11:09 AM by Laurens in E-Book Readers | Alternative Devices

Nokia unveils Linux-based web device without phone (PalmAddict)

This looks sweet!

The new device, dubbed Nokia 770, has a four inch horizontal touch screen that can display normal Internet pages. It will sell for $350 excluding VAT or 350 euros including VAT..."We're launching a completely new product category," said Janne Jormalainen, Nokia's vice president for convergence products at its multimedia devices division.

Update:
Product page: Nokia 770 internet tablet - be sure to check out the specs. (800x480 display!)
Developer site: maemo.org

Update 2:
Hands-on preview: MobileBurn

08:17 PM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

Keynote Speech to open the conference

David Nagel, was given a very brief introduction as one was not really needed. He is known by all, whether personally or by reputation. I suppose it's sort of like when you introduce Bill Gates or the President. Anything you say probably just falls short, so you make it simple and to the point.

He pointed out immediately that the name of the conference was changed from DevCon to Mobile Summit & DevCon because they wanted to focus on opportunity, and how this is a jumping off point for the entire mobile industry. There were some interesting figures given, about how the traditional PDA market is pretty much steady, but the market for all mobile devices is skyrocketing. PalmOS market share in the US has actually grown from 2003-2005 by about 5-10pts against Windows Mobile.

But everything will be networked in the future. There are about 700 million phones that will be sold in the next year. Many of those will be intelligent phones, so there's a tremendous market, and PalmSource wants a big piece of the 2.5 and 3G phones. Shares for various "communicator" devices were interesting also, with RIM at 38%, PalmOS at 23%, Windows Mobile at 17%, and Symbian and others below that. Kyocera sold 500,000 of one smartphone running PalmOS that he said beats all MS Smartphones sold during that period.

It sounds like PalmSource wants to provide a complete platform solution to carriers that can be customized for look and feel but is easy to adopt. They want to move down from the smaller communicator phone market to also supply for the 3g and feature phone markets with much larger revenues.

He said that only a multitasking, fully threaded OS will satisfy consumers. Don't know if he was implying that we need Cobalt (a stretch I think), or that we will see just that when Cobalt on Linux comes out (more likely).

Ed Colligan

Ed Colligan was one of the many guests speaking during the first keynote address. He's President and CEO of PalmOne, of course, but it will become Palm once again due to a new agreement. In addition, probably the best news of the weekend is that there is a 5yr extension of the agreement to license PalmOS, so they're in the market to stay for the forseeable future.

Ed said that the PalmOne vision was for:
1) Innovation
2) Ease of Use
3) Unrivaled Customer Experience

He mentioned that it was coincidence due to the general capabilities of the platform, not coordination, that brought out a really great media player right before the LifeDrive. I assume he was referring to Picard's new player, but I'm not sure.

There are 3 major trends driving product development at PalmOne...
1) Everything going digital
This is best embodied in the LifeDrive with it's capacity to hold files and with its wifi connectivity. You didn't see people with all kinds of files on laptops until recently, but it's exploded because of the demand for it. We'll see the same explosion for pdas.
2) Email
There are about 651 email business email boxes (users). Less than 2% are deployed as mobile email. That means there's a huge untapped market. I suppose he's thinking along the lines of the shoe salemen that went to an island where nobody wore shoes. One wrote back and said there's no market here because no one wears shoes. The other wrote back and said it's the best market I've ever seen -- everyone here needs shoes. Ed Colligan is like the second salesman, but I'm not sure if everyone needs mobile email yet.
3) Hi Speed Data Networks.
He talked about how the next killer mobile application is simply going to be the web and web commerce. Makes sense, but I think there's even more potential as hi speed data networks become cheaper and better. The problem is that the business models are all pointing toward mobile phone carriers. Large user base, growing market, and new data services. Those bring in great revenues because the customers are pretty much trapped into one carrier's services. They want those services very much, but can't shop around much once they sign a contract. That means that PalmSource, Palm, Microsoft, app developers are all going to gravitate toward the money, and your pocket will be emptied by data and data services and content over the air. But maybe a necessary evil. I'm not sure yet.

PalmOne's goal is to be the leading mobile computing company in the world, not the biggest handset maker in the world.

By the way, I was very impressed by Ed Colligan's speech, and perspective. It really gave me a lot more confidence in PalmOne for the future. And while some developers are reaching decision points about Palm vs MS, I don't see signs of a mass exodus on the surface so far. People seem pretty much business as usual, and under the assumption that things are fine. Personally, I am concerned until Cobalt and Cobalt on Linux is a success, but there are certainly a lot of reasons to be optimistic when in the worst of days they have found a way to not only survive, but be profitable.

