Brief look back on Palm Discovery

Well, what can I say? It’s the end of both the year of 2009 and also the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Lots has happened in this decade both good and bad. Little did I know at the beginning of this decade that I would be doing what I am doing right now, starting a blod that eventually became what you all know as Palm Discovery. And that all was started by my first purchase of a Palm branded PDA, the Palm Zire 71, which in its day, was considered the first multimedia PDA from Palm, capable of plahing and recording videos with its stealth pop out camera. Of course, I later ventured on to the very popular Palm Treo 650 smartphone, which was also considered THE smartphone at the time, then to a Windows Mobile Treo 750 smartphone, to a Symbian OS Nokia E71 smartphone and now the Apple iPod Touch (although not a phone). If you told me all that would happen at the beginning of the decade, I’d say you’re crazy. Okay, not THAT crazy.

2009 economic downturn

The past year brought us a very frightening economic downturn which peaked in March, when practically everyone was wondering when the next shoe, or the next big company, would fall. We saw the fall of many big corporations, like Bear Stearns, and the merger of others like Lehman Brothers. Although these are not related to the technology industry directly, it sure affected the entire landscape as a whole. Jobs were lost and cut, and at the time, we weren’t sure if we would ever get out of it. But we did, and although we are the end of the year and the outlook may not be that rosy, it certainly isn’t as bleak as it was in March.

New devices added to the Palm Discovery family in 2009

As mentioned, this past year, I got myself a Nokia E71 smartphone and also an Apple iPod Touch. if you can’t beat them, join. And to my amazement, I must admit that I am in love with the iPod Touch. Sure, the virtual keyboard isn’t great and I do enter a lot of mistakes even now, the apps are what attract me to it. There are so many apps available on the iPhone and iPod Touch that it’s impossible to ignore and so, I joined the herd and got one.

Enough about me, let’s take a brief look at the past decade.

Year 2000 and Y2K

Back before the year 2000, and shortly before the clock struck on midnight Jan 1st 2000, there was the brief scramble by everyone to update their computers to avoid the calamity of the y2k bug. This was due to the way that early computers would display the last two digits of the year (ie. 99) and not the entire four digits (1999). So, it was believed that a lot of unforeseen errors may occur when the date would pass into the year 2000, which would be calculated as “00″ which, would be incorrectly calculated as the year 1900 and not 2000 due to the misconfigured computer programming. Fortunately, it was not as bad as expected and only a few computers were affected. The world did not stand still due to computer crashes and no major disasters occurred. Whew!

Palm Inc’s status in 2000

Back in 2000, Palm Inc’s (newly spun off from Palm Computing) Palm OS (Garnet) was then still battling it out with Microsoft’s Pocket PC. At the time, it seemed that Palm was winning with its extensive Palm followers, suppliers and developers. Little did they know that by the middle of the decade that their supremacy in the PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) space would be eroded so quickly, and that its main competitor was not Microsoft, but Apple. Although Apple’s attempt at portable Pocket device, named the Newton didn’t take off and was eventually discontinued in 1998, Apple would end up coming back with a device that would take the world by storm, literally.

Apple’s initial step in mobile arena

The first wave of Apple’s storm came in Oct 2001 when they launched their first portable mp3 player, the iPod. At the time, it was mainly a sexy looking mp3 player that was only capable of playing music, and a later version also offered video. But that was just the beginning of the Apple iRevolution. In 2003, Apple came out with what eventually became the most popular online music store ever, the iTunes music store which also later included videos, TV shows, movies, audiobooks and even “apps” for the soon to be launched iPhone and iPod Touch. While Apple was starting to get back into the game again, the reverse can only be said about Palm.

