Hope You’re Enjoying Your Little Moment in the Sun, Palm
by John Paczkowski
Posted on January 9, 2009 at 10:48 AM PT
The biggest unknown is price, which went unmentioned during the demo. My assumption is that Palm would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. ‘Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,’ he asked, then walked away.”
CEOs and Palm evangelists convinced that Palm’s new Pre handset is anything more than table stakes at the handset poker game would do well to consider two bits of Apple (AAPL) news and rumor that suggest Cupertino may be hard at work on a next-generation handset capable of mercilessly beating all others into sobbing submission.
The first: A rumor that iPhone 3.0 will support quad-core processors destined for an upcoming iPhone hardware revision. If this proves true and Apple (AAPL) does release a multi-core GPU iPhone–which is not as much of a stretch as you might think–it would likely support features we’re more accustomed to seeing on the PC. And as The Apple Core’s Jason O’Grady notes, “It would slaughter pretty much every portable gaming platform on the market.”
The second: Apple has applied for a patent on a behind-screen camera that could capture images “while the display elements are in an inactive state (in which the display elements are darkened and at least partially transparent).” It doesn’t take much of a leap to see that technology brought to bear on a next-gen iPhone and the long rumored iChat AV Mobile.
Those are two potential killer features for a device that already has three things the Pre does not: a maturing platform, a thriving developer ecosystem and a market leading music player and store. Are they just rumor and speculation? For now, certainly. But given the pace of innovation in the mobile industry, and more specifically, at Apple–where the multi-touch phone that Palm (PALM) is now aping originated two years ago–they’re not beyond the realm of possibility, are they?
Comments
Really? Do you think that it’s multi-touch that has mobile users looking forward to the Pre? Did you even read beyond the hardware specs of the phone?
Instead of worrying who peed on who’s rug first, look at the way the Palm handles multiple email accounts, SMS/MMS, calendars and contacts. It’s all handled as cleanly as storing the login info in the phone’s database, and makes us of HTML 5’s ability to manage local data for web apps even when there’s no connection (if Gmail or Facebook is down).
There isn’t a phone that comes CLOSE to the seamless integration this promises.
Unsubstantiated rumors of Quad Core on the iPhone? Tout it as a feature. Nvidia actually providing demos of it’s Tegra mobile chipset? I can hear the crickets chirping.
I’m eagerly awaiting your post on the Palm lack of a 16Gb option, therefore cementing the iPhone as the all time leader in the smart phone race.
(quote copy and pasted using my Samsung Omnia)
Posted by Alan Strangis at January 9th, 2009 at 12:58 pmThis wanna be is going nowhere. First, of course, it is a clone of the iPhone, showing little originality.
Second, what the dimwits who review this stuff fail to mention, time and again, is the huge installed base: iTunes, iPhoto, and of course, the Apps store, none of which the other “smartphones” have.
Apple is truly innovative. The rest are just empty suits, sitting around a conference table.
Posted by David Owens at January 9th, 2009 at 1:19 pmLet me guess. The iPhone was your first smart phone, wasn’t it?
Why do you talk as if the iPhone is the undisputed “King of Smart Phones”?
In 2008, Symbian, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile ALL outsold the iPhone, even after the hype of its worldwide launch. When you finally step out of the Reality Distortion Field, you’ll see that the world is bigger than just the iPhone.
Everybody WANTS a nice web browser, but the want of a nice browser is outweighed by the need for proper contact/calendar handling across multiple accounts (oh and actually editing docs on the go).
There is no “one phone” for everybody. Everybody I know realizes that, except some of my iPhone using friends.
Posted by Alan Strangis at January 9th, 2009 at 1:30 pmDo i think that it’s multi-touch that has mobile users looking forward to the Pre?
Judging from the manner in which Palm touted that feature throughout its demo yesterday and the public’s response to it, yes, I do.
Onward …
I’m clearly not touting quad core and iChat AV Mobile as iPhone features. The point of this post is really about Palm attempting to stage a comeback in a sector in which the competition is so fierce and the pace of innovation so furious, that it’s entering the market with an enormous disadvantage — regardless of how wonderful Pre and Web OS might be. No matter how high your opinion of the Pre, the device furlongs behind its rivals in some very important areas. Will seemless and efficient multitasking make up for that?
Posted by John Paczkowski at January 9th, 2009 at 2:28 pmNice try John (biased Apple, but I don’t own stock). Apple had every opportunity to show their new iPhone features at Macworld and CES but they were no-shows.
Posted by Jeff Stevens at January 10th, 2009 at 6:54 amOne upmanship is standard for tech and it didn’t take too long to copy the iPhone best features and improve them.
It appears that Apple has decided to launch new products via blogs and rumors. How’s that for high tech!
The real story is Google and their late to the party Android on a 4th place network T-Mobile. With their bad boy spokesman on dui charges. (insert replay of Dell dude)
How Palm Pre stands against Nokia N97 I’ve done a detailed review at
Posted by Farhan Chawla at January 10th, 2009 at 8:41 amhttp://senseapplied.com/index......nokia-n97/
After the iPhone 3.0 with a battery life of 12 minutes, will we see the iPhone 4.0 with fusion powered processors and a battery life of 4 seconds? Somehow, I don’t think massive processing power in a competitor is Palm’s biggest problem. Not even in the top ten.
Posted by David desJardins at January 10th, 2009 at 10:56 pm