iPhone 3.0 (and maybe hardware version 3 as well?) vs. Palm Pre. This summer, that’s the question many would-be-smartphone purchasers just might be asking themselves. Both have their pros and cons. The iPhone has a huge profile and market presence, but the Pre has the old-school Palm faithful who have been waiting a long time for their Next Big Thing. The iPhone has massive channels and even Sprint admits they won’t be advertising the Palm Pre much due to low initial supply. But those most likely to want the Palm Pre already know it’s coming, where to get, and may well be reading this while already standing in line.
But what about the consumer on the edge? The consumer who has an older iPhone or Palm, or the one who’s about to move up from a feature phone for the first time. What about the dreaded “undecided”? This article is for them. And, yeah, we’re an iPhone blog, so make sure you head on over to our sister-site PreCentral.net. They’ll keep us honest and make sure you get a full, fair representation so you can make an informed decision.
Confession: we secretly hope the Palm Pre does very well. Not because we want one ourselves — we’re pretty happy with the iPhone round here — but because we want Apple and AT&T to think we want one so they continue to drive up innovation and drive down costs respectively. Competition is, was, and will forever be a Good Thing.
Case in point: we’ve heard rumors about Apple pressuring AT&T to lower data rates and/or offer lower price points for capped service. Wall Street Journal takes these rumors and shows why competitive pressure may be at the root of them with a little side-by-side comparison to the impending Palm Pre/Sprint rates. Neatly summarized:
So essentially, iPhone users have to pay $150 a month to match what Sprint will offer Pre users for $100
Hey, if Palm can get Apple to get AT&T to knock 33% off the monthly bill, more power to them (and money to us!)
[Thanks to the Reptile for the tip and @CRA1G for melting our hearts -- a little!]
It’s here. Finally. The day everyone but iPhone users has been waiting for! No, not the release of the Palm Pre, silly. The release of the day it will finally be released! It’s been a long, hard epoch in the desert for our Palm faithful friends, so with snark firmly holstered, our sibling site Precentral.net has your official Palm Pre launch day details:
June 6th. $199 after $100 mail in rebate and a 2 year contract. Believe it. It will be at Sprint Stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Wal-Mart. The Touchstone dock will be available on the same day, $69.99 for the dock and battery door, or $49.99 for the dock alone and $19.99 for the battery door.
$100 mail-in rebate taken for granted (though we tend to forget those, or the checks seem to somehow get lost in the mail), the price is exactly the same for an 8GB Palm Pre as it was and is for an 8GB iPhone 3G. Sounds competitive. No doubt our friends at PreCentral.net are already lining up, camp gear packed and spirits high. (We’ll send pizza!)
Of course, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) kicks off just two days later on June 8, where last year Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 3G and this year anticipation is high that Phil Schiller will introduce the third generation iPhone.
So is Palm crazy to start selling the Pre right before WWDC, or crazy like a fox? Do they get a couple of days of peace before riding b-reel for the massive mainstream news blitz that comes with any new Apple hardware? Do Rubinstein and crew — the folks who left Apple and the iPhone to work on the Pre — get to pay a final, seasonal homage to their former employer? Or are they gambling that Apple won’t announce a new iPhone, or that people won’t want to wait the extra month or so for it to be released, and so in antici-pointment or impatience, jump on the already available Pre?
while this is in no way a done deal yet, Apple is definitely trying to come up with a way to offer background support for third-party apps. They went on to note that while Apple may have something to say about it at WWDC, it’s very unlikely that any solution would be ready at that time, and could be a situation similar to how Apple announced Push Notification at WWDC last year but said it was coming in a few months (which it later was delayed until iPhone 3.0).
TechCrunch cites processor power, user experience, and battery life as factors currently concerning Apple. They also suggest the soon-to-be released Palm Pre, with its webOS multi-tasking as a driving force behind all chatter we’ve been hearing about it all of a sudden.
Digital Trends was gracious enough to invite CrackBerry Kevin, editor-in-chief Dieter, and yours TiPb-truly to:
Smartphone Wars: iPhone vs. BlackBerry vs. Palm pre vs. Android – Our panel of smartphone experts from all different corners of the Web duke it out over some of the most contentious issues facing the smartphone industry today.
