Palm announced a new device today. I have been a devoted Palm user since my 1000, back in the day when they were called palmPilots and were owned by US Robotics (there’s some geek street cred for you beyatch).
My only thought on this is that it’s not about the hardware. Instant on is pretty cool but aside from that it’s a bunch of apps that may or may not work with my office docs, etc. If I’m going to the trouble of carrying a big screen the two most important things for me are to be able to handle every file type I might run into in a crunch, like tweaking a brochure design in Adobe, editing an audio file in Goldwave, or yes, just reading email.
The other major point that I didn’t see anything on was media files. If I’m traveling I want to watch movies and listen to podcasts, if the device can’t do that I’m not interested – and be able to download pics from my digital camera’s media card so that I don’t have to carry around more than one card, and can check them out on a bigger screen.
I wish them the best of luck because I am a diehard fan, but I don’t see myself throwing down $500 for it.
4 replies on “It’s not about the hardware”
Ditto – this bores me… but I do recall upgrading my PalmPilot Personal to a Pro so that I could beam just like you…!
mp/m
[…] So yesterday I was saying that I thought the newest Palm hardware was a waste of time. Over on engadget a lot of people were saying the same type of thing. If you don’t have the backstory – they are selling a mini laptop, it connects to the phone and you get web, email and some other programs with the benefit of a big screen and keyboard. […]
I’m guessing that Palm did the right thing here. The market has been altered significantly with the introduction of the iPhone, which became the new benchmark overnight.
http://blog.palm.com/palm/2007/09/a-message-to-pa.html
Hey, that’s interesting, I agree. Thanks for the link!