Peter Rojas
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Peter Rojas
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The hype over the iPhone is almost deafening right now, but there's an article in today's New York Times today that captures a rare moment of self-doubt from Apple regarding the impending launch:


Last time we sat down with you it was a few months before Helio had launched. A year later, how has it been? Where are things now?
Yeah, so when we had last talked, we had no members. It was just an idea. It has been an amazing ride so far. It is great to be here and be able to talk about Ocean for the first time. Something we have been working on since even before Helio was a company.
I remember you mentioning a year ago that you had a Sidekick competitor coming out.
We were coy for a long time. We were just so focused on building it and working really hard, with a lot of travel to and intense amount of work by our team, so it is great to be here and be able to talk about this.
Continue reading The Engadget Mobile Interview: Sky Dayton, CEO of Helio


VoIP provider Vonage has already cut a deal with EarthLink to resell WiFi, presumably to go along with some sort of WiFi phone service, but could they have something way crazier (and more costly) on tap? BusinessWeek speculates that Vonage might be getting into the cellular game by launching an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). It's not hard to imagine them offering something similar to T-Mobile's HotSpot @Home service, which lets you use a WiFi-enabled cellphone to make VoIP calls over WiFi and and then seamlessly switch over to cellular networks whenever you're outside WiFi range. The problem is that launching an MVNO is no small undertaking. ESPN shuttered MobileESPN last year after failing to attract more than a handful of subscribers, and Amp'd and Helio have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to carve out a slice of what is an incredibly competitive wireless market (Apple was working on an MVNO to accompany the launch of the iPhone, but scrapped the whole thing once it became obvious how difficult it would be to gain marketshare). Could they do it? Maybe, but not without spending a TON of money, which is why it's more likely that they'll introduce a more modest Voice over WiFi service.
Is Palm up for sale? There's been no official word from Ed Colligan and crew, but shares of the company jumped last week on speculation that they were quietly prepping themselves for acquisition. We've heard merger rumors before -- there was some half-baked chatter back in the day that RIM was after 'em -- and it does seem like Palm is at a crossroads. The future of its two OS strategy is murky at best, and while the Treo has been doing fairly well here in the US, they've definitely had trouble getting traction abroad and have seemed flat-footed in the face of stiffening competition from HTC, Nokia, Samsung, RIM, and Motorola (not to mention the looming threat of the iPhone, which threatens to peel off a good number of the prosumers and enthusiasts that were once Palm's bread and butter). Of course, all this has us wondering who would actually plunk down $1.6 billion to buy Palm. Main candidates are said to include both Motorola and Nokia, but Moto already seems to be doing just fine with the Q, and to be honest, it's hard to imagine Nokia snapping up a company that puts out phones running on Windows Mobile.
We don't know whether he was pushed out or left of his own accord, but the news has just hit the wires that Ron Garriques is out as the head of Motorola's mobile devices business. It's not totally shocking to see a change of leadership, Moto's cellphone unit has definitely been through some rough times lately. Profits have fallen as the company struggles to followup the success of the RAZR and they recently announced that they were laying off 3500 employees. Whatever happens, hopefully whoever succeeds him (Ray Roman, senior vice president, global sales, and Terry Vega, senior vice president, global devices, are filling in for now) will recognize that the cellphone game is way too competitive these days to think that rolling out the RAZR in new colors is an acceptable substitute for innovation.







