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HP’s PCs: The handwriting was in Léo Apotheker’s resumé

Philip Elmer-DeWitt — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:02:45 +0000

The board sealed the fate of HP's personal systems group when it hired the CEO of SAP

What the hell happened to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) last week?

The simplest explanation is the one suggested Thursday by Techcrunch's MG Siegler and picked up Sunday by Daring Fireball's John Gruber: HP's board put an enterprise software guy in charge of a low-margin PC business and a high-risk play to outflank Apple (AAPL) in smartphones and tablets. When MORE

HP washing its hands of webOS: discontinues tablets, Pre phones

Casey Johnston — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:57:00 +0000

Hewlett Packard confirmed today that it will discontinue all current operations related to webOS devices via a press release. The announcement comes less than two months after HP launched its first webOS tablet, the HP Touc...

HP Dusts Off Pre 2 and webOS For A Second Round Against Apple

John Brownlee — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 17:07:52 +0000

Apple’s put down webOS before in the smartphone wars, but you can’t keep a solid operating system down for the count: six months after HP acquired Palm, they have just announced webOS 2.0 and the Pre 2 smartphone. When it comes to webOS 2.0, there’s a laundry list of new features you can see in [...]

Feature: From Geek to Chic: a decade of smartphone evolution

Chris Foresman — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 04:30:00 +0000

Over the past ten years, the smartphone has gone from a large, belt-holstered badge of geekiness to a mass-market mobile computing platform. In the mid-'90s, PDAs were being paired with mobile phones for the ultimate in mobil...

HP’s webOS 2.0 To Boast MobileMe Integration

John Brownlee — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:05:23 +0000

HP soon intends to relaunch their Palm-acquired webOS mobile operating system with a major new version, which they intend to use in a new lineup of devices to compete directly with iOS devices like the iPad. One new addition to the webOS arsenal of sof...

Survey: Android surges, iPhone stalls

Philip Elmer-DeWitt — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:53:05 +0000

While demand for BlackBerries and Palm Pres is drying up, according to ChangeWave Take this with the usual grain of salt, based, as it is, on a survey of early adopters who have already decided to buy a smartphone in the next three months. But in a ChangeWave report released Wednesday, 30% of respondents said they would [...]

Exit Apple: The man who made the iPod

Philip Elmer-DeWitt — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 11:14:59 +0000

Tony Fadell leaves Apple nearly 17 months after losing the iPod/iPhone division He came to Apple (AAPL) in 2001 with plans for building what would become the iPod. By 2006 he had replaced Jon Rubinstein — who went on to build the Palm (PALM) Pre — as head of Apple's iPod division, in charge of both [...]

feature: RIP Palm: it’s over, and here’s why

Jon Stokes — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 04:30:14 +0000

In January of 2009, shares of Palm traded at a little over $3 as everyone awaited details of the once-mighty smartphone maker's plans to save itself from certain death. In the wake of the Pre's successful unveiling later that month at CES, Palm's stock price more than doubled, and optimism about the Pre's prospects eventually drove shares to a high of over $17 in October of last year. But as of this past Friday's earnings report, sales are way below Palm's and Wall Street's expectations, the company has little cash left on hand, and shares of PALM have dropped all the way back down to $4. There's a growing consensus—as expressed by the market—that there are only two possible futures for Palm: acquisition, or insolvency.

So what happened? Wasn't webOS the greatest thing since the original iPhone OS? Wasn't the Pre a great phone? How did Palm blow it so badly?

I was a Pre user up until January of this past year, when the Nexus One came out. I went with Palm as far as I could, but in the end, I bailed. Here's where I think Palm went wrong, and why I left the Pre.

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Apple talks tough to handset makers

Philip Elmer-DeWitt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:26:51 +0000

The HTC lawsuit capped blunt talks that have reportedly shaken their faith in Google Oppenheimer's Yair Reiner issued a behind-the-scenes report Tuesday that sheds a lot of light on the patent suits Apple (AAPL) filed last week against HTC, the Taiwanese smartphone maker. Citing "industry checks," Reiner writes that: "Starting in January, Apple launched a series of C-Level [...]

How callers rate the carriers

Philip Elmer-DeWitt — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 12:00:56 +0000

Verizon leads the pack. AT&T is No. 2. T-Mobile and Sprint bring up the rear There's bad news for Apple (AAPL) and not such great news for Palm (PALM) in a BrandIndex consumer survey published Tuesday by YouGov. Both firms originally tied their cellphones to exclusive U.S. carriers — AT&T and Sprint, respectively — neither of [...]

iPhone devsugar: App Store approval in…one hour?

Erica Sadun — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:00:00 +0000

Filed under: Apple

Approximately one hour after uploading his new application update to iTunes Connect, Bristol-based iPhone developer Rob Jonson of Hobbyist software got the surprise of his week: an official Apple green light. His latest update to his VLC Remote application had been approved and was ready for sale. VLC Remote allows you to control a Mac- or Windows-based VideoLAN playback client from your iPhone, basically duplicating many of the features you'd get from a standard Apple Remote.

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His update wasn't complicated. "It was a simple problem," he told me over the phone this morning. "One of the buttons stopped working because of a stupid error. I missed a break in a case statement." So he uploaded his bugfix at about 11 PM local United Kingdom time.

