File This One Away

To all the internet publications breathlessly parroting today’s Bloomberg report that the iPhone 5 and iPad 2 are being delayed, please remember: The analyst who created this rumor is this guy.

Also. <Nelson>Ha ha.</Nelson>

I suppose the upside is that you’ll get to sell them at outrageous prices for a few weeks and gouge all the early adopters, who will then scream bloody murder when you drop the prices dramatically in a month or two. I don’t know how well that will work out for the product and the brand in the end, though.

UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long.

HP TouchPad

HP just announced some new stuff, including the HP TouchPad, their iPad competitor. Engadget has the full rundown, of course, but the basics are this:

• Same basic form-factor as the current iPad (9.7-inch 1024×768 display, 13.7mm thick, 1.6 lbs)
• Palm HP webOS 3.0
• Front and back cameras, video calling, “cloud service” integration
• Fancy communication and interoperation features with the new smartphones HP also announced, the Pre 3 and the Veer
• Fancy touchstone case (with kickstand) and keyboard accessories available
• WiFi-only model available “Summer 2011″ with 3G and 4G versions “following”

Very slick hardware and webOS 3.0 looks amazing. Since the Xoom pricing news broke, I’d say this is the first “real” viable iPad competitor. There is, of course, a huge “but” in the news. The TouchPad looks fantastic against the iPad 1, but we all know that Apple won’t be sitting still. I do wonder if the TouchPad design is going to look a little dated before it even comes out once the iPad 2 ships. The design looks very much like the current iPad model. And, of course, by summer we’ll be swimming in a sea of competing Android tablet launches.

And that really brings up the biggest potential problems I see… Vague, WiFi-only “summer” launch and no pricing announced. A classic Palm pre-announcement move.

We Too, Are Standing on a “Burning Platform”

Engadget has a memo from Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia:

And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.

The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyse or join an ecosystem.

Good news. He gets it.

They’re going with Windows Phone 7.

If Only It Was 2016

This thing that Sprint announced last night looks like a pretty cool idea. Or, it would be anyway, if it didn’t make it look like this. Unfortunately, we live in the year 2011 and not some magical future world where displays use no extra power, are wafer-thin, and sliding hinge mechanisms never break.

And there are the software issues. From the Engadget hands-on:

Under the hood there’s a 1GHz second-gen Snapdragon running Android 2.2 — we’ll forgive the older software because Kyocera had to do extensive customization to add dual-screen support to seven core apps like the browser, email, and messaging. The seven optimized apps can be run on each screen individually so you can have the browser up top and email below, and several of them include useful full-dual-screen views as well. There’s also a new dual-screen app manager, which is brought up by tapping the two screens simultaneously. Unfortunately, third party apps can’t be run in any of the new modes and just fill the entire display for now — Kyocera and Sprint say an SDK is coming shortly.

Interestingly, the Echo doesn’t really run the optimized apps simultaneously when you have two of them open — it quickly switches them in and out of hibernation, even though they’re both displayed on screen.

That customization means, of course, that you can expect that device will stay on Android 2.2 for a long, long, long time to come.

Still, it certainly looks cool, even if I’d never want to actually own one, and that’s something, I guess. In the end, Sprint is quite obviously just throwing anything and everything out there to see what works.

How Motorola Plans to Ruin the Xoom Tablet

So, it looks like we do finally have a price and launch date for the upcoming Motorola Xoom tablet, which they advertised during the Super Bowl last night.

The evidence for a Motorola Xoom launch on February 24th just became that bit more compelling, courtesy of this here Best Buy ad. It promises Moto’s Android tablet will be in stores a couple of weeks from now, decorated with a daunting $799.99 sticker.

About all I have to say about that is… “Good luck with that.”

Wow. Really?

It gets worse. On top of that, it appears that you will not be able to buy one without activating it on Verizon’s network. That means that if you want one of these things, but you don’t want a monthly service plan for it, you’re basically out of luck. According to the reports out of Best Buy, you cannot buy a Xoom tablet at all without also signing up for a Verizon data plan for the tablet. They just won’t let you do it. Of course, the $800 price is contract-free, so you could sign up and then cancel the plan when you get home, but that doesn’t mean that Verizon isn’t going to charge you an activation fee to turn the 3G data service on, and apparently you can’t even buy one without activating a service plan. So, no matter what, you’re going to be on the hook for at least a Verizon Activation Fee and probably one month of service on top of that $800 you paid.

We’re hearing from some Best Buy Mobile employees that these simply won’t be able to be sold without being first activated on Verizon’s network, so even though you could theoretically cancel the same day, you’ll still likely get hit with a one-time activation fee (and possibly one month of data). Then again, there appears to be typos on the flyer, so you may want to wait for Verizon’s official word before getting up in arms.

And this is at Best Buy, not at the Verizon Store. Of course, if Best Buy is forcing you to turn on a Verizon Data Plan before letting you walk out the door with a Xoom, then the Verizon store will absolutely be locking you into a plan at their stores!

And that certainly doesn’t bode well for using a 3G Xoom with an iPad-style “turn the data on only when you need it” type use-case! If they’re going to charge you an Activation Fee, that pretty much rules out turning the service on and off for a week or so at a time when you need it (when traveling or whatnot).

I hoped not, but I figured it was coming. None of the cell phone handset makers seem to get it. They want to sell tablets, not as a computing platform, but as a vehicle for getting people to sign up for a second (and third and fourth) data plan from their cellphone carriers.

Yeah… Good luck with that.