Thursday, September 12, 2002
Heading into 2003, it will get interesting
Posted by Ed Hansberry in "THE COMPETITION" @ 01:00 AM
Going into 2003, the PDA market will change radically.
• First, the current king of the hill, the Palm OS, will finally ship OS 5 products.
• Second, Dell enters the PDA fray with a Pocket PC 2002 device targeted at consumers for $299 this Christmas.
• Third, I keep seeing indicators that in early 2003, there will be an update to the Pocket PC operating system based on thoughts like this and this.
• Fourth, Microsoft's Smartphone should be shipping by then.
• Fifth, Foo Fighter will get a Pocket PC with a transflective screen, so traffic here will drop a bit.
The most interesting and unknown of these is the success of Palm OS 5. "... Palm's biggest challenge may be migrating its large and valuable developer community, which has populated the handheld landscape with Palm devices and applications. " This is no simple trick. The only OS I've seen that was a radical change from the previous version was Mac OS X, and they still don't have all of their key apps ported from Mac OS 9 to OS X. There are some pretty complex apps on the Palm. There is no porting. It is ground up rewriting to work natively in the ARM based OS. OS 5 isn't where this happens but OS 6. At some point Palm will presumably drop the PACE emulation environment. Rewriting 15,000 apps is a lot of manpower. I suspect some of the 250+ calculators won't get rewritten along with 500+ versions of solitaire.
"There's a lot of pressure on this new OS to be a strong answer," Aberdeen Group analyst Isaac Ro said. "This may be Palm's last best hope to recapture dominance in the marketplace."
What do you think? Will Palm recoup lost market share with OS5? Will Dell clean everyone's clock with a competent $300 Pocket PC? Will the rumored iPAQ 5000's keep iPAQ the strong product it is today? Will Microsoft trump every conceivable Palm OS 5 option with a Pocket PC 2003 available in early 2003 - one that we could hopefully put on our 2002 devices for $30 or so? Will smartphones come in at a price cheap enough to sway consumers and start eating into PDA marketshare? Will Foo ever be happy with his PDA's screen?
Thanks to Foo for the link to OS 5 article, which spurred this thought.
• First, the current king of the hill, the Palm OS, will finally ship OS 5 products.
• Second, Dell enters the PDA fray with a Pocket PC 2002 device targeted at consumers for $299 this Christmas.
• Third, I keep seeing indicators that in early 2003, there will be an update to the Pocket PC operating system based on thoughts like this and this.
• Fourth, Microsoft's Smartphone should be shipping by then.
• Fifth, Foo Fighter will get a Pocket PC with a transflective screen, so traffic here will drop a bit.
The most interesting and unknown of these is the success of Palm OS 5. "... Palm's biggest challenge may be migrating its large and valuable developer community, which has populated the handheld landscape with Palm devices and applications. " This is no simple trick. The only OS I've seen that was a radical change from the previous version was Mac OS X, and they still don't have all of their key apps ported from Mac OS 9 to OS X. There are some pretty complex apps on the Palm. There is no porting. It is ground up rewriting to work natively in the ARM based OS. OS 5 isn't where this happens but OS 6. At some point Palm will presumably drop the PACE emulation environment. Rewriting 15,000 apps is a lot of manpower. I suspect some of the 250+ calculators won't get rewritten along with 500+ versions of solitaire.
"There's a lot of pressure on this new OS to be a strong answer," Aberdeen Group analyst Isaac Ro said. "This may be Palm's last best hope to recapture dominance in the marketplace."
What do you think? Will Palm recoup lost market share with OS5? Will Dell clean everyone's clock with a competent $300 Pocket PC? Will the rumored iPAQ 5000's keep iPAQ the strong product it is today? Will Microsoft trump every conceivable Palm OS 5 option with a Pocket PC 2003 available in early 2003 - one that we could hopefully put on our 2002 devices for $30 or so? Will smartphones come in at a price cheap enough to sway consumers and start eating into PDA marketshare? Will Foo ever be happy with his PDA's screen?
Thanks to Foo for the link to OS 5 article, which spurred this thought.
