Palm Pre: Does it Live Up to the Hype?
In the early to mid '90s, when Palm was at the top of its game, the name "PalmPilot" was effectively synonymous with an entire class of devices: the Personal Digital Assistant. Into the late part of that decade, Palm even managed to leverage its PalmOS into the early smartphone market with the Treo line, even while the company was repeatedly bought and sold, changing hands more time than the Queen of Spades in a game of Old Maid. But at a certain point, the smartphone market kept moving on and Palm's innovation went stagnant.
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All things considered, the Pre is actually a pretty good phone. Despite my mostly minor gripes, it's got a pretty slick operating system, a boatload of features, and it's very usable. Not all the pieces are in place yet, but like all of the other smart phones, it's a work in progress. It's not perfect, but it's certainly a worthy device, and most people coming from a non-smart phone will rightfully see it as a huge upgrade.
The real star of the production, of course, is webOS. From a hardware perspective, the Pre is little better than many of the sub-par smart phones that have come before. The webOS has a real chance to be a serious competitor to the iPhone. Apple's philosophy is to ship no software before it's up to snuff--Palm seems to have gone the other direction and thrown in many features, not all of which are ready for prime time.
The choice of networks plays a big part in whether you're going to pick the Pre or the iPhone; right now Palm has an exclusive deal with Sprint, which is slated to run through 2009, though there are already rumblings about the device appearing on the Verizon network next year.
Of course, the Pre's not the only webOS phone we can expect to see, just as there are more Android models to come in the future. The big question right now is whether the Pre can do well enough to keep Palm afloat in the meantime.
More to the point, though, let's address the question of whether the Pre can "beat" or "kill" the iPhone. The problem here is that the question itself is based on a false premise. Just as in the interminable argument over Macs versus PCs, the smartphone market is not a zero-sum game: Apple doesn't have to lose for Palm to win. More important, by having two robust, competitive platforms, we, the consumers, are far better served than if one company were to dominate the market place all by itself. In that sense, by creating a product that's even comparable to the iPhone, Palm has succeeded, even if the Pre isn't holy grail of smartphones. It doesn't have to kill the iPhone--it just has to put up a good fight.
[Dan Moren is an associate editor for Macworld.]
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