Other Speakers

Cingular, Orange, SmartGlobal and others spoke a lot about wireless opportunities and there was a general plea from all sides to developers to make their apps wireless enabled. IBM had a speaker that emphasized all the infrastructure built to support enterprise business applications that extend out to the PalmOS world.

I was most impressed with Francis Li of GSPDA (Group Sense PDA Ltd.), which is a company out of Hong Kong that already has PalmOS Garnet smartphones on the market throughout Asia, is coming to Europe and Asia with its latest phones and is coming next to the US. They are working on a Cobalt phone, and plan to bring it to market by end of the year. No one at the conference seemed too enthusiastic about that, but I think that's a big deal. In fact, when David Nagel announced all the news about Palm and the extension of the contract with PalmOne and various other good news, no one seemed very impressed. I thought it was one of those twighlight zone moments when it seemed like I was in another world. I started to clap while in complete amazement that everyone else seemed to be sleeping or something, but the applause did pick up a bit, but was only slightly enthusiastic. Maybe developers aren't thinking about that kind of thing too much.

Powered Up Awards and SplashBlog

I'm sure this will be posted on the PalmSource web site, but they announced the awards. There was a demo of SplashBlog also, which was very interesting. You basically just take a picture with your Treo and then send it to the blog you have set up. Easy photo blogging. Here's some pics SplashBlogged from DevCon.. http://www.splashblog.com/devcon2005/

I saw someone taking notes with a Dana. Had a full keyboard and an lcd black and white screen. Didn't look like the display was adequate and was hard to read. I kept noticing him bending over to see it. But it was certainly interesting.

PalmSource Installer

The PalmSource Installer 1.5 was announced and demo'd. Demo'd could probably stand equally well for demonstrated or demolished! The idea was to download an app two ways. Once by a geek as a .zip file and once by the new installer that makes it simple. Except it didn't work so well either for the geek or the "grandma" character they used. In fact, rather than a one button press to download and install the app, it turned out instead that grandma managed to crash the Treo with just one click of the installer! Oh well. It turned out to be fine because "grandma" knew just how to deal with all the error messages and presto the app was ready to use.

But regardless of any poking fun, it's big progress. The market needs to be open to the average user and everything needs to be less techy. Their goal is to make the installer a part of the platform. They also claim that it only takes 15mins to installer enable your application, so it may not be a big deal to implement on the developer side. Whether developers like the sales channel is a different question that will have to be worked out.

Suggestions from David Nagel

To wrap up, David gave some suggestions to the developers on hand.
1) Think wireless
2) Develop on Cobalt/Protein, and be ready for Cobalt on Linux
He said specifically that devices (plural!) ARE in the pipeline for Cobalt. He said PalmSource is dedicated to helping developers make it work on Cobalt and will provide help. It's a very important next step.
3) Make the installer part of the standard platform so anyone can install software
4) Leverage the economy and relationships PalmSource has built with wireless carriers

He reminded everyone again that the Palm economy is working, and gave thanks to the people he has worked with over the last four years. He said it's been "a wonderful ride." There was a very warm standing ovation for him to honor him as he steps down, and I think people really view him fondly. It was a touching moment, and I hope he finds great joy and success in whatever new ventures come next for him.

One final bit of great news for me. The deals at the Palm Store were in fact 40% off everything that was offered. One model per person limit, of course. I hope people don't abuse it and only get what they need for themselves. When they run out, that's the end of the deal. And the line was extremely long. Only 50 LifeDrives arrived. 100 were expected. So they are allowing orders at the special rate for LifeDrive only when they are gone from the store.

I have to say one thing. LifeDrive is awesome! I played with one and although it was only a brief moment, I'd have to say that it confirms everything you heard from Sammy about how wonderful it is. I don't have any concerns about that slight delay due to the microdrive spinning up, and second time it's instand due to caching. The screen is beautiful. The device feels solid, and not too big, not too heavy. It's really really nice. I would have bought it except for one thing. My girlfriend actually provided a lot of input. She would like for me to carry a cell phone with me, and would like me to be more available.

There's not many things that are more important to me than my pda, but she certainly is, so I took her wishes into consideration and bought a Treo 650 instead. I'm pretty excited about it, even though it can't use wifi, has a square hires (not hires+) screen, and only has 32 meg memory. It is has both phone and pda in one device, and it has a camera. We'll find out how good it is very soon, but it seems to be everyone's favorite device here based on the number around. It will really increase my geekiness when I'm reading books on my phone, but I guess that's okay.

