Why no Apple in the Palm

The cry of investors to "sell Palm" is actually a bit funny. What in the world would Apple want Palm for?

OS? The current release of the Palm is badly aging. They do have something else upcoming, anyone can look at it if they sign up as a developer, which is free.

But I think the request is based on wistfullness, a "coulda shoulda" glance at the iPod -- the thought that Palm should have been there.

Far from it. Palm has never had particularly good media play back support. This has been a critical failure of the product. It is telling when $99.00 cell phones has superior media support to a $300.00 Palm.

The article makes several bad assumptions. While the TabletPC has defied my expectations, and has not sunk like a rock, it is hardly selling like gangbusters. The form factor remains an unfullfilled promise -- something we would all like to really, really work. Windows TabletPC OS has too much legacy tied to conventional Windows (including the dumb start menu with nested menus, which is hard to navigate on a Pen interface) to be truly useful. I know, I have tried my darnest to like the one I have on loan. Ultimately, I end up using a keyboard to do just about anything, simply because it is more efficient. I have noticed this to be true of most tablet users as well. It is really worth the price differential between a tablet and conventional laptop to be able to use a pointing device to point at the screen?

I am confident that someone like Apple could make a tablet UI that would be more useful. Inkwell isn't bad at handwriting recognition, Apple has some promising accessibility tools that could be repurposed for a tablet environment (Voiceover). Will they do it? Recent patents hint that they are thinking about it, but it remains to be seen that there is a market.

My guess is that instead of a general computing device, it should perhaps be more like the Nokia 770 -- a web-centric device that is inexpensive and easy to use, inside of it's tightly focused functionality.

So, don't expect to see an Apple buyout of Palm. There simply isn't any value there, nothing that Apple could not invent themselves. Perhaps a stripped down version of Mac OS X, with a simplified UI, running on one of Intel's processors normally used for PDA's. Have it support dashboard widgets as a integral part of the user experience -- many of these would be quite useful in a mobile context.

Will that happen? Who knows? Everything at Apple is incremental, it is often best to predict what they will do by what they have done.

--hal