Our sibling site PreCentral.net has gotten their mobile accomplishers on yet another (rumored to be) leaked internal document. This one supposedly comes from Sprint and details what, to PreCentral.net, are some interesting factoids. To us, however, they represent some far more interesting questions:
The picture above shows what looks to be fairly user-toxic troubleshooting steps for Pre and memory management. While the iPhone has memory issues as well, you either reboot or restore. Here, steps are approaching the level of finicky task management and triage Apple has made fun of in previous iPhone keynotes.
Tethering looks to be gone, which may be a bad sign for iPhone users hoping AT&T would throw it in when OS 3.0 — which enables it — rolls around this summer.
Also, no cut and paste from web pages, which is interesting given that webOS is based on web 2.0 style pages. Shouldn’t that one be a gimme?
For much, much more, check out the source blog and let us know how the Palm Pre is developing, competitively to the iPhone, from your point of view. (Of course, we won’t know any final feature set or functionality levels until it actually ships… sometime before June 30).
I’d do the same thing I offered to do for a BlackBerry Storm: try using one. Believe me, for someone who’s mellow has been 100% de-harshened by the iPhone, that’s a contest ender.
Think you have what it takes to win a FREE Palm Pre? Time to put up or shut up! PreCentral.net is giving away FIVE Palm Pre Phones the day that the Palm Pre is released. In addition, we’re sweetening the deal by making them into full-on Palm Pre Packs, including:
A Palm Pre Smartphone on Sprint
A $100 Amazon Gift Card to fill your Pre up with music
A Touchstone Charging Station & Battery Cover
Any case from the PreCentral.net Accessory Store
A Set of Motorola S9-HD Bluetooth Stereo Headphones (A $99 value) to rock out with your Pre
If the qualifiers end up anywhere near as fantastic as last year’s CrackBerry.com’s Storm give-away, we should be in for some epic tattooed, mud wrasslin, paint-ball blasted, smartphone smashed, Palm Pre fun.
Kudos to PreCentral, and best of luck to all the contestants!
Our sibling site, PreCentral.net has just pulled a Palm, getting a great new look backed up by rock-solid Web-based underpinnings. Some would call it Karma, we call it the tireless work of our ole’ editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, the awesome crew at PreCentral.net, and the backstage magicians at Smartphone Experts.
If you haven’t already, check out PreCentral.net for all the latest news and views on Palm’s upcoming new miracle device, the Palm Pre, inarguably the second most anticipated device launch (after our own next-gen iPhone, ‘natch!) coming some mid-point this year.
Congrats again to the PC team! Great new look, same great content.
Dieter managed to score an awesome video walkthrough of the Palm Pre’s app launching functionality and a look at some of the apps themselves. We’ve joked about how the Palm Pre, supervised by the guy who helped build the iPhone, developed by engineers who helped program the iPhone, felt more like a branch of the iPhone sometimes than a linear descendant of PalmOS.
Turns out we were wrong. To be joking. You swipe horizontally to switch Home Screens, just like the iPhone (though you can scroll down vertically as well to jam more apps on each screen). You hold your finger down and then move to reposition apps, just like the iPhone (though they don’t do the jiggle dance). They even seem to be a little bit laggy and slow to launch at times, just like iPhone 2.0 was! (Though these are widgets, not native apps, so that’s really more of a concern at this point).
Palm, I love ya. I had PDA’s going back to the Visor, smartphones going back to the 600. You left me, I didn’t leave you, remember? So now I found a new phone, and seriously, dressing up just like it isn’t the way to win me back. You gotta be yourself, the new you not a new version of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I really dig your Synergy, that touchstone charger, and that awesome alert system. Gold. But Apple didn’t make that first big iPhone splash by holding up something that worked like a BlackBerry or a Treo. They didn’t show off a Nokia-style experience. They made something new and instantly iconic. Copying the iPhone’s UI and interactions to this degree isn’t recognizing that Apple nailed the multi-touch paradigm for all time. It’s not surrendering the default behavior. It’s just copying Apple’s experience when you should be creating the next generation Palm experience.
Maybe you should have stuck with Palm leadership, engineers, and innovation?
