Coat tails: Pilot riding on Newton. Pre riding on iPhone. Without the iPhone the mobile industry would be as boring as it was 3 years ago and you'd only be seeing more variations on the RAZR this year.

Palm's budget is probably somewhere just north of Hugo's salary they don't have much room for making errors at this point.

I wish! I'm sure their finance team is stressing seriously about how they can finance production runs though... particularly tough when your credit rating has been slashed.

Kinda like the problem we had at empeg with financing production runs but on a rather bigger scale!

Hugo

Did anyone catch the one-time palm Pre commercial last night on the new Jimmy Fallon show? It was co-hosted by the editor-in-chief of Engadget, one of Palm's new PR companies. Most people know it as a gadget blog, but that's just a cover.

This comment (from Engadget) was the only one I saw during a quick scan which hit the nail on the head:


You have to be deluded to think that payola ever went away from the airwaves or that it hasn't always been a part of (some) online tech coverage.

On a related note, Palm put out an official retraction of the comments by McNamee about how the Pre will do compared to the iPhone as well as some additional CYA points. Specifically items 8 and 9 of their "Free Writing Prospectus" are noteworthy. I suppose they don't want to get their arses sued by their shareholders when they can't live up to what could have been considered official promises/statements by the company.

Obsessed much?

Is your ego tied to the failure of Palm?

Unlike some people recently quoted in the media, I have no affiliations, agendas or stake in the performance or lack thereof of Palm, Apple or any other company discussed in this thread.

I came across the "news" while quickly browsing tech items as I do as part of a daily scan of numerous sites.

I haven't started a Palm death-watch pool or anything yet.

BREAKING NEWS - Investor makes outlandish statement about the future performance of a company he's investing in. Film at 11.

Seriously, dude, regardless of whether you have a stake in the outcome, you're coming off as spiteful teen-age brat. We get it -- Palm is completely broke, the CEO and investors are all crackpots, and the PR strategy is an evil conspiracy involving Engadget/AOL, GE/NBC/Sheinhart Wig Company, Bono, The Carlyle Group, The Illuminati, and Major League Baseball. Can we please just wait for the device to flop before making all of these grand proclamations of death before it's even been released?

Josh is an enormous fan of the Pre. It's a giddy fanboy thing, not some nefarious plot.

This is a general reply, not to Matt.

If I waited for the device to fail then it wouldn't be speculation. I'm finding it amusing that critics of the Pre are getting the boos (including here in this forum where I wouldn't expect it) while the company and its investors have seemingly carte blanche on the bullshit train.

The Palm media soap opera is somewhat entertaining, but if you guys don't find it equally amusing, I'll try to cut back on anecdotes, opinion and links.

Matt, Josh should probably have mixed it up a bit with his time on the show, including perhaps some promotion of his site. It came off smelling like product placement and you could see at times Fallon was uncomfortable as he looked around the set. I'm sure it didn't help his ratings since neither the studio nor home audiences are such fanboys (or girls).

It's marketing. I couldn't really care less about it. I'm somewhat interested to see how well the device ends up working in real life. Feel free to speculate about device features.

I am, however, not interested in speculation about market share or how exaggerated Palm's management's claims are. Who gives a rat's ass?

I'm interested in the marketing aspects because it's something I've been doing for a long time. It's also a significant component of what will make or break such a product in this day and age.

Feature-wise the device has seen specs jump around a bit and nothing printed on paper (or screen) really jumps out. There are some interesting ideas there, but then you also have things like a clumsy magnet in the unit and a small screen. The entire product at this stage, for everyone but a select handful of people, is all marketing. Vapor if you will.

There's room for discussion because the ammunition has been put out there by Palm. I just happen to be interested in a lot more than the technical specifications. What we unfortunately can't speculate on are the products being produced the by most of the established players in this market because not much, if anything at all, is being put out about their upcoming wares.

So now that the Pre launch date is set and the price is known, who here is going to try and get one?

