Within the past few months we have seen the smartphone industry flourish with new handsets and competitors purchasing out one and other such as HP and Palm. Least to say, it defiantly hasn’t been an easy ride for the American company especially trying to compete against large competitors like Apple with their iOS4 with their large market hold.

The software market for all smartphones requires a lot more compared to what it was years ago. With phones becoming more sophisticated and processors reaching over 1GHz, the smartphone market is forever changing due to demand and users  wanting to listen to music whilst social networking and other resource consuming applications.

The platform Palm use in their current smartphons called “webOS” was designed primarily on SME clients allowing a synergy between multiple social networking sites, outlook and other business applications. The synergy brought all contact information together allowing updates and pictures to be stored against contacts which was very seemless, it also updated itself in a contact view of previous updates.

Let’s start with what the basics

Palm’s basic goal with the webOS was to create a mobile smartphone that seamlessly brings information together - lets face it Palm managed to pull that one off very well.

All Palm Phones already supports multi-tasking through a ‘cards’ mode within the home screen which mean that when the Palm Pre was released it definately had the upper hand to Apple. Cards Mode means that any application which is minimised will be cached into the background allowing a copy and paste between different documents or emails.

With a LED flash already incorporated into all of Palms recent phones, dark shaded areas are okay taking photos of. This again allows Palm to excel in that area in comparison to an iPhone 3GS/ iPhone 3G.

For SME and choosing the right smartphone to integrate with a calendar such as Microsoft Outlook is defiantly something I look for first when coming to purchase any new smartphone.

The webOS address book displays all the information available for each person in a contact profile from multiple different sources.

A single person’s entry could have, for instance, phone numbers from an Exchange Server, a street address from Google, and a picture from Facebook and all of this information would be displayed to the user together, without regard to where it came from.

A brief background

The arrival of the Palm Pre in October 30^th 2009, Palm subsequently released their Palm Pre+ and Palm Pixi which ironed out the issues the Pre initially had such as failing to boot up and a few software issues.

However Palm can be commended for their facility of allowing users to backup and restore their Palm phones over the air. Not only allowing backing up and restoring of data, Palm enabling firmware to be updated through ‘Update’ feature over the air. This allows the firmware, applications and more on the phone to be updated.

For business

With email facility and a document viewer installed into webOS, Palm enables all of the users to download and view attachments on an emails. With the App World and being able to download WhatsApp, it enables smartphones to speak to one and other absolutely free of charge under a data plan.

webOS also has support for Exchange ActiveSync built into it, allowing emails, calendars, address books, etc. to be synchronized over the air.

What does webOS 1.4 have

webOS 1.4 brought many new features including-

• A camcorder mode for the Palm Pre
• Once a video is shot, you can now crop it
• Emails can now be sorted by sender or subject (like the search function within the Blackberry and iPhones)
• Embedded numbers in web pages and emails can be short cut straight to a call
• Performance enhancements to aid the multi-tasking of cards
• Adobe Flash 10.1 through the App World but is only available for Pre devices not the Pixi
• Improve battery life
• A new LED messaging feature

With Notepads, Laptops and Tablets all getting lighter, faster and reputable platforms being installed onto them such as Windows, Android and iOS4, we’ve seen many releases over the past few months.  The most popular tablet by far has been the Apple iPad.

The concept of the iPad was incorporating a capacitive touch screen (runs on a heat source, no stylus) and a larger version of an iPod Touch. The iPad has proved extremely popular for something so simple and so similar to the aforementioned iPod Touch, however it has ended up selling two million units within two months.

Apple are currently the market leader for “Tablets”, however many other vendors want a share of that market, meaning we have seen a lot of leaks online for tablets such as the HP Slate.  Due to the recent acquisition of Palm by HP, the Slate will probably not end up with Windows 7, but more likely webOS – the operating system currently used in Palm phones.

We have also seen products from Lenovo and Samsung where they have crammed Android onto their tablet products.  However, with virtually every manufacture cramming Android into their product, even the knock off ones from China, this may not provide them with a competitive edge or a compelling reason to buy.

In the past quarter we have seen the release of the Dell Streak which was produced as a smartphone but with browsing compatibility and no calling function. The Dell Streak can only be compared to the iPad as it’s marketed with a Data Plan.

Dell’s attempt at competing with the iPhone is likely to be put on hold until a more competitive operating system is released – Windows Mobile 7.

A lot of us are still waiting for a proper tablet to be introduced to the SME market.  The manufacturer who currently has the largest foothold in the SME gadget marketplace e.g. smartphones is RIM with its Blackberry product range. As Blackberry currently produce smartphones sold to both SME and Consumer, we know that they have the right credentials to work in both markets.

The online rumours surrounding Blackberry and the probability of them producing a Tablet has steadily been increasing. Recently, thanks to Mobile Crunch, they have discovered that Blackberry have registered a domain ‘www.blackpad.com’ for themselves. This could possibly suggest that RIM/ Blackberry have something up their sleeves – all that we know is that Blackberry is possibly developing something which will go into direct competition with Apple.

The Balckberry tablet is expected to have the following iPad killing features:

• Two cameras (one front facing)
• A faster processor
• New BlackberryOS6
• Bluetooth

and a few other’s that will definitely set it apart from the competition.

Whilst many features are still quite vague, we do know that Blackberry are producing it with a 9.7inch screen, it will make it work very close with their other Blackberry products and that it will be unveiled in November ready for Christmas.

Stay tuned for more information.