Now, to their credit, they tried to remain relevant by launching 2 phones, one of them even running Android.  But as they reported today in their 3Q results call, they’ll be “winding down” that business.  I can’t blame them.  Trying to compete with Apple, RIM, Motorola, LG, Samsung, Nokia, and all those multimillion brands that spend millions on each smartphone is tough.  The question is what’s left for Garmin to hang their hat on?

At roughly $6B US in market cap and still making $130M in earnings last quarter you’d think there is hope.  Focusing on their fitness, aviation, and marine business, which grew last quarter, seems reasonable, but I doubt they can sustain a $6B market cap that way.  So, my fellow reader (singular) there might still be room to short, but not a lot.  They may be an acquisition target for their technology, but it is a gamble.  So exit your position, whatever it is and be glad it didn’t go any worse.

Enjoy.

Research in Motion, responsible for those of us “thumb-typing” all day long and undoubtedly king of the smart phone market announced quarterly results today. Impressive!! They beat analyst estimates again. Yet, the stock traded at some point after hours almost 10% below yesterday’s close (it has then recovered all but the last 2% or so). Is the Blackberry is running out of juice (I hate puns!) at last?

People buy things because of the things these things do (whaaat?). Applications are what sell devices, not the devices themselves. Sure a sexier iPhone will sell better than an ugly one but first and foremost you have to want to do what the iPhone does before you consider it.

Blackberries mobilized email. An applications that had been relegated to a computer and involved carving out time of your day to actually do it. RIM leveraged their know-how in two-way paging technologies to create email “push” technology that allowed devices on a cellular network to receive email in real time. They had perfected the thumb qwerty keyboard in the RIM- 950 (leapfrog) so they had a great input UI. They added a screen and a great scrolling interface. Lastly (and the most important component) they created the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) that made email “push” technology seamlessly integrate to Microsoft’s Outlook and voila, by April 2000, mobile email was born. In other words, they created the perfect combination of device, infrastructure, and services for the application at hand. Over the past 9 years they’ve managed to dominate the smart phone market by essentially bringing mobile email to more and more people from the corner office to around the corner soccer moms and hockey dads. Sure, you see some people running SAP interfaces, Syclo apps, Salesforce.com, and a bunch of other business apps on them, but they are really, really very good for email only and most importantly email is what lures people into buying them. Are there more people that need to mobilize email? Not really and they now have too many options to chose from. That may be the reason why Wall Street did not get excited about another blowout quarter by RIMM. They have to clearly prove a new application base in order to grow significantly.

Similarly Apple had found an amazing way to sell and distribute digital music that made everybody win: consumers, record labels, and mostly, well, Apple. When they introduced the iPhone they leveraged that, added telephony (which was no big deal anymore) and found a great way to mobilize the internet. A real browser with an awesome user interface made it really useful on the go. But forgive my heretic comment, but iPhone, 3G, and 3GS are reminiscent of the PC speeds of the 90′s and the RAZR, KRZR, ROKR sequence: essentially the same thing with an minimal evolutionary advance.

Palm is now trying to combine both email and browsing but, like I pointed out in a prior post, it is just dividing the pie further (if they are lucky) not really growing the pie or creating new pies.

In other words we need a new mobile application that will create new categories of devices and grow the market. Think about it, we started with simple telephony, we added PIM (Personal Information Managers), text messaging, media, pictures, videos, games, email, location (gps), internet browsing, books and magazines, and there may be a couple more. But the list really stops there. It is all about things that are tethered today and need to be mobilized so we can do them any time and anywhere without having to dedicate special time to them. Or things that we keep in one place and we want to take with us everywhere we go.

The app store phenomena with various degrees of success is, in my opinion an attempt to find other things to do with your device as a secondary functions. Good idea, don’t get me wrong, but if wireless carriers, device manufacturers, OS suppliers, etc. all have an app store, few are making money, and more importantly few app developers are making money too it is hardly what you would consider a market changing catalyst the way the Palm Pilot, StarTack (now I’m aging myself here), BlackBerry, or iPhone have been.

