Twelve Black Code Monkeys

Last week I wrote about the Treo 650 Memory Debacle and wanted to post some further thoughts. Andrew over at Treonaughts has been getting indignant about the issue, as have many of his readers and those on Treocentral and myTreo.net. Palm came out with a response later last week which basically said that they were offering those who needed it 128MB SD cards and would work on a fix that would be available as a system software update. Fair enough, right? Maybe.

Part of the curse of being a “power user” or “early adopter” is that you tend to be in a relatively small demographic. As such, you are usually a minority and so you are marginalized to some degree. We can make a lot of noise which can sometimes cause companies to sit up and take notice, since we can detect problems much sooner than the average user, but the responses from companies, when they come at all, are normally just damage control PR that tries to show they are being responsive and to sooth the worries of less-savvy users who learn about these issues.

PalmOne, as other companies before it, I’m sure, understands that the big stink that a lot of people have made about the Treo 650’s memory issues, is lost on the majority of its target market. What is it’s target market? It’s increasingly corporate users. I’m sure PalmOne is looking to supplant Blackberry with the 650, or at least eat up a chunk of its sizable corporate market share. While corporate users are also a savvy bunch, chances are they will be using the Treo primarily for contact management, phone calls, and scheduling, all of which are built into the Treo. Yes, the memory issue will mean that they won’t be able to store as many contacts, emails, etc., but these types of data generally don’t take up much room and they could easily and cheaply expand their capacity with an external memory card.

Meanwhile, us “power users” who want to use the Treo 650 to its fullest potential, like the Treo 600 – as a CONVERGENCE device - are out in the cold. The Treo 600 serves as my email reader, phone, contact manager, scheduler, but also GPS, audio player web browser, RSS reader, gameboy, nutrition tracker, and much more. What gets me is that at least in this area we will actually be getting LESS with an upgrade to the 650. Memory is such a core feature of any computer or PDA because it is what lets you run programs and store data, that it just is unbelievable to me why a company would want to keep it at the minimum that allows for just the basic applications to run. Some of suggested that PalmOne bought up Handspring (the company that originally made the Treo) because they couldn’t compete with it, and now that they own it, they are taking largely the work that Handspring did with the device and pushing it out without some needed upgrades. The lack of an upgraded camera was bad enough, but something I could live with, but the more I think about it, this memory issue just makes me mad.

Unfortunately, PalmOne probably knows that it’s really the only game in town when it comes to PalmOS-based smartphones. Sure there are PocketPC phones, but many of them are bulky, and the ones that aren’t either require a stylus to do everything or have other issues. Handspring didn’t cut corners when it came out with the Treo 600 last year. It was so far ahead of previous models and was just very well thought out and redesigned. The 650 seems much more like an enhanced 600, but probably one that has enhancements which add so much that it will be irresistible to most early adopters. So, in other words, PalmOne knows they have us over a barrel. We can whine and complain about how our expectations are not being met and how PalmOne has been a penny wise and a pound foolish and could have avoided all this commotion by simply putting an extra $5 worth of memory into the phone, but in the end, most will probably buy it regardless. And this issue probably won’t dissuade the less-savvy user who just wants to do basic things like calling, emailing, and a little web browsing.

The whole situation, ironically, reminds me a little of what I had to put up with when I had a T-Mobile Sidekick. Many users clamored for a true solution to synch their data with their MS Outlook or other PIM, but despite this actually being available, T-Mobile decided they just didn’t want to offer it. They knew some of its users wanted it, nay NEEDED it badly, but somehow the small cost of supporting those users was too much to bear the risk of losing them.

What it really comes down to is competition. Macs, for all their elegance, are pretty pricey. But they are not prohibitively more than PC’s and so this should mean a much greater market share than their mere 10%. But if PC’s weren’t around and Apple were the only game in town, you can guarantee that Macs would be even costlier. Cheap PC’s have driven the price down of Macs since Apple’s marketshare would be closer to 2% if you had to pay five times the amount for a Mac than a similarly priced PC. Design and usability is one thing, but relatively few people will buy a Jaguar when a Honda will get them where they need to go at a fraction of the price. PalmOne’s lock on the PalmOS smartphone is not so much based on price as it is on the history of the PalmOS. PocketPC devices, desite their abundance, haven’t risen to the promise that this competition implies. They are still priced pretty similarly to PalmOS devices and while they carry some benefits like more memory and faster processors and even Wifi, operationally they are not that much different. So these slight advantages don’t really make up for the similar cost. However, companies that base their thinking on their current place in the pecking order may fall victim to clever upstarts that are willing to take risks. It’s very conceivable that we could have a new smartphone (either a PalmOS device but more likely a PocketPC-based one) that ends up coming out of the blue next year and PalmOne will need to start playing catchup.

Update: Treonaughts has a piece about how Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal has commented about the 650’s memory issues. He specifically says that they should have included more memory to begin with, although it has enough memory for his needs. Perhaps such a prominant article in the periodical for corporate professionals (at least in the financial sector), will get PalmOne moving a little bit faster. Whether all of this will start snowballing to force PalmOne to actually retrofit the 650 with more memory is much more of a longshot, but we can dream.