That's it for now. Hope to have more updates soon.

07:52 AM by Colin Dunstan in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

More PalmSource news today. The Deal is quoting Jamie Friedman, an analyst at Fulcrum Global Partners LLC, saying that the change in leadership is a signal that PalmSource could become an acquisition target any moment soon:

"They lost a CFO in February, who was replaced by a better CFO, then they lost the head of sales in March, who was replaced by a better head of sales, and now you have the CEO leaving. It is a scenario where the company could get acquired.

According to her, potential buyers could be palmOne (feel how the wheel is turning?) and Blackberry-maker Research in Motion.

Update: Two related links both from C|net thanks to Laurens:
PalmSource may be in play
PalmOne spends $30 million to drop 'One'

Update 2: Just checked PalmSource stock price and it is +13% today!

06:13 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

With yesterday's announcement of David Nagel's departure from PalmSource, eWeek columnist Guy Kewney doesn't have anything left but gloomy words for PalmSource. Quote from the article:

I fear that success is now the albatross around PalmSource, and that it can't move forward fast enough to survive—before the investors decide to quit while they're still ahead and pull the plug.

If the new management has a time machine, it can solve the problem. Without one, I hardly know what to say beyond, "I hope your investors are as dumb as you think they are."

04:28 AM by Alexander Turcic in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

In case you haven't noticed yet, PalmAddicts is holding a forum contest with great prizes such as $200 towards software of your choice, 5 copies of any Astraware software titles, Proporta case's and goodies, and money off vouchers from Proporta. The winners will be chosen at random, so make sure you go to their forum and post there!

12:53 AM by Bob Russell in Archive | Handhelds and Smartphones

I'm here in San Jose, CA for the 2005 Palmsource Developer Conference (DevCon). It's "Day 0" because everything happening today was sort of pre-conference activity. Events included a marathon 5hr class called "Programmers Intro to PalmOS," early conference registration, and a PalmSource sponsored Palm User Group meeting.

Oddly enough, there was almost no mention of the resignation of David Nagel, President and CEO of PalmSource. The only comment I heard that even acknowledged the fact was at the PUG meeting where he spoke. He himself made a comment about how someone else would be speaking next year in his place. I did not sense any animosity, and everyone warmly greeted him at the meeting. No one from PalmSource shows any signs of being uncomfortable. It was nice to see that on the surface it looks like everyone is on great terms.

I was able to discuss it briefly with one PalmSource employee, who indicated that she first heard the news this morning when they were all gathered together for the announcement. They didn't really seem to hear too much about it either, or didn't want to share it with me. Not sure which was the reason, but don't look for me to reveal any information here, anyway, that would be damaging. If someone shares something privately with the expectation that it would not be shared, I will honor that, especially if it could bring bad results. I know that's not the way the mainstream press works, or even most blogs, but it's the way I desire to approach things. So if you're looking for news that will destroy anyone, you'll have to look elsewhere. But that's not the case here. Everything so far about David Nagel's resignation seems to be on good terms.

The press release indicates that "Patrick McVeigh, currently senior vice president, worldwide licensing for PalmSource, has been named interim CEO." McVeigh is currently the Sr VP of Worldwide Licensing and Sales, so you might feel that they were just giving the spot to a sales guy. But he has 20yrs of experience in technology and consumer electronics, and is former CEO of Aliph, a company developing audio and speech capabilities for mobile devices. He also was chairman and CEO of Omnisky Corporation until it was bought by Earthlink. According to the PalmSource supplied speaker biographies, "While with Omnisky, he developed and executed the launch of service within one year of founding the business, growing revenues from $0 to $43 million on a run rate basis." In addition he spent over 10yrs with Apple in sales and marketing position. I think that he also has a great background to move the company towards PalmOS on Linux if he becomes permanent.

In his tenure at PalmSource, David Nagel was responsible for some really significant progress at PalmSource as he ushered in the wireless generation. He was previously the chief technology officer at AT&T, so he certainly had the background for it. Also under his watch, we saw the new PalmOS on Linux direction, which if executed well with Cobalt has the potential to open all kinds of future business. The future is uncertain, and there are concerns with the delay in Cobalt devices, but one has to acknowledge that if they can make the jump to Cobalt on Linux, and stay a player in the wireless/smartphone market, there is great potential.

My only disappointment for the day was that I had hoped to see our very own Pride of Lions at the PUG meeting. I'm not sure if he was a no show, or if I just didn't find him, but I guess we're going to have to do it another year.