I'll admit, the Pre would probably be towards the top of my list if the iPhone hadn't come out. There are a few things that I dislike about the Pre though:

1. Sprint. It's less the company, and more the technology they back. I want a GSM phone.
2. 8GB of storage. The 16GB on my iPhone is almost constantly full, due to using it as a media device heavily.
3. Web apps. Sure they are HTML 5 and can run offline. But I'm really hooked on the gaming capabilities of the iPhone now, and a HTML 5 site isn't going to come close to even running Wolfenstein 3D.
4. Physical keyboard. After having spent 2 years with a very good virtual touch keyboard, I can't even consider a tiny physical keyboard. The ability to type as quickly as my thumbs can move and an auto correct/resizing touch area backed keyboard lets me fly though composing messages even if I do miss the proper key from time to time.

The top things I do like about the Pre from the info available:
1. Multitasking. It's annoying trying to chat from time to time with someone while also using another app on the iPhone. This is only going to get worse with the 3rd party push access for IM and such. The Pre handles this much better.
2. Universal search. I've been using search on my iPhone now for about two months and find it very useful.
3. Web browser. Much like the iPhone, the Pre looks to offer the best in mobile browsing due to both a decent renderer, and multitouch.

Gizmodo has a nice Pre FAQ.

Oh, and I don't think the Pre is going to hit the same level of ease of use like the iPhone with gestures like these. Lots of various important ones to learn that I'm sure owners won't have a problem with, but it makes it less friendly for non owners to use. So far, most people have been able to use my iPhone after only explaining the home button and the sleep button.

I think the Pre will have a problem with this if/when they open up the platform to real development instead of running Web apps. The issue with the iPod is its limited resources, chiefly memory. The 128MB on the iPod goes very quickly with Safari alone. Many games can chew through this without batting an eyelash as well.

We'll have to see how well iPhone OS 3 and any new hardware are able to address these resource constraints. Which, were likely imposed in the first place to better manage battery life.

I'm really eager to see the launch of the Pre in early June followed up by Apple's WWDC announcements. I have a feeling Palm is going to get the heavy (heavy) hammer dropped on them. If Apple release anything even mildly interesting it's going to completely saturate mind-share.

Battery life is the real trick. Much as the iPhone restricts what you can do with it, the battery life is really quite good. If you try to use the Palm Pre like it's a full-blown computer, it's going to chew through power.

If by "Web apps" you mean the HTML5+Javascript apps that they have said it will be able to run, then that doesn't make sense at all.

"web apps" as you describe them will eat up far more resources than the equivalent app coded natively. If Palm in the future allow "real" native apps I would expect the resource usage to fall for apps with the same functionality, not rise.

My iPhone is great, but I would never describe the battery life of "really quite good". I really miss the days of phones that could be relied on to survive a weekend away. My iPhone has yet to manage that without charging.

You had the problem where some unknown background process pegs the CPU and causes the entire iPhone to heat up and drain the battery like crazy?

Those seem less than complicated to me. And not particularly supernumerary.

I am certainly going to swing by the local Best Buy and/or Sprint store to take a look, but the fact that I'd have to double my monthly phone bill is going to make me very selective. Just like the iPhone, Sprint is making up the cost of the phone with outrageously expensive plan prices, so my excitement about this device is going to be tempered by the $840 premium (over the next 24 months) I'd have to pay to use it.

That said, for my needs, the Pre wins hands down, so if I don't get a Pre, I'll continue to muddle along with my Treo 755p until such a time as either device becomes worth the additional cost.

You expect the resource usage to fall when apps go native? I wouldn't. Sure, any given executable can be more optimized, but the scope of an application can be an order of magnitude greater. Each developer doing their own asset management to boot.

Right now the HTML renderer and JS interpreter are essentially running all the time. Each application a sort of advanced web page. Running multiple applets isn't going to be such a big deal.

There are plenty of iPhone apps out right now that will suck down every byte of available memory on the device. When you're running a web browser, a game, a paint program and an audio sampling/mixing application, things are going to get tight, I don't care what platform you're on.

