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Apple-Palm / Palm-Apple (7/21/00)
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Praise the powers that be for the bounty they have granted us: namely, fodder to keep the Apple-Palm rumors alive for a few more weeks, albeit in a slightly revised form. Perhaps by now you've seen the report over at The Register about an upcoming "low-end" Palm OS device. What's interesting here is that, rather than hear for the umpteenth time that Apple's licensed the Palm OS and plans to release an Apple-branded Palm-based PDA that incorporates some of the finer elements of the cancelled Newton architecture, we find that The Register has turned the tables on us: rumor has it that this upcoming unit, code-named "Calvin," is Palm's baby-- but it'll sport some Newton technology presumably licensed from Apple. Woo-hoo!! Let the speculation fly!
Reportedly, Calvin is a 4MB handheld with a colored case that allows users to snap different faceplates on it to suit their mood (or wardrobe) for the day. Now, certainly the multiple colors angle is very Apple, but hang on, because it gets better. Calvin is expected to cost only $149 when it replaces the Palm IIIe sometime in the murky and unspecified future. Now, given the price point and the colors, Calvin (assuming it exists) is obviously targeted at Handspring's audience, who has been snapping up Visors like candy on Halloween. So what's going to differentiate Calvin from the Visor, other than the Visor's additional RAM and Springboard expansion slot? How about this: "the ability to write in your own handwriting and have the Palm translate it."
Folks, that phrase perfectly describes what the Newton tried to do in 1993 (and failed miserably) and finally accomplished commendably in about 1997, not long before the whole project got Steved. So what's the deal, here? Did Apple license the Newton's Rosetta handwriting recognition technology to Palm? And is this the scenario that reconciles Steve's comment that Apple has "been doing a lot of work with [Palm] lately" and Phil Schiller's remark that Apple isn't working on its own handheld product? Or better still, was Phil wrong (or lying)? Because we're sure you noticed that when Steve introduced the new six-sector product grid to accommodate the Cube, he left a nice big question mark in the new portable slot. Something's going on, and we can't wait to see what.
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SceneLink (2433)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 7/21/00 episode: July 21, 2000: ATI gets the cold shoulder from Steve for ruining his Expo surprise. Meanwhile, peripheral manufacturers are up in arms over Apple's nerve at ditching the fruit flavors after a mere eighteen months on the market, and rumor has it that the legendary Apple-Palm may in fact be a Palm-Apple...
Other scenes from that episode: 2431: The (Very) Silent Treatment (7/21/00) Say what you will about the mercurial Mr. Jobs; for all the stories about him blowing his stack and tearing out some poor underling's throat with his teeth, eyewitness sightings of him losing his cool in public are relatively scarce... 2432: The Out-Of-Date Shuffle (7/21/00) Come on, now-- you'd think these people would have learned their lesson after Bondi Blue. A CNET article makes a big stink over third-party peripheral manufacturers who are reportedly shocked and dismayed that Apple has revamped the iMac color selection; now that Indigo, Ruby, Sage, Graphite, and Snow are the next hip thing, they're "left wondering what to do with all those USB hubs, CD-ROM drives and printer covers featuring last year's shades." Say, that is a tragedy...
Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast... | |  |
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