To wrap up the days activities, let's take a look at them one-by-one:

The Programming Class

Our instructor for the class was JB Parrett from PalmOne, Inc. He did an excellent job of teaching, and even after 5 solid hours, people looked like they were ready for more. Interesting and informative. While most of the talk was rather technical, I have one great tip for the average PalmOS user.

If your device locks up with just the PalmOS logo after a reset, you may not have to do a hard reset. Before you get that desperate, try the following: Hold down the "Scroll Up" button and hit the reset button. It will reboot, but not send launch codes to applications. Then do a soft reset to reload everything properly (after removing the offending application if the problem was caused by a new app just loaded.)

Seems that this is due to an application not coded to properly handle launch codes. But one doesn't need to know all that to use the reset trick.

I would highly recommend the class to any programmers wanting to program with PalmOS. There were some great tips about differences between the emulators and simulators, how memory works, the UI, and tips about what documentation to look at. One of the other interesting notes is that PalmSource still provides the source code for the PIM applications in the Palm SDK, so you can see how the pros do it.

The class was also a chance to meet a couple of people. Two very nice guys were here from Intellisync in Romania. And I thought my 12hrs of traveling was a lot!

Conference Registration

I know this is not normally of a lot of interest to people, but I'm new to this whole blog thing, so I have to tell you that registering as press, and getting a flashy red ribbon on my badge gave me quite a thrill! Doesn't take much, I guess, but it was a real privilege. And they had a very nice black PalmSource backpack for attendees also, filled with some nice goodies. I don't care how old I am, I still love free goodies!

Palm Users Group Meeting

Again, an oustanding job. The meeting had some great speakers and was a lot of fun because of all the giveaways. About five or so Palm devices from PalmOne, Garmin, and TapWave were given away. Also some GPS receivers and loads of software and t-shirts. A lot of fun, and the majority of us got something. (Some free software and a t-shirt came my way.) If you ever have the chance to attend something like this, you should take advantage. It was free and open to the public. Well worth the time to visit.

Larry Berkin, Dir of Developer Marketing at PalmSource, was one of the speakers. He kind of wowed us with a vest he was wearing. It had a scrolling billboard on his back advertising PalmSource DevCon. He said it was controlled by a Palm PDA and pulled the controller out of the pocket. Pretty cool!

Larry shared that there is a new free wireless application in beta that will allow users to find Palm User Groups all over the world. You can go to www.palmsource.com and user groups, where they either have the download or will have it soon. It includes contact info about the user group and a calendar with the events.

David Nagel honored us with a short talk also. He had quite a bit to say about the market. But first he noted that there is strong attendance at the conference this year. No big announcements like Cobalt last year to bring in developers, but still they have about 1000 attendees which matches what they did last year with the big news.

He pointed out that there are good numbers in the business, despite the gloom and doom talk. Especially in the wireless market. To give perspective, he shared some figures. About 10-15 million handhelds are sold each year. About 650 million cell phones are sold each year. In China alone, there are 340 million wireless subscribers, with only a 25% penetration. There are 5 1/2 million new subscribers per year. Now that's a big market!

He mentioned that he's been going to China about once a month. And he talked about how they want to help developers sell software. Right now about 80% of Palm software is sold on developer sites, but he expects that most will be sold over the air in the future. Pick out software with your wireless device and push a button to buy it and install it automatically.

There's a lot of developers out there and most are 1-2 developer shops, so it's not easy to market and sell. Better yet, over the last year, there were about 100,000 new developers added over the last year so more apps are coming. In fact, new apps are coming at a rate of about 500-600 per month. Many new apps are going to be launched right here at DevCon.

We saw some nice presentations from Garmin, which makes PalmOS devices with GPS and route planning built in, and Aceeca, which makes ruggedized devices. There is also a portal store for Europe called Pdassi, which has 6 different portals for 6 different languages. Kind of like a Handango or PalmGear for Europe. Also Kenny West from Motricity (PalmGear) spoke. If you look at the RSS feeds for PalmGear on their site, you'll see that they are supplied by MobileRead. We can thank Alex for that feat of magic, and Kenny was kind enough to thank him for his excellent work. He was quite amazed at how he would call Alex up and next thing you know, he'd have something working! But by now, that surely doesn't suprise any of us!

Someone, I think it was Mark O'Sullivan from PalmSource, showed off a very nice application called Msafe, which is great for Treos. The idea is that if you lose your Treo, all you have to do to lock it or wipe it clean is to send an SMS message from any phone anywhere in the world with the command and password, and it will do it for you. We saw his password in the demo and his phone number, so I hope he either changes it quickly, or the group is not evil-hearted!

