Palm Press: Advantage — Palm, Flash Forward
It is Thursday and that can only mean it’s time for another Palm Press. Palm Press is our weekly look at the world of Palm. The smartphone race is going full blast and every competitor is pressing every advantage to get ahead of the pack. Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein said in an interview this week that Palm, Apple and RIM are the three companies that have an advantage over everyone else in the space due to deep hardware and software integration. His comments were obviously a dig at Microsoft given the launch of Windows Mobile 6.5 this week.
Adobe is talking up the newest Flash player for mobile browsers, and went on video to show off Flash 10.1 running on a Palm Pre. They even stated on the video that the Pre will be one of the first phones to get the new Flash technology, and that is pretty darn exciting. The coolest demo was showing multiple instances of Flash in the browser running side-by-side.
Palm and Apple are still going back and forth with iTunes synchronization with the Pre, a situation that is getting a bit ridiculous at this point. Apple released a new version of iTunes that killed off the Pre’s ability to sync with that program’s music library. Palm then released WebOS version 1.2 that did not restore the syncing ability; pardon us for thinking the slapping contest was over. A few days later Palm released another update, 1.2.1, that restored the iTunes sync capability. Can’t these two companies just grow up, already?
Seems to me that apple ‘grew up’ years ago when they published an open, stable, and well documented API for sync’ing 3rd party devices with itunes data. The same API that RIM, Mark/Space, doubletwist and plenty of others use.
Frankly, trying to hijack all of Apple’s development efforts in the iTunes sync’ing arena is pretty childish. Palm needs to get off it’s cheapskate butt and write their own app or license something like doubletwist. Yeah, it would cost them $$, but that’s kinda the point. You don’t get to run around making money off other people’s software without paying something for it.
Thanks for your comment Bill Gates.
Also, Who needs ITunes anyway? All you need to do is transfer your existing MP3s from your computer to your phone. Doesnt cost ya a dime.
Um…the mass market does.
People are not tech geeks. The mass market needs a brain-dead, simple sync setup. Figure that you start losing customers with every click after one. Steps more complicated than a click lose you more.