TamsWMS - the Windows Mobile Smartphone Blog

SmartphoneMag’s Nate Adcock recently posted an article called “What happened to the iPAQ”. His core point is that iPAQ’s look boring compared to devices like the HTC boxen, and that HP should spice up its graphics department to make its handhelds “cool” again.

Even though HP had some excellent consumer handhelds like my beloved rx4240, Nate IMHO still missed the point. HP is a B2B company that caters to businesses - and corporate IT departments couldn’t care less about stuff like TouchFLO. For them, every extra app is more support hassle…and the more an app looks like Windows 2000, the better.

The lack of upgrades has actually surprised me to some extent, as Compaq has traditionally had long model cycles with excellent spare/software update supplies (sometimes lasting over ten years). The reason why HP eventually stopped to offer WM upgrades IMHO was a sort of stand-still at Microsoft’s…the changes in WM 6 were not considered important enough by many to warrant the hassle of an effortful upgrade.

Thus, a generation or two went by without upgrades…and HP fell into the same mind set when Windows Mobile 6.1 hit the scene. But: WM 6.1 is completely different. Even though it looks bland from the outside, IT departments love it due to the addition of a central management server that allows WM devices to be managed remotely with ease.

And this is where the hare is buried. IT departments don’t care about design, coolness or duffergile - for them, a device must be easy to maintain. WM 6.1 gives competitors devices a real advantage here…an advantage that HP IMHO will not be able to ignore on the long run…

As for the current devices: I am sorry, but I don’t think that HP will offer upgrades for these unless huge movements happen in the market. However, I am pretty sure that the boys in blue will eventually rediscover old (IBM-American) values - it (hopefully) is a question of time…

What do you think?

P.S. In case anyone feels like asking about entertainment iPAQ’s - these probably are done for good. The competition is way to intense here…

I have really liked the so-called Music Genome Project’s streaming radio service called Pandora - unfortunately, licensing concerns no longer allow them to send to Europe.

Nevertheless, Windows Mobile users in the USA will soon be able to enjoy Pandora on the go (if they have a hefty data plan). Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora’s mother company, stated that a version of Pandora is upcoming for WM in a recent wmpoweruser.com interview:

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Without question I’ve learned a lesson about commenting on unreleased products… truth is it was almost two years ago when I shared on our blog that we were working on a Windows Mobile build of Pandora. At the time I really believed it was less than 90 days away from release. I guess it’s never a good idea to talk about products that you haven’t yet released.

…. our deals with Sprint (and then later AT&T) came through. With those deals in place we started shifting our mobile development priorities to sync up with what the carriers wanted us to do — without exception that was to so-called “feature phones” and not smart phones. …

The good news is that we do have a team working on Windows Mobile versions of Pandora. Given my track record it’s probably best not to comment on the “when” but it’s certainly not a question of “if”.
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