The Palm Pre made some serious splashes earlier this year when it was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It was promised the device would ship in the first half of 2009, and despite rumours the Pre was going to be delayed, Palm has now officially stated (the page break hides the fact that those are two separate links) that the Pre is still on track for H1 of 2009. The marketing machine is also ramping up.
Roger McNamee, an investor with a stake of 39% in Palm (“I’m there about three times a week, mostly with the engineers”), had some interesting things to say about the Pre vs. the iPhone. “You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee said in an interview in San Francisco, “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”
He also hinted that a lot of people bought the iPhone merely because it was the coolest product around. “Think about it – If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market,” McNamee said, “Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.”
Palm could really use a break. The company is in a dire financial situation, and with the economy getting worse, the company has bet a lot on the success of the Pre and its webOS. While the Pre has been received quite positively by the media, it faces the same problems any new platform faces: lack of developers, lack of applications, and will most likely have some bugs as well. The Pre won’t save the company in three days – it needs a commitment.
“I’m on a 10-year plan, here,” McNamee said, “[Apple, RIM] are going to run out of gas way before we are.” At least Bono believes in them.
This McNamee guy is an utter moron. If he actually believes all that he is living in a fantasy. And if he doesn’t believe it he is doing a huge disservice to Palm by hyping the damn phone this much – it only rises the expectations unreasonably much and dooms a nice device to a failure. All it would take to suck all the steam out of Palm is for Apple to release a device with a similar to the Pre hardware and slightly improved OS. I won’t even comment on the RIM part, because as much as the iPhone and Android were considered no competition to Blackberry for the lack of enterprise features, the Pre seems to lack just as many of those if not even more.
“Think about it – If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market,” McNamee said, “Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.”
The people that purchased or upgraded to the 3g version of the iPhone will still have a year of contract left when the pre is released. Any time you upgrade your phone, or change your rate plan, your contract is extended. That may not be the case with his current carrier, but that’s how they treat the little guys that aren’t 39% investors…
Palm Pre sounds like some early release of something. As if I should wait for the big thing.
And it’s about one year after the iPhone 3G and… about the same date the new iPhone is expected to be announced. No-one is standing still here: Apple, Android, RIM (well, almost no one 😉 http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090305/hard-to-stand-behind-wi… )
They are not going to be competing with the two-year old original iPhone, they’ll be competing with an (as of yet) still unreleased “new” iPhone.
Unless the Pre´ allows more bare metal language programming, there’s a lot of things many other phones will have applications available to do that Palm’s entry won’t allow people to do, period, so that portion of the market won’t even have a reason to consider the Palm phone, and that’s outside the reality as others have mentioned before of all the other phones still advancing in hardware and software capacity, all while people are signed up for contracts that are expensive to break out of.
While Palm leverages JavaScript experience and the large pools of developers with their solution, it also distinctly handicaps the phone long-term, unless they plan later on offering native lower level programming that allows more computationally intensive software to exist. Palm has rather limited their market possibilities at this time by going with JavaScript, because the iPhone and Android and many others can do a large superset of the applications that the Pre´ can do, and already have established ecosystems: Palm has an up-mountain battle on their hands.
…that was released. It was the iPhone and all ancillary services. What you Thom and so many other people fail to either understand or acknowledge is that it is the whole package that people love about the iPhone. The only ones who don’t like the App Store (you would have us believe it is the whole world that despises it) are the geeks, the same people who have a whinge about things like the new Mini because it doesn’t contain whatever.
The Pre will have zero impact on Apple unless Palm can deliver the total package, and to date there has been no evidence of this happening to any degree that would cause Apple any angst.
What do I have to do with this? I’m just reporting on a story that’s making its rounds acorss the net, that’s all. I have no feelings whatsoever about the iPhone. I’m ambivalent towards it – it’s a good phone, but I don’t understand why people wet their pants over that thing.
It’s just a phone.
Admittedly, the PrÄ“ looks good aesthetically, hardware and software-wise. Its OS seems to be a needed improvement over Palm’s prior offering, Palm OS — which in my opinion was showing its age.
I just wonder if it’s going to be able to gain enough momentum in the American market against the behemoths that are Apple, Google, RIM, and Windows Mobile-based Smartphones.
I hope this thing comes to Verizon. I’m thinking not likely, unless they give Verizon a cut of every app they sell or something. But Verizon really does need a cutting-edge phone. Windows Mobile is going to need more love from Microsoft (or at least phones with quad-core processors) to be desirable for me. Blackberry, I don’t know. I’d want a bigger screen and better browser than most of them have.
Oh well, my NE2 (rebate toward new phone) doesn’t kick in until September. I guess I have time to wait.