Palm’s expensive mistake

In 2003, Palm Inc was split up into two separate entities: PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software). This turned out to be a critical and expensive mistake that cost them dearly. At that time, Handspring, founded by the inventors of the Palm Pilot (Jeff Hawkins, Donna Dubinsky, and Ed Colligan) was acquired merged into what became as PalmOne. PalmOne purchased the rights to the Palm name back from PalmSource in 2005 and changed its name back to Palm again. In 2005, PalmSource was acquired by ACCESS and sold its Palm OS source code back to Palm in 2006. As mentioned already, this was a time-consuming and expensive exercise that distracted Palm’s focus. A brief highlight of Palm during that time was in 2004 with the launch of the Treo 650 smartphone and in 2005 was the launch of their innovative LifeDrive which, unfortunately, due to lack of updates for improvement, was discontinued in 2007. Although the Treo 650 was a popular smartphone that was unrivaled at the time, it didn’t take long before competition came. In 2006, the competition was heating up and Palm decided to shake hands with the devil, which was Bill Gates in forming an alliance to produce the Treo 700w and 700wx running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 5. This turned out to be their saving grace for the next few lackluster years.

Technology from 2001 to 2003

As for the rest of the technology industry, in 2001, Windows XP came out replacing Windows 2000 and the very forgetful and buggy Windows Me. 2002 saw Google (although it was established in 1996) finally became a household name when it beat out Yahoo and MSN as the search engine king of the internet. In 2003, Mozilla Firefox originally called the Phoenix, came out as an alternative browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer due to the number of exploits that targeted the most popular browser from Microsoft. Spyware and trojans were beginning to become a threat to Windows computers.

Blackberrys sprouted for more competition

In 2002, A little known company called Research in Motion also starting entering the smartphone arena with its Blackberry devices although they were introduced back in 1999, as a two way pager and slowly evolved into the push email messaging smartphone we know today. The battle was just starting to heat up with competitors on the horizon, ready to topple Palm from the top of the mobile space.

Social media and networking explosion

From 2004 to 2006 we saw the explosion of social networking with Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Youtube, Blogger and many others gaining popularity which shaped the basis of what we now consider as “mainstream”. Blogs popped up everywhere and suddenly everyone was “blogging” (including yours truly ). Youtube ensured that anyone can garner as much attention as the major networks. The time has finally come that anyone can get their 15 minutes of fame without much effort.

Wii serves it up

On the gaming side, Nintendo, long to have been disregarded in the gaming industry came back with a vengeance in 2006 with its Wii console, the first of its kind that is a handheld pointing device and detects movement in three dimensions. This takes playing games in a whole new dimension. As you’re playing by moving your hand, rather than by simply only pressing buttons.

Easy to use and easy to dump

Pure Digital Technologies’ theFlip Video Camcorders were launched in the YouTube revolution, now allowing anyone to easily capture video and share with family and friends, and upload it them to YouTube without much knowledge of technology. Microsoft in 2006 came out with Windows Vista which turned out to be a huge disappointment as many people discovered that most of their peripherals and software stoped working with Vista. Drivers were a nightmare and word got out quickly about these problems. As a result most consumers and businesses passed on the upgrade and stuck with Windows XP to the chagrin of Microsoft. Vista was most likely the worst product Microsoft ever produced, with Windows Me a close second.

iPhone steals 2007

The biggest news of 2007 was the announcement and launch of Apple’s iPhone which become “the smartphone” to beat and has yet to be beaten. Unlike what was then available, the Apple iPhone offered finger touch navigation and slick graphics and features. Once quoted by Palm’s CEO, Ed Colligan back in 2006 in reference to Apple’s iPhone: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” it was unimaginable that Apple could pull off a smartphone right off the bat and win over the entire industry. But they did. Rather than come up with a new product, Palm opted to push out their Palm Centro, still running the aging Palm OS Garnet. But they did try with their Foleo smartphone companion but that was quickly pulled in September 2007. As we approach the end of the decade, the Apple iPhone now iPhone 3GS is still “the” phone to beat. With over 90,000 apps in its Apple iTunes store and new apps added daily, I’m not sure if anyone or any smartphone can dethrone it.

