Palm Releases Its Own App Store

In the year since Palm released the Centro as an attempt to revive its lagging business, I've barely heard a whisper about new applications or energy for the Treo and Centro lines. Yet late Monday night, the device maker released its own app store download for Centro and Treo users to more easily access the applications.

The arrival of Palm's free app store--for both Windows Mobile and Palm operating systems--was undoubtedly spurred on by the success of Apple's iPhone App Store, Google's Android Market, and the upcoming BlackBerry app store that's slated to debut in March.

Palm's nexus of downloads includes over 5,000 applications, about a fifth of them freebies. Yet with the exception of Facebook, few appear to be the fresh takes on multimedia and social networking that have defined modern applications. A press release trumpets Nursing Central, Encyclopedia Britannica, Pac-Man, Tetris, and Fish Tycoon as its hot apps.

While Palm may hope its storefront will coax developers to submit variations of their innovative iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android apps to the store, the offering so far adds little strength to Palm's lagging market position.

Still, getting an app store out before BlackBerry does provide some credibility. More importantly, it will undoubtedly please existing Palm users, the most important ingredient for Palm's continued existence in the vicious and volatile mobile marketplace.

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A Worthy Windows Mobile Update

Skype for Windows Mobile 2.5 beta, released on Tuesday, essentially brings changes made to Skype's desktop VoIP client to Windows Smartphones and Windows Pocket PCs.

The application's display is compact, intuitive, and full-featured.

The mobile version places tabs for your various actions at the bottom of the app. By switching among them, you'll be able to change your online status and see missed calls and instant messages, initiate IMs, or place a call to your contact's Skype account, mobile number, or land line if you've purchased Skype Out. There's also a dialing pad to directly dial a call using an international format.

Like Skype's desktop beta, this Windows Mobile version highlights instant messages. It supports emoticons, but file transferring is what we'd really like to see, and what competitor Fring (downloads) already offers on Symbian phones.

The call quality is going to vary based on your phone model, your headphones, and how fast and stable your data connection is. Test calls were excellent on the Samsung Omnia. The app's biggest drawback--on the touch-screen Omnia at least--is that the tiny icons and links are difficult to accurately press.

As a whole, however, Skype's Windows Mobile beta is good enough to recommend to Windows Mobile users with overseas connections who may have been on the fence about opening a Skype account.

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Palm Revenue Craters as Treos Fall Out of Favor

With revenue falling to dire levels, Palm may need a Christmas miracle to stay afloat next year.

The latest dose of bad news? Revenue for Palm's second fiscal quarter, which ended last week, will be just $190 million to $195 million, the company announced Monday ahead of its December 18th conference call. Wall Street analysts had been expecting Palm to record $331 million in revenue, an astonishing 41 percent gap caused by "reduced demand for maturing smartphone and handheld products," Palm said in a press release.

Last week Palm revealed plans to cut workers and refocus its business as it copes with a poor economy and strong competition from the likes of Apple and Research in Motion. Palm's Treos were once very popular, but they have looked positively ancient against the iPhone and new BlackBerrys such as the Storm and Bold. If it wasn't for the Palm Centro--which doesn't really break any ground on the software front but costs an attractive $99--Palm might already be dead.

The company's fortunes will be determined by a race against time: if Palm can get products using its Nova operating system--which scheduled to arrive in the first half of 2009--out in the market before sales of Treos dwindle to zero, it has a chance to regain its perch atop the mobile computing world. Otherwise, Palm is stuck in a moment and it can't get out of it.

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Apple Suggests Mac Users Install Antivirus Software

In what appears to be a first, Apple is recommending that Mac users install antivirus software.

But don't read this as an admission that the Mac operating system is suddenly insecure. It's more a recognition that Mac users are vulnerable to Web application exploits, which have replaced operating system vulnerabilities as the bigger threat to computer users.

Apple quietly signaled its shift with an item titled "Mac OS: Antivirus utilities" posted on its Support Web site November 21: "Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult."

The item offers three software suggestions: Intego VirusBarrier X5 and Symantec Norton Anti-Virus 11 for Macintosh, both available from the Apple Online Store, and McAfee VirusScan for Mac.

Brian Krebs, who first reported on the Apple antivirus recommendation Monday in his Security Fix blog at The Washington Post, said an Apple store employee told him he didn't need antivirus software when he purchased a MacBook three months ago.

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Intel rethinks Netbooks: 'Fine for an hour' but...

The Netbook, take two: When Advanced Micro Devices said it wasn't going to focus on Netbooks, as Intel and its partners defined them, maybe it was on to something.

Intel is re-evaluating the Netbook market as possibly not The Next Big Thing. This from the company that makes the Atom processor and accompanying silicon that go into most of the Netbooks sold today.

At a recent Raymond James IT Supply Chain Conference (streamed via this Intel page), Stu Pann, vice president in the sales and marketing group at Intel, said his company sees the Netbook differently now.

"We originally thought Netbooks would be for emerging markets and younger kids, and there is some of that. It turns out the bulk of the Netbooks sold today are Western Europe, North America, and for people who just want to grab and go with a notebook," Pann said. "We view the Netbook as mostly incremental to our total available market," he added.

And the most revealing statement? "If you've ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size--it's fine for an hour. It's not something you're going to use day in and day out."

Though this may simply reaffirm some people's view of the Netbook, it may also be surprising to others who thought the Netbook was potentially a laptop replacement for highly mobile users looking for a lightweight design. Or at least a design that was bearable beyond one hour.

Enter AMD and its take on the market. Though it won't resist if computer makers use its upcoming Huron and Conesus CPUs (one of these is due early next year) for Netbook-like designs, its focus is on ultrathin laptops similar in build to the 13-inch MacBook Air (and even 14-inch designs) but at a much lower price point.

AMD Chief Executive Dirk Meyer said earlier this month that "we're ignoring the Netbook phenomenon--just thinking about PC form factors above that form factor." And Bahr Mahony, director of notebook product marketing at AMD, said at that time that there are "a fair number of people" who are not satisfied with the experience they're having with Netbooks.

Mahony added that the dissatisfaction with Netbooks "has been exhibited by the high return rates that have been seen on these mini notebooks" in Europe. (AMD uses the terms "Netbook" and "mini notebook" interchangeably.)

AMD believes that the Netbook screen size is too small and the performance disappointing.

The coming year should show whether the Netbook has legs or whether it was just another marketing flash-in-the-pan like the UMPC (ultramobile personal computer) before it.

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