Just before midnight, he checked his e-mail before heading off to bed. The Apple approval was sitting in his in-box. A recent update, submitted last week, had taken only a day to receive approval. "With 24 hours, I was very impressed. But one hour? I couldn't believe it. Clearly Apple has changed the game."

Update: This picture speaks a thousand words. Courtesy of Tom Harris of InsiderApps. This is a different app from Jonson's

"It's awesome," he said. "It makes me less scared to put out an update. " As Jonson explained, updates used to involve a two week process. During that time, you didn't "...want to do any more work until it [went] through. You [made] yourself do something else in the meantime" like switching to another project development, to allow time for Apple to finish processing the submission. "Now, I know I can have it sorted out very quickly, it's so much easier for me to improve my app."

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He contrasted Apple's new response times with Palm's, which continues to introduce long delays between app submission and review. "If a user finds a bug, and I fix it, I have to send a request to cancel the update before I can submit a new update." This is similar to Apple's policy of developers self-rejecting an app submission, but takes more work. You must wait for the cancel request to process. "Palm hasn't got the update process sorted yet for its app store." With Apple, he can now submit his updates and know that they will be handled promptly.

For now, Apple's excellent turnaround time means two things. First, it's going to greatly improve the ability of developers to deliver bug updates in a timely manner, without being burdened by long delays that cause development downtime. Bug fixes will reach users sooner and the App Store ecosystem will improve as a consequence.

Second, it's going to speed the process of developer entry into the iPad arena. Shorter turn-around means that iPad-specific apps will start filling App Store shelves without the kind of months-long ramp up that was needed when iPhone apps first debuted. With just sixty days between iPad announcement and the first units expected to hit the shelves, Apple's rapid app review promises that developers can put their iPad goods in the hands of consumers nearly as soon as the iPad starts shipping.

Shorter review times are a great move on Apple's part and a win for all parties: developers, customers, and Apple.

TUAW iPhone devsugar: App Store approval in...one hour? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google phone vs. Apple iPhone

Philip Elmer-DeWitt — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 10:25:23 +0000

At the end of two years, the Nexus One will have cost you $500 less than the iPhone On the heels of Google's (GOOG) release of the HTC Nexus One — popularly known as the Google phone — the folks at BillShrink have done us all a favor. They've put out one of their handy charts comparing [...]

Borders’ e-book store no competition for dedicated devices

Jacqui Cheng — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:28:00 +0000

Borders has decided to follow everyone else's lead and join the e-book party. The company announced Wednesday that it has partnered with e-reading service Kobo to launch its own store geared towards mobile devices. The problem, though, is that Borders is both late to the game and also appears to have no dedicated device in mind, meaning that its e-book store will end up grouped with the handfuls of others that the masses aren't even aware of.

Kobo's schtick is that it develops storefronts across a variety of mobile platforms, including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Pre, and Android (not to mention the Sony eReader). For example, Kobo already has a free storefront of its own in Apple's App Store, where you can buy all manner of e-books—the idea is that Kobo will create a branded version of its own e-book store for Borders to do pretty much the exact same thing, and across multiple devices. Borders hopes to launch sometime in the second quarter of 2010.

Apple iPhone closing in on BlackBerry market share

Lauren Hirsch — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 22:00:00 +0000

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple, iPhone

Paul Carton, Director of Research at ChangeWave Research, reported yesterday at investorplace.com that Apple iPhone is gaining steadily on BlackBerry's market share, a great feat considering BlackBerry's entrenched position in the business sector. iPhone market share is now a heady 30%, still behind BlackBerry's 40%, but RIM products are not gaining new users at nearly the same rate. As for Palm? Well, the Pre seems to have leveled out the free fall, but there's nothing terribly encouraging about the data. My guess is they are still pining for those halcyon days of 2006 when Palm was king.

The smartphone market itself is rising; according to Mr. Carton's research, a full 39% of consumers now own some kind of smartphone. Compare that with last summer, when the smartphone market was just cracking 25%.

The good news for Apple is that RIM's stranglehold on the smartphone market appears to be loosening, and with so many consumers still to reach, Apple has the momentum. CNNMoney.com characterized Apple's market gains as putting Apple within "striking distance" of BlackBerry. What's driving the momentum? Customer satisfaction. Among those who plan to buy a smartphone within the next 90 days, 36% plan to buy an iPhone. And among current users, fully 73% of them are satisfied with the device, compared with only 43% of BlackBerry users.

Mr. Carton notes that BlackBerry is planning product launches this year, and Apple has already released the 3GS. If Apple holds true to its history, we won't see a significant upgrade to the phone until next June. Either way, Apple has carved itself out quite a niche and the iPhone can no longer be dismissed as a toy to BlackBerry's business device.

TUAW Apple iPhone closing in on BlackBerry market share originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPhone in "striking distance" of BlackBerry

Philip Elmer-DeWitt — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:43:18 +0000

Apple gains, RIM drifts, Palm holds steady in the latest ChangeWave survey Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, with a 40% share, is still the most popular smartphone among the 4,255 owners who responded to a ChangeWave survey in September. But Apple's (AAPL) iPhone is gaining fast, according to research director Paul Carton. "Apple (30%) has seen a [...]