~Palm Takes on Giants in Smartphones ...

Palm, a new entry in the big list of mobile phone manufacturer came up with the all new, first of its kind of a Web-surfing pocket-computer phone 2002.
The team introduced a new generation of smartphones in June with the $199 Palm Pre on Sprint’s network. The second phone in the line, the $99 Pixi, went on sale Sunday.
While both the products got good reviews as per the expectation for being easy to use and great for Web browsing. But in recent weeks, the rival Google’s Android operating system for smartphones took not more than a week to grab the public attention.
Jon Rubinstein, Palm’s chief executive and the former Apple engineer (the first head of its iPod division), said in an interview that Palm does not need to be as big as its rivals to thrive. “One of the key things we need to do as a company is to get to scale,” he said. “We need to bring on more carriers and more regions.”
Right now, it sells phones in six countries and is steadily expanding to others in Europe and North America. Investors trying to read the mood of the consumer are unsure whether Palm will prevail. The volatility in Palm’s stock is a sign of the uncertainty over its ability to challenge the iPhone and BlackBerry. (Palm’s shares bounced up to $12.40 on Friday on speculation it would be acquired by Nokia, a prospect many analysts find unlikely.)
Palm looks particularly small if smartphone applications are compared. Apple’s App Store now has more than 100,000 apps. No other phone operating system comes close, though there are about 10,000 apps for Android. Palm has about 300.
Mr. Rubinstein said Palm would never need as many applications as the iPhone. “We are focused on quality over quantity,” he said. He expects developers will write program code for Palm devices, in part because Palm’s operating system, called webOS, is based largely on the same languages used to design Web sites. Android, by contrast, is based on Sun’s Java language, and Apple uses a variation of the C computer programming language.
While Android is getting a lot of attention because it has attracted so many phone makers, those companies, Mr. Rubinstein, argues “have to depend on the kindness of strangers” — meaning Google — for their software.
“The companies that will deliver the best products are the ones that integrate the whole experience — the hardware, the software and the services — and aren’t getting one piece from here and one piece from there and trying to bolt it all together,”
“We did what we said we were going to do,” “We have done a really good job of laying a foundation for the company moving forward. Now we need to move quickly,” said Mr. Rubinstein.