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I've been saying this all along. I still don't understand why everyone got so excited over the Pre demo at the CES. The UI doesn't look as intuitive as the iP

by ssharp 17y ago

I've been saying this all along. I still don't understand why everyone got so excited over the Pre demo at the CES. The UI doesn't look as intuitive as the iPhone. Multitasking sounds good but how well will it work? Apple didn't "overlook" multitasking. They saw that it would be a nightmare in implementing it while maintaining their usability standards and decided against it. If the Pre can't multitask efficiently, it's a useless feature that does more harm than good. And push notifications may be enough for Apple to compete in this area. QWERTY keyboard. The "big" defense against the iPhone. Having come from using a Blackberry for several years before switching to an iPhone this year, I can say that the virtual keyboard wasn't an issue at all. I'm not sure if the extra bulk of a physical keyboard is necessary, especially if the keys are too small. SDK - Web O/S sounds "sexy" but it isn't. It's not nearly as powerful and capable as the iPhone's SDK. If you thought the App Store had a lot of noise in it, wait until you see the nonsense that gets churned out by Pre "developers". Which brings me too: App Store - This was the killer feature of the iPhone v2. The built-in phone interface and integration with iTunes was killer. And the ALREADY ESTABLISHED popularity of the iPhone was enough to convince big time developers (and the small guys) to invest the time into developing for the iPhone. The Palm doesn't have this luxury. How well the Palm interfaces with it's app store and how well it integrates into synching with a computer remains to be seen. I doubt the Pre will have anywhere close to the quality of apps that the iPhone has. Hype - Hype (and killer demos) brought initial conversions for the iPhone to AT&T. The quality of the phone continues to bring them in. The Pre doesn't have this level of hype. In the tech sphere, it has hype, but nowhere close to the iPhone. And outside of the tech world, it's a big nothing. And Palm doesn't have the money Apple had to market their new phone. Release - When the iPhone released, the "gold standard" was the Blackberry, with great email, and awful internet browsing. The iPhone changed the smartphone game. Now everyone has consumer smartphones. The Pre doesn't change the game. They are just doing the same thing as everyone else. They have nicer features but it's not enough to shift markets like the iPhone did. Some of the minor features - Cut and paste. Never a big deal for me that the iPhone didn't have it. I can think of maybe 3 times in the past year that I wanted to copy and paste something. Once again, on a pure touch phone, cut and paste probably wasn't easy to do without hurting something else. The new iPhone software supports it and it's adequate enough. Price - iPhone wins by costing $200 out the door. Not a $300 price with a $100 mail in rebate. And if the rumors are true that the 8GB iPhone will be dropped to $99, it's goodnight Palm.

halo 17y ago
I disagree. The UI looks great. In fact, I think it's better than the iPhone's in many ways. The calendar, contacts feature, the merging of conversations across different platforms, and the universal search are all great, for example. It all seems super-slick. Multitasking looks great, and it's a massive oversight in the iPhone's featureset. The fact that you can't run a MSN Messenger client or a streaming audio application in the background, for example, kind of cripples it. The fact that Apple hasn't managed to do it doesn't mean that the Pre can't, any more than the fact that Internet Explorer Mobile didn't mean that the iPhone browser was crap. The card interface in particular looks fantastically intuitive and deserves all the praise it gets. On the other hand, "Notifications" are simply a poor substitute from proper multitasking functionality. I think Apple will reveal proper multitasking, possibly exclusive to a next-gen iPhone, over the next year. People are divided over the QWERTY people, but it's undeniable that it some people prefer physical buttons. In particular, the audience that Palm are likely aiming at, which is primarily business Blackberry users, prefer physical keyboards. I don't think trying to differentiate itself from the iPhone will do them any harm though. I've not used the SDK, but I understand their approach. It's a trade-off. It's not very useful for real-time applications like games. However, web applications are becoming more and more popular, even on the desktop with applications like AIR. Whatsmore, people know HTML/CSS/JS tech (particularly compared to Objective-C), and that makes it easy for them to encourage people to develop applications on their platform, even if it remains a niche. It seems like a reasonable trade-off. I'm not convinced games are really that important either, the case in point being Mac OS X users. The iPhone has a leg up over the Pre in sheer quantity of applications. On the other hand, long did Palm OS and Windows Mobile. And Windows still does over Mac OS X. It doesn't really matter as long as there's thriving communities on all unless there's one single-platform "killer app" which can't easily be replicated on the others, which currently doesn't, and is unlikely to, exist. All that matters is that there is a thriving developer ecosystem. Hype doesn't have to equal to sales, as Blackberry and Nokia have shown by outselling the iPhone in the United States and Europe. It's also worth adding that if Palm sell half the amount of units that Apple do, they'd probably be celebrating in the streets and their share price would rocket. Palm's measure of success is almost certainly not anywhere near "beating the iPhone". If we measure success by innovation and "X did it first", Opera would be the most popular browser on the planet and we'd all be running BeOS right around now. Being a "game changer" really doesn't matter in the long-term. The price is higher. But it is a brand new phone with a brand new operating system, and they likely want to charge early adopters more. I doubt Palm are going to choose the Apple pricing strategy of keeping the price static for months or even years, and are more likely to compete in price as time goes on, especially when their exclusivity agreement ends and if they remain the underdog. There's also other reasons. The fact it's on a different network to the competition works in its favour - not everyone has a choice of having good coverage for all the networks. The lack of a removable battery has likely discouraged corporate users from the iPhone. The DOC/PPT/XLS and PDF viewer will appeal to corporate users and is a nice touch. I regard avoiding iTunes as a big win. A decent camera with flash is a nice touch too.