There are several possibilities here: Either someone finds something else to mobilize which I find difficult to believe at least on a massive scale (the PC industry has not found a lot of new things to automate on a fixed basis that will later need to be mobilized) or we approach this in a totally different way. The fact of the matter is that your Blackberry, iPhone, MotoSurf, Palm-pre, pro, pra, or pri are a commodity.

The point is that although there may be some innovation coming up to a device near you it is only evolutionary. It may be in the form of a sexier phone with more features. But to really be a catalyst for change the networks need to build out bandwidth and capacity. Network addressable storage has to come to a consumer simplicity, and innovation has to come in the form of services and data delivery. Why? well …. that’s a topic for another discussion.

By the way, make sure you start digitizing your entire life in preparation for it. Remember whatever you own that displaces water it is not portable. If it is stored in binary format it is.

Enjoy.

TeleNav launched the Shotgun, a different kind of PND, a connected PND late 2008, not the first attempt at this category of PNDs.   Some advantages of a connected PND is that you can get real time POI (Points of Interest) updates, traffic, and weather feeds. But more importantly you can get a faster initial fix.In the triangulation process I described, besides the timestamps, the receiver needs to know the position of the satellites and then find at least 4 on site. It typically takes several minutes to find 4 satellites, but if you knew where they are, you’ll find them faster. Satellites follow orbits that are roughly known. The long term orbital positions of the satellites is stored in a file called the Almanac and short term variations are called ephemeris. Typically PNDs download the ephemeris from the satellites at a whopping speed of 50 bps (that is bits per second) so it is sloooow.  This file is valid for several hours and it is typically downloaded when the device is first turned on during a 24 hour period or so.  This can take up to several minutes. If you had a faster connection available to download the ephemeris you could get a much faster location of the satellites and a faster first fix. A connected PND such as the Shotgun or the defunct Dash has a cellphone like connection that can be at least 1000 times faster than the satellite. Hence, a connected PND can get the first fix in seconds. Good stuff.

Is that worth a $10 / $12 monthly fee?

This brings me back to my beloved Go.  By signing up to TomTom’s site you can get the ephemeris file from your PC via the connection utility before you leave home. It is valid for a bit more than 24 hours so you get the same effect for free.   The only thing is that you have to remember to plug it in every night after you come home, and take it back to your car before you leave.  The MapShare feature that Tom Tom has, where they allow you to correct errors on the map and share them with other TomTomers is cool, although not all corrections you receive from others are, well, correct.  There are lots of other things you can do at the TomTom site like downloading up to date gas proces (for a fee), all sorts of weird POI’s (and I do mean weird), and of course the ubiquitous software patches.

The traffic and weather feeds do require a monthly fee after the first 6 months. I tried them out but did not find them that that useful. Granted my commute is 20 boring miles and relatively light in traffic.  But if yours isn’t, you may want to consider the monthly fee.  And, there is a nice side effect with the monthly fee:  if you have a data plan with your bluetooth enabled cellphone, your Go can use it as a data connection and give you the feeds and the ephemeris file, turining it into a connected PND. Nice!

What really made us go for the Go-920 is the fact that it included Western European maps.  For a Garmin or Magellan you will have to shell out an extra hundred or so to get them.  I know what you’re thinking:  “didn’t you say Alaska?”.  I did, but it will be great for our next trip to Europe.  Wait we are in a recession, who know when that trip is going to be.  I hope maps haven’t changed by then.

In case you’re wondering, it worked great in Alaska.  Although the system is less precise the closer you get to the poles.  But Alaska’s highway system is very well marked, simple, and it is not easy to get lost in it, at least in the highways that you’re allowed to drive with a rental.

I have two pet peeves of my Go: the window mounting is a lot more reliable with Garmi and for some unkown reason, it tends to turn itself on and drain the battery.  Could it be the fact that it is Windows(r) based?

Enjoy.