JeffKirvin.net

Source: Form vs. function: Palm won’t follow fads, CEO says - MarketWatch

“We think that will be a greater driver of purchases in the future,” he told MarketWatch in the interview. “We don’t want to follow design fads.”

While Colligan acknowledged that phones have become “a bit of a personal status symbol,” he stressed that Palm’s core business user is most interested in reliable applications and great functionality.

“A lot of people grossly underestimate what that differentiation means,” he said.

Colligan suggested that recent design innovations may be passing fads, noting that while some phones have become ultra thin, that evolution has often come at the expense of battery life.

“Our customers want a battery that lasts all day,” he said. “We may lose some sales on day one to some trendy designs, but we have 14 years of experience making small computers and we will not compromise,” he said.

I used to fall back on a joke that it was easy to make ultraslim phones like the RAZR–just leave out the battery. On the one hand, Colligan has a point. Making a Treo, as we currently understand Treos to be, requires a hefty battery. If you don’t believe me, ask around on the boards to see if people “upgrading” from 650s to 680s are happy with the battery life.

But on the other hand, Motorola (the Q), HTC (the Dash) and Samsung (the Blackjack) have made ultrathin Windows Mobile phones that don’t have abysmal battery life. Why can they do it and Palm can’t?

In a word, touchscreens.

Notice that the Q, the Dash and the Blackjack are all Windows Mobile Smartphone (or Windows Mobile Standard, in WM6 parlance) devices. All three lack a touchscreen, while the Treo is expected to have one. As a former Treo owner, I can tell you it’s rarely necessary to actually use the touchscreen on a Treo, but having it there is part of the now established Treo experience. And more than any other feature, it’s why the Treo can’t be as slim as the competition.

Touching a touchscreen consumes, if I recall correctly, about 40 times as much power as holding down a button. That’s a lot of juice you need to have in reserve, even if you don’t use it all that much. And with the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, touchscreens are coming back into vogue just as Palm would be well served to consider dropping theirs. Colligan’s caught in a marketing bullet point Catch-22 here: keep the touchscreen and get dinged for how fat the Treo is, or lose it, slim down and get dinged for not having a touchscreen like the iPhone.

The obvious answer, of course, is to do both, like HTC does. HTC offers both Standard and Professional devices (may as well get used to the new terminology now) for different market segments. There is no one kind of “smartphone” buyer. There are people like myself that prefer a big screened, wide keyboard Professional device like my HTC Apache (the Sprint PPC-6700) or it’s successor, the Titan. But there’s also people that prefer a smaller, slimmer device like the Q or the Dash, with a ready access keyboard for them to reply to a text and get back to what they where doing. The question is whether Palm has the resources to offer both options, and if they can make the slim, touchless version work with Palm OS or Palm Linux.