by ssharp 17y ago

halo 17y ago

I disagree. The UI looks great. In fact, I think it's better than the iPhone's in many ways. The calendar, contacts feature, the merging of conversations across different platforms, and the universal search are all great, for example. It all seems super-slick. Multitasking looks great, and it's a massive oversight in the iPhone's featureset. The fact that you can't run a MSN Messenger client or a streaming audio application in the background, for example, kind of cripples it. The fact that Apple hasn't managed to do it doesn't mean that the Pre can't, any more than the fact that Internet Explorer Mobile didn't mean that the iPhone browser was crap. The card interface in particular looks fantastically intuitive and deserves all the praise it gets. On the other hand, "Notifications" are simply a poor substitute from proper multitasking functionality. I think Apple will reveal proper multitasking, possibly exclusive to a next-gen iPhone, over the next year. People are divided over the QWERTY people, but it's undeniable that it some people prefer physical buttons. In particular, the audience that Palm are likely aiming at, which is primarily business Blackberry users, prefer physical keyboards. I don't think trying to differentiate itself from the iPhone will do them any harm though. I've not used the SDK, but I understand their approach. It's a trade-off. It's not very useful for real-time applications like games. However, web applications are becoming more and more popular, even on the desktop with applications like AIR. Whatsmore, people know HTML/CSS/JS tech (particularly compared to Objective-C), and that makes it easy for them to encourage people to develop applications on their platform, even if it remains a niche. It seems like a reasonable trade-off. I'm not convinced games are really that important either, the case in point being Mac OS X users. The iPhone has a leg up over the Pre in sheer quantity of applications. On the other hand, long did Palm OS and Windows Mobile. And Windows still does over Mac OS X. It doesn't really matter as long as there's thriving communities on all unless there's one single-platform "killer app" which can't easily be replicated on the others, which currently doesn't, and is unlikely to, exist. All that matters is that there is a thriving developer ecosystem. Hype doesn't have to equal to sales, as Blackberry and Nokia have shown by outselling the iPhone in the United States and Europe. It's also worth adding that if Palm sell half the amount of units that Apple do, they'd probably be celebrating in the streets and their share price would rocket. Palm's measure of success is almost certainly not anywhere near "beating the iPhone". If we measure success by innovation and "X did it first", Opera would be the most popular browser on the planet and we'd all be running BeOS right around now. Being a "game changer" really doesn't matter in the long-term. The price is higher. But it is a brand new phone with a brand new operating system, and they likely want to charge early adopters more. I doubt Palm are going to choose the Apple pricing strategy of keeping the price static for months or even years, and are more likely to compete in price as time goes on, especially when their exclusivity agreement ends and if they remain the underdog. There's also other reasons. The fact it's on a different network to the competition works in its favour - not everyone has a choice of having good coverage for all the networks. The lack of a removable battery has likely discouraged corporate users from the iPhone. The DOC/PPT/XLS and PDF viewer will appeal to corporate users and is a nice touch. I regard avoiding iTunes as a big win. A decent camera with flash is a nice touch too.