It is reported that on September 24th, 2009 Premium Apps will be made available in the Palm “App Catalog” – this excites me to no end. Of course this announcement comes amid controversy of Palm dumping Windows Mobile in favor of the Linux-based webOS platform – a strategy I whole-heartedly favor. Linux can be very stable, I have servers that haven’t gone down in 2 years without a restart, so I see this as a good choice to go in a good direction. At least Palm can focus on innovation and not have to deal with MS issues.
Could you imagine a Smart Phone you could use for 2 weeks straight without a restart??? Ahhh to dream!
Palm is also having some financial issues related to sales projections – I am a firm believer in build a product, make it work, stick it out and you will rise to the top of the food chain. This takes patience and the willingness to stick by convictions. I tend to avoid “analyzing” companies based on their “business model” alone since most of what we are shown of a given companies so called business model is built on conjecture and pretty powerpoint slides rather than on the stability of the product that they are selling – I don’t buy for the packaging, but it sure is nice to find a product that works as advertised TODAY (meaning I don’t have to wait for the next release to experience the promise of what I was sold). Hey, and if the packaging makes me happy too, then SCORE for everyone!! That is the company I will stand behind through thick and thin.
‘Wish more products were bought and sold based on stability, compatibility, ease of use, end user experience and a real humanitarian corporate culture.
I simply did not ”buy into the hype” – The fact that the iPhone can brag “thousands” of Apps is really good for them. The fact of the matter is, the intuitiveness of my new Pre as compared to my “experiences” with the iPhone far out weight waiting for a few “Apps” that I don’t really need. I need a stable device that facilitates real-time communication not eye-candy. (Although, I have to tell you that my Pre is really, really a stunning gadget ...and it has a built in vanity mirror!! Oh, yes they did!!)
I did a lot of research on the iPhone prior to choosing the PalmPre – in fact, there are many reasons I did not chose an iPhone when it first came out and literally waited years for the Pre. I did not like the idea of a “visual” keyboard, I need to feel little buttons under my fingers to feel like I am writing something. This is one of the reasons I didn’t get a Blackberry Storm, also no WiFi and it debuted on Verizon – and well, Verizon is the devil as I said in previous posts.
In addition to the iPhone’s unappealing visual keyboard, I did not feel comfortable going with AT&T – In NYC a lot of the cell towers that AT&T uses to support the iPhone are the same T-Mobile towers that had been dropping my calls for years.
Ok, so I have had a few days with my Pre and on SPRINT – I haven’t had any dropped calls, I get my emails, texts etc without fail, it hasn’t crashed and I can watch the live streaming on SPRINT TV! I am going to set up an encoder and see how it does for live webcasts, since I am a webcast producer I should be able to tune in to a stream to make sure things are hunky dory. At any rate, I will keep posting about my Pre and experience on SPRINT, I will be going out-of-town next week so this will be my first “roaming” experience.
By the way, the final plus that made me choose SPRINT was their AnyMobile AnyTime guarantee.
On a performance note, my Pre alerts me of new email before I receive it on my desktop with a 10Mbps connection. Let’s see what happens when I head north for the week!
This was Nico reporting on her new Palm Pre, over&out!!
In addition to search and usability enhancements, updated features include:
Tuning in to Video Profiles: Business video profiles found across tens of thousands of category and local geography combinations on YELLOWPAGES.COM and on the YELLOWPAGES.COM YouTube™ Channel are now easily accessible from the YPmobile App, giving advertisers another way to interact with consumers while on the go. According to Nielsen, 37 percent of iPhone owners watch video on their phone and are six times as likely to view video compared to the typical wireless subscriberi.
Pay Per Call Ads: AT&T Interactive’s Pay Per Call® advertisers now have the opportunity to be featured with their ads displayed at the top of relevant business search results on the YPmobile App. While YELLOWPAGES.COM subscription advertisers already have the opportunity to be distributed across AT&T Interactive’s mobile applications, adding featured placement for Pay Per Call® advertisers leverages a unique opportunity to monetize the mobile local channel and offer businesses a cost-effective way to connect with mobile consumers.
Mobile access to video profiles adds significantly to the convenience of the YPmobile App and offers users the opportunity to easily explore businesses and events around them. The App’s Browse tab makes it easy to find local businesses within categories such as Restaurants, Banks and Coffee – as well as identify the nearest location of well-known brands. These businesses and services, such as AT&T Wi-Fi Hotspots, are easily accessed with a simple tap on their icon – offering directions and other need-to-know information. In addition, the App’s unique Events tab continues to offer users a convenient way to find local events. Once a Plan has been created, users can easily Share with friends – and get on the road with integrated maps.
The YPmobile App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.
These new features and enhancements support further growth on the mobile platform and follow a 250 percent increase in searches across AT&T Interactive’s mobile local networkii. The aggressive focus on mobile has also led to a notable increase in overall reach. According to a study conducted by comScore, YELLOWPAGES.COM experienced an industry-leading increase in audience with the addition of mobile website activityiii in comparison to other leading search engines.
Bandwidth throttling, as I prefer to call it, began most apparently with Comcast – only because they got caught – of course their valiant effort was in order to prevent what they deemed to be abuse by bandwidth hogs (paraphrase and allegedly) – their outward guise to prevent mass data transfer of illegal music, stolen movies and potential pornographic material of a lascivious nature.
AT&T allegedly filed last Friday with the FCC a “usage-based pricing” model as a form of network management. Streaming service providers and viewers question the impact on HD streaming media quality and accessibility; However, in my mind, the caustic effect will be the ever widening codec /player gap we had hoped to shrink through partnership and collaboration. read this entry »