PDA Evolution23 December 2002 A poster to my discussion group brought up an interesting point about my H1910 review. He took issue with my claim that the H1910 would be "the biggest tiny PDA since the original Palm V" and claimed that the market share numbers clearly show that the buying public still prefers PalmOS. To which I say, "For now. Wait." Now that I'm working the PDA counter at CompUSA, I have a front row seat to watch the PDA wars, and the tide has already turned. In just a couple weeks - during the most intense shopping season of the year - the introduction of the iPAQ H1910 and the ViewSonic V35 have put a major dent in PalmOS device sales. I started wondering why that was, and I think it's really just Darwinism at work: adapt or perish, survival of the fittest. (And before I begin, the following is all based on anecdotal evidence compiled while working retail. I have no sales numbers or statistics for you, just what I've seen for myself.) In 1996, the "Zen of Palm" was a good idea. Do a few things simply and well. Teach people to write in a way the computer can understand rather than teaching the computer to understand how people write. Provide room to grow, but with limits. This philosophy allowed Jeff Hawkins and company to sidestep most the problems that plagued the too-ambitious Apple Newton and most of the other pen-based computers of the time. People were willing to learn Graffiti if it meant nearly perfect recognition, especially while the Newton's handwriting recognition had been recently ridiculed in the national press. Early "Palm Pilots" did their jobs well, and made effective use of mid-1990s technology. They were well-adapted to their time and environment, and thus succeeded. Now fast-forward six years. In 2002, technology has improved by several orders of magnitude. Transcriber - or better yet, Calligrapher - on Pocket PCs is capable of very high recognition rates on cursive handwriting with only minimal training. Pocket-sized computers are far closer to laptops in capability than paper DayTimers. They can play music, surf the web, double as phones, maintain websites (I do all the editing of Writing On Your Palm on my XDA, including ftp uploads of new content). While mobile devices have gotten more powerful, the environment around them has also changed. In 1996, dial-up Internet access was still relatively uncommon, and there was pretty much no such thing as home broadband or the "wireless web." In 1996, serious word processing on a handheld was considered lunacy (You all thought me mad, did you?!?) and reading full-length books was almost unheard of (the PalmDoc ebook format had to be created to allow arbitrarily long books to fit into PalmOS's database system, which didn't know how to handle records longer than 4k). Now not only are ebooks a fairly common and enjoyable use of PDAs, but watching full-length movies off a storage card isn't unheard of. PDAs have come a long way in six years. Well, some of them have, and therein lies the problem of PalmOS. While hardware capabilities and the technology world in general were advancing, Palm stood pat, convinced that if the "Zen of Palm" worked in 1996, then it worked just as well in 2000. They were wrong. As with most things that work in the real world, evolution is fractal. It works the same way simultaneously on multiple levels. Just as an organism that fails to adapt to a changing environment is doomed to perish, so is a corporation that fails to adapt to a changing marketplace. Over time, as the technology advanced around them, Palm mistook being simplistic for keeping it simple. In the meantime, their competition has overtaken them. For example, let's look at data input. The original Palm Pilots were sold to executives that wanted to replace bulky paper day planners. In addition to smaller size - and "cool factor" - the early PalmOS devices offered less maintenance - no more manually entering recurring appointments - audible alarms and synchronization with desktop PCs. The trade off was that you had to learn to write in glyphs the Palm Pilot could understand. For the busy, technologically literate executives that bought those early devices, this was worth the effort given the advantages of using the device; Graffiti offered an acceptable return on investment (ROI). Today most PalmOS devices are still using Graffiti, even the new ARM-based devices that have the horsepower to run true handwriting recognition. Meanwhile Pocket PCs come with Transcriber, based on the handwriting recognition engine of the Newton. Why would anyone who doesn't already know Graffiti want to learn it when they could just write normally in their own handwriting instead? The ROI for Graffiti has disappeared. There are myriad other examples of how PalmOS has stood pat while the world passed it by. When dealing with large data or programs on a storage card, who can honestly say that dealing with Palm's VFS is preferable to the Pocket PC's completely transparent handling of storage cards? Why convert Word and Excel files to Palm databases when other PDAs can edit them natively? While the Tungsten T can play music files, there seems to be no easy way to get them on the device in the first place; Pocket PCs "mount" themselves as removable drives on the PC, making file transfers as easy as copying to a network drive. Word on the Street™ is that PalmOS 6 will address a lot of these issues, but we won't see that for another year. A year from now, wireless connectivity may be standard on Pocket PCs and PalmOS will still be behind the curve. Not to mention that if the OS5 devices on the market are any indicator, OS6 devices will almost certainly be more expensive than Pocket PCs with similar capabilities. What do you think? Has PalmOS's failure to keep up doomed it to eventual extinction? Or like VHS over Beta, will sheer installed base and inertia be enough to overcome more capable competition? Jeff Kirvin
Jeff Kirvin is available for consulting on mobile technology. Email me today! |