Friday, September 6, 2002
Visiting PalmSource, Sony and Nokia
Posted by Andy Sjostrom in "THOUGHT" @ 01:48 AM
Things are slow on the news front. It can only mean one thing: companies are busy getting new products ready. I thought that if news won't come to me, then I'd have to come to news. A while back ago I toured the lands of mobile device makers to find out what is really going on. My first stop was PalmSource. I wondered why David Nagel, president and chief executive officer of the Palm OS subsidiary of Palm, has been so upbeat despite financial woes. I found some interesting bits:
Palm OS 5 contains much more than publicly known
The core of this new operating system is more modular than I had first thought
There are very few Palm OS applications from earlier versions that are not running in their labs
Its multithreading capabilities, support for new processors and faster memory chipsets made the test devices I saw fast. Very fast.
What surprised me the most was the Pocket PC emulator state that I saw run both Windows Media Player as well as some of the coolest Pocket PC games.
Before I left, I got to chat with a couple of their Enterprise folks and was shown some of the work that has come out from their IBM partnership. Main themes were new development tools and cross platform server connectivity.
After my stop at PalmSource, I headed over to Sony:
Their new devices all use the new Palm OS 5 operating system.
The design prototypes I saw were all had silverish, rounded design and bright TFT screens.
Sony has apparantly worked hard cramming wireless connectivity into their devices: I saw built-in WiFi, CDMA, and GPRS, and they talked about more wireless technologies just about to be implemented.
During my short visit I didn't get to read the detailed specs on mother boards, memory, and so on. But from what I saw, they all moved. Moved quickly.
The coolest demos I saw showed working integration between Sony devices and their home entertainment systems.
The engineers in the inner most room I was shown worked on Sony Ericsson's new Symbian based and Java enabled mobile phones. If I'd use just one word to describe what I saw, it must be: multimedia!
The last stop on my tour was Nokia:
First, I spent some time talking with some "political chiefs". In summary, I understood that they are dead serious in viewing Microsoft as their chief competitor.
The prototype devices and specs I was shown make their current flag ship, the multimedia packed 7650, look like an alpha test. Beta test, at best.
Interestingly, I saw the same new development tools and server products that I saw at PalmSource... Secret partnerships, I wonder!
Well, my conclusion is that the battle intensifies by volumes in the coming 6-18 months. What do you think?
(Obviously, this is just a THOUGHT, just my imagination. Nothing of the above ever happened. But don't tell Microsoft. I really want them to be paranoid.)
Palm OS 5 contains much more than publicly known
The core of this new operating system is more modular than I had first thought
There are very few Palm OS applications from earlier versions that are not running in their labs
Its multithreading capabilities, support for new processors and faster memory chipsets made the test devices I saw fast. Very fast.
What surprised me the most was the Pocket PC emulator state that I saw run both Windows Media Player as well as some of the coolest Pocket PC games.
Before I left, I got to chat with a couple of their Enterprise folks and was shown some of the work that has come out from their IBM partnership. Main themes were new development tools and cross platform server connectivity.
After my stop at PalmSource, I headed over to Sony:
Their new devices all use the new Palm OS 5 operating system.
The design prototypes I saw were all had silverish, rounded design and bright TFT screens.
Sony has apparantly worked hard cramming wireless connectivity into their devices: I saw built-in WiFi, CDMA, and GPRS, and they talked about more wireless technologies just about to be implemented.
During my short visit I didn't get to read the detailed specs on mother boards, memory, and so on. But from what I saw, they all moved. Moved quickly.
The coolest demos I saw showed working integration between Sony devices and their home entertainment systems.
The engineers in the inner most room I was shown worked on Sony Ericsson's new Symbian based and Java enabled mobile phones. If I'd use just one word to describe what I saw, it must be: multimedia!
The last stop on my tour was Nokia:
First, I spent some time talking with some "political chiefs". In summary, I understood that they are dead serious in viewing Microsoft as their chief competitor.
The prototype devices and specs I was shown make their current flag ship, the multimedia packed 7650, look like an alpha test. Beta test, at best.
Interestingly, I saw the same new development tools and server products that I saw at PalmSource... Secret partnerships, I wonder!
Well, my conclusion is that the battle intensifies by volumes in the coming 6-18 months. What do you think?
(Obviously, this is just a THOUGHT, just my imagination. Nothing of the above ever happened. But don't tell Microsoft. I really want them to be paranoid.)