Android emerges as new mobile platform

Aside from the iPhone, in 2007, there were other noteworthy news. The Open Handset Alliance was formed by Texas Instruments, Broadcom Corporation, Google, HTC, Intel, LG, Marvell Technology Group, Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile which produced the Android mobile operating system found on many smartphone devices today.

Digital books and netbooks come of age

Amazon came out with a very interesting digital book reader device called the Kindle. Although its popularity didn’t explode until this year 2009, it was the beginning of a new era in digital books and ebook reading. What made it different is its wireless capability enabling instant purchase and download of ebooks and other digital printed material. We also saw the beginning of a new category of computers, also known as the “netbook” with the first arrival of the ASUS Eee PC, running Linux and with only a few Gigabytes of storage but it would be the start of a new trend towards connectivity at a low price.

The color Blu

2008, the biggest battle of the High Definition DVD players was finally won when the last manufacturer standing, Toshiba backed out and handed Sony’s Blu Ray technology as the winner. Although the ASUS Eee PC was launched in late 2007, the whole “netbook” phenomenon didn’t take shape until 2008 when major computer manufacturers like Dell, Toshiba, HP started coming out with their own netbooks.

Pre, Windows 7 and Snow Leopard

In 2009, Palm finally came back into the smartphone industry with their Web OS smartphone, the Palm Pre which offered not only a touch screen smartphone device but also a slide out keyboard. But could it be too little too late? We also saw the launch of Windows 7 which many consumers and businesses embraced and skipped over Vista to upgrade. Mac pushed out their Mac OS X Snow Leopard although it turned out to have some hiccups during its launch.

Looking forward to 2010 and to the future

With the first decade of the century almost coming to an end, we take a moment to ponder about what may lie ahead. Certainly, it’s not much of a surprise to expect Apple’s iPhone and iTunes to remain at the top. As well, the rumored iSlate, Apple’s tablet device will very well be announced as soon as the end of January 2010 as will the new iPod Touch with built-in camera which will become its own rival to the iPhone 3GS. There will be many new smartphones, especially those loaded with Android OS that will likely try to take a stab at the iPhone but will likely not be able to do so. Android, however, will either make or break it in 2010. I am thinking that they will finally become one of the main mobile operating systems out here, overtaking Windows Mobile. Also Maemo, Nokia’s Linux based operating system will also make inroads in the mobile smartphone industry, although mainly limited to Nokia branded devices. I am guessing that we may see the gap between netbooks and smartphones get even more narrow as smartbooks will become the new device that takes that space, offering more phone features and computing power than ever before.

It’s also no wonder that touch screen devices will start to come to many household devices, like the TV, laptops. 3D and augmented reality will likely come to our TVs as a way that we can customize what we see. We should expect to be able to touch something on the TV screen to get more information on it, especially a link to where to buy it even buy it directly. More and more of us will view TV on our smartphones and listen to online music and purchase media via our smartphones. Data pricing will ultimately come down with wider acceptance that connectivity is the answer.

These aren’t really predictions as in many cases they are already here but I thought I’d mention them. Thanks to the Apple iTunes model, we can expect that it will be much easier to buy things with the iPhone. The pay by iPhone cash payment will become reality. I can also expect that I can use the iPhone to send money at the local Walmart via an online payment system. One thing that I can get out from the past decade is that technology moves at such a fast pace that as a company, you need to constantly be in touch with what is happening around you because although you may be at the top today, it’s no guarantee you’ll stay there tomorrow.

It will be fascinating to start the New Year and decade in 2010 and look back on it next year and of course, in a decade from now. Regardless of what new products, news and ideas unfold, it will be something exciting that will ultimately shape our future. That, does not need to be predicted. Thanks for reading.

By no means is this editorial meant to cover every news or item from the past decade. What do you think are some of the noteworthy news or product that you thought were worth a mention? Do you agree or disagree with me on what I said in this editorial? Please leave me with your thoughts below! Thanks!

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