The Pre isn't magic and its components are all filled with the same blue smoke as everyone else's.

I'd classify the battery usage performance (duration) of the iPhone as above average and that of the iPod Touch as far above average. Taking into account of course what you're actually doing while using up that charge.

The gestures that struck me as odd are the ones that require the user to hold down a keyboard key while also interacting with the screen. Really seems to be an awkward way of selecting text or even just moving the cursor around.

This isn't why I want multitasking on the iPhone. I just want to be able to reply to an SMS or IM without having to close down whatever I was in the middle of, especially when it is listening to music outside of the built in iPod. The phone seems capable of allowing me to run various apps when I have an active phone call, and can also pop up a dialog alerting me to a message, so why can't I reply right there? The Pre does this, even if it is done by having web apps.

I'd probably get one if I could keep my plan, but with the new plan requirements it means I'll definitely wait and see what the next iPhone looks like.

I'm likely to pick up a used Touch Diamond and live with the wonders of windows mobile a bit longer. I'm stuck in the golden handcuff's of Sprint's sero plan. $35 a month for insurance, enough text messages, and an easy hack to bluetooth tethering is going to require a big improvement to get me to give it up.

If they all share a single interpreter and renderer then if a single web app dies or locks up then it'll take down everything.

Well, the text selecting thing is akin to selecting text in Windows using the keyboard: hold down shift and use the arrow keys. This "gesture" is also what the Blackberries with trackballs use for text selection (I am desperately sad that I know this), which might be important to note.

I'm tired of speculating why Apple chose to implement some things the way they did. Apart from the obvious which we've discussed, device resources. They obviously saw fit to temper that issue with a pretty heavy hand and in a rather inflexible way. And it's obviously a big deal for those people who only want "a little" third-party multi-tasking ability.

It's likely a matter of time before you're able to do more simultaneous tasks with at least Apple's own software. Their progress has unfortunately been rather slow on the OS and built-in Apps front. All the same, it's not something you want changing every few weeks either.

Fingers crossed things get better and there's more flexibility down the road. I'm still looking forward to the day we can delete or at least hide built-in applications, including swapping out a different music playing app for the crappy "iPod" app. But I won't hold my breath. Oh, I also despise mobile Safari and wonder if they'll ever fix the poor scaling in WebKit (which also affects desktop Safari betas and Google Chrome).

I haven't read anything that says any different.

The biggest question in my mind about this release is whether anyone will even notice there's a new handset out. So far I've never heard of anyone mentioning anything about the Pre (or Palm at all) in the consumer meat-space. In contrast to the iPhone which was being mentioned by breast-feeding stay-at-home moms while out in malls months before it was ever released.

Come on, that's not a fair comparison at all. Apple could release the Apple i or the iRack and it would be the lead story on CNN. They probably spend more on advertising in a week than Palm has in the last three years. To expect the Pre to get Apple-level hype before launch is plain silly.

I did, but that rarely happens any more, thankfully.

I'm not expecting the Pre to get the level of awareness of the iPhone. However, it already has greater than the amount of hype of any iPhone release from many sources. That's the rub. While it is getting certain media attention and the attention of many analysts, it has little to no consumer mind-share. And I suspect that's not going to change dramatically in the next six months.

Get a load of this most recent blurb from analyst Trip Chowdhry, of Global Equities Research, in an interview with Reuters:



A "superior operating system" (that said analyst hasn't used and hasn't been reviewed by anyone yet) and CDMA now a better telephony technology than GSM.

Many analysts and media are seemingly pushing hard to put the Pre where the iPhone is, while deriding the iPhone in the process. Why? I'm not certain I've seen any negative press about the Pre to tell you the truth. Do you remember how much negative sentiment existed for the iPhone prior to its launch? How many predictions of failure?

Smart money in 2007 was betting that the iPhone was going to change the game. Smart money today is that the Pre isn't going to make even a ripple in the pool, even though it may turn out to be a great product and thoroughly enjoyed by its niche market consumers.

Oh boy. What is that guy on?