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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 acros
by 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.
- rimantas 17y ago"I'm not convinced games are really that important either, the case in point being Mac OS X users." Well, take a look what kind of apps take the top spots on AppStore. However the most amusing thing in this kind of discussion is a take on SDK. When Apple initially offered to develop apps using web technology it was greated with "booo". Now Palm says the same and it is greated with "Wow, cool". Go figure.
- halo 17y agoI believe Apple were perceived to almost dismissively offer remote web apps which require internet access as a replacement for local apps with access to APIs, and it quite obviously is not a very good substitute. On the other hand, Palm are offering their web development platform as a first-class platform where the applications look, act like, and feel like native applications, as well as providing full interfaces to local APIs. I don't think games are that important. The Sims sold 16 million copies, but no-one bought a PC simply to play The Sims. I think the same is true for phones - for the vast majority of people it's a nicety rather than a true selling point.
- lallysingh 17y agoThere's so little you can really do with the iphone that you end up with games, which have little interaction with the system and with the overall user experience (outside of the time playing the game, of course). The difference between the Palm SDK and the iPhone web API is that they've extended the web apis to build regular palm apps -- the builtin apps are (afaik, mostly) built with the same APIs provided to developers. Also: 1. Palm knows PDAs. The iPhone's calendaring and contact management is toyish at best compared to what we had on the old PalmOS. 2. Palm also knows how to treat developers better. HN's full of complains by iPhone developers on the App Store process. Palm's had a strong developer community before, and they treated them (us -- I was one of them) well.
- ssharp 17y agoThe UI may look great but until customers fingers are on the screen, we won't really know which phone is more usable. From the videos I've seen, it doesn't look as intuitive as the iPhone. As for games, I can say that I've never played a native OSX game in my 6 years of using Macs. However, I have an entire page of games on my iPhone. They wouldn't be a deal breaker for me but they're pretty nifty to have around and the power of the SDK allows them to be much more sophisticated on the iPhone than the Pre. I'm also not convinced that the Pre is a business smartphone. It seems heavily designed as a consumer product. Your comment on the quantity of applications is misguided. Palm OS and Windows Mobile never had the popularity that the App Store does. The App Store changed the mobile app distribution game completely. Your comment on Blackberry and Nokia "outselling" the iPhone is also a bit silly. The Blackberry Curve was the #1 smartphone but they were also selling them as a 2 for 1 deal and on multiple carriers. And if you account for all RIMM models, of course they're going to have a larger share. They have multiple models on every carrier. What the iPhone has done as a single phone on a single carrier has not be duplicated and the Pre certainly won't be the one that matches its success. Also being a game-changer may not matter in the long-term. However, for a company like Palm that doesn't have a lot of money and is essentially going "all-in" with Web O/S, the short term is much more relevant. This company was essentially done with until the Pre was announced and they needed a substantial investor to come in to finance the launch of the Pre. Also, with cell phones in the U.S., we are used to 2 year gaps between changing devices and carriers. Being a game changer makes people switch. Doing something different but not necessarily better, does not.