Friday, May 06, 2005

Palm Life(Boat)Drive

Amazon has leaked pictures of the new Palm LifeDrive. 4 GB microdrive, 480x320, wifi and camera. I would guess Palm OS 6, which is important, as this is the first release that uses bits from the purchase of Be Inc.

LifeDrive is a good name. It is a device that people use to document their life. But wifi is not pervasive, and may never be. Take the same concept, and make it a cell phone, and add other services -- the ability to spontaneously share (phone call, images, streaming video, data). Now you have something that is relevant.

The european/asian market is still so far ahead of us in terms of mobile technology. A co-worker and I have been tracking the recently announced Nokia N series. In a sense, it is a continuation of the NGage -- a hybrid of multimedia and phone.

The N90 is a very interesting phone, but we will never see it in the US because the market it is designed for doesn't exist here yet. But 20-somethings in the czech republic certainly want one:

http://www.mobilmania.cz/Bleskovky/AR.asp?ARI=109925

We are just starting to see streaming media on phones here -- in part it is not being driven as much by the cell providers themselves as it is by the content owners/developers. When I talk to folks about video-conferencing on cell phones, they assume that this is some technology yet to be invented, but companies have been shipping them for a while now.

But people *do* want this stuff. At least Orb hopes so:

http://www.orb.com

We are stuck with infrastructure that is a blend of cell phone centric services, tied to legacy services that are designed for a personal computer. Web pages are written so they only work on IE. People still think of cell phone access to data as a unique thing. Witness the Blackberry -- people will carry around a big device that has expensive monthly service fees, just to have access to their data on a text-centric device. No streaming media, very limited image capability. It is a closed box tied to a proprietary service. Just what the cell phone companies want. But it does it's job well, I guess.

And I have to keep reminding myself what someone (I think it was Russell Beattie) wrote: Cell phone company's customers are not end users, but the cell phone service providers.

So, it may be up to Sony, Palm and other companies to prove that there is a market here for mobile media beyond iTunes. It will only happen if there is content. I seem to remember that Palm 6's OS has better MM support. I mean more than mp3 playback -- perhaps even 3gp content that my $99.00 Ngage QD has no trouble playing now. I think the key is in letting people have the abilty to create their own content, and make it easy to share.

I wish Palm luck. Sales of PDA have slid for some time, while Microsoft continues to grab more the remaining market share. Sony bowed out a while ago, and now it appears that Tapwave is headed in a different business direction. Palm needs a killer device, an iPod. I am not sure this is it.

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