Bono knifes Steve Jobs
IN WHAT will be a battle between the world's smuggest giants, popular beat combo artist Bono is funding an outfit that will knife his old chum and Apple messiah Steve Jobs in the back.
Bono is a founder of a private equity outfit called Elevation Partners. Over the holiday period Elevation quietly announced it was giving the troubled smartphone maker Palm more than $100 million. This gives Bono more than 39 per cent of Palm shares.
Bono has some of Apple's former top names to help him rescue the ailing company. This includes Fred Anderson, a former Apple CFO and board member. There is also Jon Rubinstein, a hardware executive who served as Jobs's right-hand man at Apple until he resigned in 2006.
Rubinstein is now Palm's executive chairman and has apparently approved a new family of devices that will compete with Apple's Iphone. We will see some of these next week at the CES computer trade show. While Palm were too slow to get any hardware out to compete in the new smart phone wars, they have considerable technical knowledge and ability and could come up with a scary rival to the Jesus phone.
We suspect that Bono has been off of Steve's Christmas card list for some time now. Last January he appeared in a farewell video for Microsoft supremo Bill Gates. He has was also caught schmoozing with Michael Dell who famously told Jobs to shut down Apple and give the company's money to its shareholders.
While Jobs will probably lose little sleep at the thought of Anderson (who was chosen as the scapegoat for the Apple share backdating scandal which nearly put him in prison) being at Palm, he might be a little miffed at the devotion that Bono has put into the rival.
Valleywag seems to think that the pair have had a falling out. It suggests that when Jobs went for Anderson, and could have put the bloke in jail, he threatened Bono in the wallet.
Bono, along with Coldplay, has always had iconic status among Apple fanboys for his support of the company. Now it seems that his King of the Sad People crown is likely to be sent somewhere else.
We don't see any great mystery in the falling out between Apple and U2. Bono has chased Messiahs and funny religions before and still has not found what he is looking for. µ
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knows apples fans like coldplay and u2.
saw palm everywhere in Panama. No iPhone.
Probably not Bono's first right-hand Palm from Jobs.
Wounded Apple emperor to Bono:
- U2, Bono?
I returned to a pre-Windows Palm Treo having become well and truly fed up with the overwrought, underpowered nature of modern smartphones. Most smartphone makers use an asthmatic fat kid gulping on an inhaler as their performance benchmark, and I really don't have the patience to wait a random number of seconds each time I want the phone to perform its primary function: search the contacts list and call someone.
The pre-Windows Treos such as the 650 and 680 are magnificently fast doing such things, responding to your command the instant you tap a key or push the stylus. There really is no interface lag whatsoever. They don't need occasional restarts to recover lost resources. The keyboard is absolutely the best (i.e. fastest for typing) ever made. The battery life on the 680 is awful, and you do have to spend an extra £50 on a 2400mAh upgrade from a third party vendor such as Seidio, but it's well worth the investment: a three day standby suddenly becomes somewhere between 1 and 2 weeks.
The PalmOS might have a crap browser but it also gives you a bunch of stuff the iPhone famously omits: copy and paste, MMS, send to multiple SMS recipients, user replaceable battery (see above) and best of all I don't look like a complete nob whipping it out down the local and dragging a greasy index finger across the screen. I just sound like a nob when I bang on about how wonderful Palm used to be :^)
And that brings me to my point. If you judge the company by their recent offerings rather than by their more pioneering PalmOS based devices (which, let's not forget, enjoyed a majority share of the market for many years), whatever 'iPhone killer' they come up with will be slightly larger than an Independence Day mothership, will require a rest in its cradle every night for a recharge, and will have Sinclair ZX80 levels of screen lag.
That said, I genuinely hope they don't mess this one up. They've wasted so much time and so many millions trying to pick up the ball they dropped all those years ago, and as far as I know they've gotten nowhere. Money isn't necessarily the answer. Having a clue is.
I own and use the Tilt from AT&T. The command lag is horrible - right on with the "wait a random number of seconds each time i want the phone to be a phone"
I've considered the Crackberry beucase it has a speakerphone and GPS that are acutally WORTH using and have a pretty decent keyboard to type with.
I used a friends iPhone and I think it makes a better toy than a phone..
Lines like "In what will be a battle between the world's smuggest giants..." are what keep me reading this site.
Is it not more likely that Elevation Partners, as a private equity company, has made its decision based on an assessment of Palm's business, rather than it being based on a personality clash?
And with Elevation already being a significant investor in Palm (a fact that was not mentioned in this report), an additional investment is hardy shocking.
What is perhaps surprising is that Elevation believed Palm was worth backing in the first place.
Bono has already found what he was looking for - MONEY.
Palm is a company worth saving.