Marshall Porter from Handango shared some trivia with us (like Handango was founded in 1999 and used to be called Palm Central). And talked about Handango in Hand, which is a client app that lets you browse their catalog and purchase software over the air. It even comes preinstalled with a device offered by Sprint. Clearly everyone is moving toward this software delivery model.

There's also going to be a PUG section at Handango that allows a portion of proceeds (5%) to go back to the PUG group that sponsors the sectionl. By the way, the name Palm Central is making a brief appearance once again when Handango offers a 20% discount on all Palm software at a Palm Central portion of the site. No word on when it's coming or for how long, but it will be at palm.handango.com.

There was an announcement about www.allaboutpalm.com. Supposedly, at the PUG we were the first to hear about the site, but of course anyone that follows Palm Addicts already knew about it and had probably even visited it before, just like I had! As I always say, if you want to get all the news about Palm, just keep an eye on Palm Addicts!

Wrapup

I hope this has given everyone a taste of what this pre-conference day has been like here. So far, PalmSource has made everything a very pleasant event, and I'm really looking forward to the remaining days, as well as hooking up with a few friendly faces.

Speaking of which, I spoke momentarily with Mike Rohde, of Rohdesign.com while I was trying to find a seat at the PUG meeting. He disappeared during the evening, but I hope to catch up with him soon.

I'll be back with more news as soon as I have opportunity, but please note that this is pretty much stream of consciousness. No time for things like spell check or grammar or proofreading. It's late (almost 1am local time back home) so I'm headed back to the hotel!

11:06 PM by Gatton in E-Book General | Deals and Resources (No...

Fictionwise is having a sale to celebrate their five years in business. According to the site the details are as follows:

Fictionwise will be five years old this June! To celebrate, from now through June 2, all MultiFormat titles are 25% off, and all Secure titles have a 25% Micropay Rebate!

Might be a good time to pick up a few things for summer reading. Anyone want to make some suggestions?

10:53 PM by Zire in Miscellaneous | Lounge

Have you ever tried to enter Yahoo! chat or Yahoo! games in Firefox for Mac? Do you hit a brick wall and cannot chat or play games? Well your answer is Java Embedding Plugin. I have been using this since I found it on MacUpdate and it is great to not have to switch to Safari in order to play games or chat. It works...it really, really works. Give it a try.

From MacUpdate:

Java Embedding Plugin 0.9.2:

The Java Embedding Plugin is a utility (currently in beta release) that allows other web browsers than Apple's Safari to use the most recent versions of Java (1.4.X) on Mac OS X. Currently it supports recent versions of the Mozilla "family" of browsers, when used together with an updated version of Mozilla's MRJ Plugin Carbon (included in this distribution). But in principle any web browser could use one of the Java Embedding Plugin's two APIs to add support for Java 1.4.X.

The current versions of the Java Embedding Plugin and the updated MRJ Plugin Carbon have been tested with Mozilla 1.6 and 1.7.X, Firefox 0.8 and 0.9.X, and Camino 0.7 and 0.8.X on OS X 10.2.8 with Java 1.4.1 and OS X 10.3.5 with Java 1.4.2 Update 1 and Java 1.4.2 Update 2.

The current version (0.8.6) of the Java Embedding Plugin has not been tested with Java 1.4.2 "plain" or on Mac OS X 10.3.3 or 10.3.4. But previous versions of the JEP (e.g. 0.8.2) worked in these environments, and so (I believe) should version 0.8.6.

Apple's Java 1.4.2 and above have one additional requirement, unrelated to the Java Embedding Plugin -- an appropriate version of the JavaPluginCocoa.bundle must be present in the /Library/Internet Plug-Ins folder.

What's New:
Version 0.9.2:

* Fixed a major security hole in the MRJ Plugin that effects all nightlies, alphas and betas of Mozilla-family browsers issued since 2004-04-25, but none of the "released" versions. So, for example, Firefox 1.0.X, Mozilla 1.7.X and Camino 0.8.X aren't vulnerable. In browsers effected by this hole, potentially all security checks are disabled when doing JavaScript-to-Java LiveConnect. Users of vulnerable browsers should upgrade as soon as possible.
* Cleaned up some problems with a bugfix (for Camino's "spurious updates" bug) included in the previous version (0.9.1) of the Java Embedding Plugin.
* A few other minor fixes.

Requirements:
Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later.

Download from here.