only three handset makers have licensed the Palm operating system (OS) for use in their phones. Besides Samsung and Kyocera, Palm is the other licensee by default of their acquisition of rival Treo, which used to produce several PDA-like phones.
Symbian, once the power behind the Psion handhelds, has regrouped as the pre-eminent operating system of choice behind most mobile phones without a proprietary OS.
Software behemoth Microsoft recently joined in the battle for converged devices supremacy with Pocket PC Phone edition; an OS that Nagel said has so far received little market acceptance.
"I don't want Bill Gates designing my ideal converged device because I don't think he and I think exactly alike in terms of providing value, making tradeoffs." he quipped.
To bolster Palm's attractiveness against Pocket PC-based devices, Nagel said Palm is also planning to build in native support for common document formats. At present, the Pocket PC OS has the built-in ability to read Microsoft Office documents while Palm users have to install additional software to do the same.
To succeed in the cellular market, striking a chord with the mobile and wireless operators that control the distribution channel is also crucial, Nagel added.
"Looking at it from a platform point of view, PalmSource has relationships with almost 60 carriers through our licensees. So, there's quite a bit of acceptance of the Palm platform," he said. "Getting those relationships with the carriers is a much bigger barrier than anyone could ever imagine."
To this end, Nagel concedes Palm has not done a good job with its previous converged phone/ PDA offering -- the Tungsten W. While the gadget boasts mobile-telephony capabilities, the company marketed it more as a handheld than as a mobile handset.
"The W was never positioned very well. People really didn't understand what it was. The Tungsten C is much better in that regard; it's pretty clear what is," he said.
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