The Pre has landed. Well, not for me – I do not have my hands on one of these things and it’s killing me. I can’t wait to give up my iPhone. But even though I don’t have it, a bunch of other folks do. The reviews are pretty good over all, but there’s a caveat. As awesome as the Pre is today, how will it stand up to the new and improved iPhone that I assume will be released in July?
People seem to like it, with the iPhone caveat of course. The biggest downsides seem to be Sprint as a carrier (although Sprint is better than AT&T in my area) and the lack of apps available at launch / clunky App Store. The App issues will hopefully change and other carriers will most likely be carrying the Pre by early 2010.
It’s official! Palm has announced that the Pre will make its debut on June 6th, just a couple of days before the big Apple WWDC keynote.
The Palm Pre will be sold in Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, select Wal-Mart stores and online at Sprint.com with a $199.99 price tag. That price requires a a two-year service agreement and is after a $100 mail-in rebate (So I suppose you’re shelling out $300).
You have your choice of Sprint’s Everything Data plan or the Business Essentials with Messaging and Data plan. The wireless Touchstone charging station for the Pre (not required – it comes with a wired charger) will also be available on June 6. The Touchstone kit will be sold for $69.99 or you can buy the individual pieces for $49.99 (charger) and $19.99 (back cover for the Pre).
Now I just have to cross my fingers that the Pre lives up to my very high expectations. Rumor has it that they aren’t going to have a whole lot of Pres on hand, thereby creating demand after a sell-out. Well, my AT&T contract is up in August. I hope the kinks are worked out of the OS and the phone is in stock by then because I really want (need?) a Palm Pre.
There’s a fair amount of buzz about the Palm Pre launch and when it might actually occur. You see, the closer we get to June, the closer we get to the iPhone 3.0 announcement, which will turn all the blogs into all-iPhone-all-the-time. Based on previous years, it will again be all-iPhone-all-the-time in July when the new iPhone launches. (I’m sort of glad I’ll be on vacation in July.)
By continually avoiding release date talk, other than “first half of 2009,” Palm seriously risks losing a lot of marketing time to the latest iPhone launch. Apparently, a lot of folks expected the Pre to launch last week. The next guesstimated date is May 17. Mid-may would at least give Palm a couple weeks of attention before all eyes shift to Apple.
Both Palm and Sprint need the Pre to help revive their flagging businesses. According to AdAge, Sprint & Palm have enough problems without creating new ones:
Survey results released by ChangeWave last week suggest that the Pre will have to deal with Sprint’s image problem as a second-tier carrier with poor customer service. In a survey of 4,292 cellphone owners, 17% said Sprint is the top reason they will not consider the Pre. Incidentally, the same percentage said they won’t buy an iPhone because of AT&T. But Sprint is no AT&T. It’s struggling to keep its 49 million customers, while its bigger rival is growing its 77 million subscriber base.
I fall into that latter category by the way, I’m itching to get my hands on a Palm Pre and leave my horrid AT&T service (and equally bad customer service) behind. AT&T is apparently a little worried too – and they’re just good sales people. An internal AT&T document has leaked that provides talking points on how the iPhone is better than the Palm Pre. I would beg to differ with a couple of the points, but at least AT&T has talking points. I have my fingers crossed that, upon release, Sprint sales folks can tell me how the Pre is better than my iPhone and how to effectively sync the Pre with my Mac.
A recent post by 24/7 Wall Street lists Palm as one of the 12 brands most likely to disappear in the next year, partially because of its partnership with Sprint.
Recent research shows that almost no one who owns an Apple (AAPL) iPhone or RIM (RIMM) Blackberry will switch to the new smartphone, so Palm will have to essentially expand the market to get share for its new device during a recession. The “Pre” will also be sold exclusively though Sprint (S), the No.3 cellular carrier in the US which has been losing subscribers consistently for more than two years. The launch of the “Pre” is a disaster in the making. … The bottom line is that Palm has no chance of getting an even modest part of the smartphone market in a severe economic downturn since it competes with two of the premier technology companies in the world—Apple and RIM. Palm won’t be in business in a year.
Palm is expected to drive the advertising and has hired Modernista for the campaign. (Modernista did the “Skittles thing” before Skittles did.) But I wouldn’t put Sprint out for advertising either. One of my favorite commercials at the moment, one that I’ll stop the DVR and watch, is the new Sprint commercial with the 3-D Twitter birds, some humor, and the shot of the Pre at the end.
Thank you to fellow Intel Insider, Cathy Brooks, who helped me gain immediate access to a personal demo of the new Palm Pre smart phone. Peter Skillman, VP of Design, and the man credited with giving hope to Palm’s future, previewed the Pre at CES 2009 in a private room at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Skillman is proud and indeed he should be. It’s beautiful and it is a promising and refreshing representation of what Palm could be…
“We wanted to define a new experience with everything you touch, from the box, to the charger, to the phone,” said Skillman. This philosophy and design methadology is pervasive. Every detail and aspect imaginable and unimaginable seems to be accounted for. It most certainly delivers an elevated ambience – one on par with the quality and exclusivity of Apple. The interface is reminscient of the Apple iPhone and to be honest, it appears to be the most engaging and intuitive challenger to the iPhone.
The phone will be released by Sprint and is expected to retail around $199 – $249 with a two year contract. Sprint only holds the exclusive for the first 90 days, so you should expect to see other carriers announce support shortly thereafter.
The tech/gadget world has been all a-twitter (literally) about the new Palm Pre. Like everyone else, I had pretty much written off Palm as far as Smartphones go. I even routinely make fun of my husband’s clunky Treo (regardless of the fact he has better reception than my iPhone). This was silly of me. After all, Palm was one of the early companies out there. Apple’s Newton failed rather spectacularly, but along came the Palm Pilot and things changed. I had two or three different Palms over the years, as recently as five years ago.
I gave up the Palm for a Blackberry when I realized that a Palm, a phone, and an iPod in my purse was one gadget too many. That was followed by the iPhone, which miraculously reduced me to one gadget. Yet I often pine for the keyboard on my Blackberry. I’m one of the few, it seems, to have never quite taken to the virtual keyboard on the iPhone. My contract is up this year and I was seriously considering investigating other services and other phones. The Android was tops on my list, followed by the Storm, but now I think the Pre may be pushing all those others aside.
Palm debuted the Pre (prounounced “pree” – there’s a line over the e that WordPress doesn’t like) at CES this week. Since then, several different gadget bloggers have had the opportunity to get up close and personal with the phone. Interestingly, Palm won’t let any of the bloggers actually touch the phone, but they’ve tried. No price has been set on this innovative new smartphone and the release date is sometime in the first half of this year. So they’ve got some time to work out bugs and settle on competitive pricing.
The new phone runs Linux, has an accelerometer like the iPhone, touch screen capability and a pull out keyboard. Apparently the toolbar is a really cool feature, and the speaker is fairly loud. The applications are all fairly solid, from what I’ve read, and your contacts have information pulled in from their social network profiles. That’s small, but impressive. My favorite? System wide cut and paste.
I’m curious to know how well it will sync with a Mac and just as important, and often forgotten, is it a decent phone?
My favorite video so far is the one from our friends at Boing Boing Gadgets, so I’ve embedded it here.
There’s a fair amount of buzz about the Palm Pre launch and when it might actually occur. You see, the closer we get to June, the closer we get to the iPhone 3.0 announcement, which will turn all the blogs into all-iPhone-all-the-time. Based on previous years, it will again be all-iPhone-all-the-time in July when the new iPhone launches. (I’m sort of glad I’ll be on vacation in July.)
