International Mac Podcast

Alright, it’s time for some honesty on my part. I wasn’t satisfied by the number of comments on my last ‘Keaton On’ post, so I’ve decided to put my life on the line and go on a serious first-to-palm (see what I did there?) Pre-bash-athon. Yes, I do remember the last time I bashed Palm for the Pre on Twitter, ending with my own all-too-public humiliation. Now, after spending 5 months in the fetal position, sucking my thumb and crying for my mommy, I’ve done some actual research (a.k.a. I skimmed the Wikipedia article) on the Pre, and have a whole new set of reasons why it will fail. Muahahahaha!

Reason #1: Two years too late

Lets face it, as we’ve seen with the iPod, peer pressure is a powerful thing. Sure, there are many MP3 players that have way more features than the iPod does, and they’ve been around for years, but the iPod is still ridiculously dominant in that market. The truth is, “better than the iPod” doesn’t cut it at all, when you’re going against a device which has so much ‘cool factor’ attributed to it, you need to be “lightyears ahead of the iPod in every way.” The same is true for the iPhone, the iPhone OS is on over 30 MILLION devices, iPod Touches and iPhones are selling like crazy (and crazy sells very fast). If Palm wants to reverse that, they Pre had better be a telepathic, holographic phone that only costs $10 and gets free service for life. It isn’t, it’s just another slight improvement on the iPhone. This may be my most overused phrase of all time, but “it’s Evolutionary, not Revolutionary”. The iPhone was revolutionary, hence its success; if Palm wants to be successful they can’t compete with the iPhone, they have to invent something totally new.

Reason #2: One year too late

It was almost one year ago that the already popular iPhone launched its app store. The iPhone app store now contains over 50,000 apps that have been downloaded over a billion times, and it’s growing at an ever-increasing rate from there. The Apple App store launched with 500 apps, Palm launched with 18, so Apple started out with 27 times more apps. Of course, that would have been if both stores had launched at the same time, but as the title states, the Palm store is a year late, so the Apple app store now has a slightly bigger heads-up on Palm’s, something on the order of 28,000:1. More than that, Palms APIs are, for the time being, completely JavaScript based, so is has almost no potential as a gaming platform. As a high-school student, I can tell you that a large portion of iPod Touch sales are specifically for said games, so Palm’s app store is missing out on a gigantic market there.

Reason #3: Too business-oriented

I think of the Pre as sort of a mashup between the iPhone and the Blackberry. Many of the Pre’s coolest new features fall on the business end of things. Unfortunately, the “Hardcore businessman who requires a shiny looking phone” market is virtually non-existent. The Pre may very well be better than the Blackberry at enterprise stuff (I can’t say for sure though, having used/needed either and never having worked at any company at all), but probably not enough so to convince hard-core Blackberry users to switch. Sure, it’s got all sorts of cool contact sync and whatnot, but it’s way more expensive than a Blackberry and might provide a bit of a learning curve to people who have only ever used RIM’s very simplistic menu-based OS.

Reason #4: Missing features

The iPhone has long been known as the phone that lacks many of the basic features that other phones have had forever. With the announcement of iPhone OS 3.0 and the iPhone 3GS, Apple has added in almost every feature that users have complained about. So, now the feature-lacking-phone moniker must be passed on to another phone, and in this case I think it might be the Pre. The iPhone now has video recording, the Pre does not. The iPhone now has Voice Control, the Pre does not.  The iPhone has as much as 32gb of storage, the Pre only has 8gb. Of course, it’s not fair to mention the features the iPhone has that the Pre doesn’t without mentioning what the Pre has over the iPhone. The Pre has a physical keyboard, the iPhone doesn’t. The Pre can multi-task, the iPhone can’t. So which feature set is better? Well, it depends on the user, but most of the iPhone users I know have adapted to the keyboard and don’t seem to mind the one-app-at-a-time rule too much, but depend greatly on their precious storage. Sure, the first-gen Pre is way more advanced than the first-gen iPhone, but that harkens back to the “Two Years Late” thing.

Reason #5: UI & Design

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the Pre looks like a Fisher-Price iPhone. Every surface is strangely curved, as if to prevent people from accidently cutting themselves on it, even the UI is ridiculously curved. All of the features look over-exaggerated, especially the speaker at the top. The matte-background on the keyboard looks completely out of place, and whatever that home button is made of, it’s just strange. Maybe it’s just the product shots I’m looking at, but it looks very cheap, like they couldn’t spare the extra ten cents on some decent plastic. The UI provides a nice way to handle multiple processes, but it seems like it takes up way to much of the screen, and isn’t quite as drop-dead simple as the iPhones UI. So why does it matter?  Again, being a high school student, I’ve seen how much of a style icon a persons phone is. You don’t want to carry around an ugly phone any more than you want to wear a plaid kilt, huge-rimmed glasses, and a button-up shirt with multiple pocket-protectors.

Reason #6: Hype

I was about to write a whole long paragraph about this, but then I realized this article completely proves my point for me, so there is very little need to go into any further detail.

All of that being said, the Pre is not a bad phone, but I think the hype among geeks doesn’t necessarily reflect the hype among the rest of the world. Cool phone, yes. Successful enough for Palm and Sprint to stay in buisiness, maybe. iPhone killer, hell no.