Palm & Sony Ericsson...

1src once used to be the web forum I frequent the most, exchanging conversations with others on anything Palm OS related. Well, with Palm doing close to nothing for the past years except rebranding the same phones again and again, they now even have seemed to given up on releasing ANY products. In my opinion, they have already dug their own grave and are putting the finishing touches, ready to rest in peace. Thus for the past few weeks, I got lazy and stopped visiting 1src. I went back again today, just because I'm, well, bored. And wow, are people die hard. Most of the popular members of my time, have already left, and most of the actively posting people seemed to be new members of the last 12 months. Looking at the posts discussing the next version of Palm OS makes me feel like seeing people excitedly discussing Duke Nukem Forever (the legendary vaporware that's forever "in development").

Another company I am starting to unlike: Sony Ericsson (excluding the Japanese division, which operates seperately, selling totally different models). For the past year, they came out with tons of phones that are the same thing (same mother borad, same keyboard layout, same screen, same camera, same radio, same software), only the casing and the model name is different. Wow. I all I want is a different casing, maybe I'd be better off with one of the 8 year+ Nokia phones that I can buy my own case and change it whenever I want... (eg. Nokia 3310) No wonder SE is rapidly loosing market share to LG. And, how did they respond this year? More old phones in cases that are uglier then ever! How nice?

So Palm & Sony Ericsson are dying; Nokia only makes boring/overpriced/ugly/brick phones; Motorola is also dying; Japanese companies are using all their might to lock their stuff inside Japan only; Alcatel/Benq/Siemens/Sanyo are already dead; and let's face it, the iPhone is an overpriced brick, hTC even more so. Samsung & LG while also keeping their best in Korea, are the only ones that are serving close-to-okey phones to the rest of the world. Come on! Is the whole industry plotting to let Koreans rule?

About 3 years ago, the phone industry was said to be on track to kill PDAs, GPS navigators, credit cards, subway/bus passes, MP3 players, cameras, portable gaming devices, just about any device you can think of. Well, now, other then PDAs, which the manufacutors volunteerily killed themselves, none of the stuff listed above aren't thriving, while phone companies are killing themselves. Oh, looks like the to-be-king of the hill is shotting it self in the foot...