To succeed, a vendor has to find a niche where it leads in some feature/size/performance category. And that is a nightmare for Palm, a hothouse flower that has never shown an ability to integrate new features rapidly and push prices down at the same time.
Hardware Horror
Palm's hardware trouble is succinctly summarized by the Treo 750, a spectacularly uncompetitive 3G device that started selling widely in Europe last February. This is probably the best Palm is offering this summer, and the performance gap between it and the rest of the field is turning into a yawning abyss right around the third quarter. Palm may launch a more advanced model for the third quarter, but this is unlikely. It simply has to do something drastic by the fourth quarter. How much improvement is needed is spelled out in the atrocious Treo 750 specs:- Display: 240x240 pixels and 65,000 colors. The benchmark is 240x320 pixels and either 256,000 (Sony Ericsson) or 16 million (Nokia, Apple) colors.
- Weight and thickness: 154 grams and 22 mm. The benchmark is 105-115 grams and 12 mm (Motorola and Samsung).
- Camera: 1.3 megapixels. The benchmark is 2-3 megapixels (Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Apple, Motorola) to 5 megapixels (Nokia).
- Extras: 3G plus HSDPA support (a boost for 3G data transmission speeds). The benchmark is 3G and WiFi (Samsung, Sony Ericsson) to 3G, HSDPA, WiFi, GPS, 1 GB or more of internal memory (Nokia).
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