Bloomberg.com:
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Palm Inc.’s new Pre smart phone will lure customers away from Apple Inc.’s iPhone when subscribers’ contracts start expiring in June, Palm investor Roger McNamee said.
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee said today in an interview in San Francisco. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”
Wow. Talk about myopia. Daring Fireball commented: “Not sure why he’d want to raise expectations like this.”
I have the answer. The reason why he wants to raise expectations is that Palm is D-E-S-P-E-R-A-T-E for a buyout, while the company is still solvent. They have completely squandered the dominant position in the PDA market, and succeeded in pissing away any momentum they had in the smartphone market. And now they’re on the verge of death. They released a “me too” iPhone clone OS called Pre, hoping against hope that they could somehow convince developers to ignore the App Store and develop for this totally new and untested (and completely incompatible with everything else in the world, including their own legacy platforms) smartphone OS.
Palm is going to die. Sad, but true. They’ve been circling the drain for some time now, and rightly so. They had it all and they squandered it away, watching as Microsoft bumbled around with Windows Mobile for *years* and then having the nerve to act surprised when Blackberry hopped on the scene, and then again when Apple released the iPhone platform.
Hobbes,
Sure, Palm is desperate for a buyout; they have absolutely squandered the last five years or so, and made some idiotic moves in that time as well.
But, I for one hope they succeed with the Pre. Why? Because Apple has no direct competition at this time with the iPhone, and competition is what drives innovation.
We must admit it: the iPhone is almost stagnant. Sure, 2.0 brought some cool new features, but the platform is crying for innovation: email search, cut and paste, notebook tethering, etc. No OS extensions are allowed, and Apple is being really slow about innovating there.
Yeah, I realize those features as not innovations, but they are desperately needed nonetheless. The prohibition of OS extensions is stifling innovation.
IMHO, there is no competition to the iPhone. I suppose Android could be competing, but I’ve not seen anything terribly interesting there yet. I think if it was such an awesome phone, I’d’ve seen one in the wild by now, especially considering the geekery I work among. I have not.
The Blackberry Bold is a complete joke, from what I’ve seen, and a sad one at that; it should have been much better. Nokia continues to be completely, surprisingly, and even disappointingly silent in this market.
Which leave us with Palm. Everything I’ve seen about the Pre to date has been incredibly impressive. I’d love to get back into the Palm ecosystem, where development and creativity was much stronger than what we’ve seen to date on the iPhone. Alas, that whole ecosystem is teetering on a precipice, awaiting the Pre’s success to push it back. Such a scenario is nowhere near assured.
My two-year anniversary with my iPhone is coming up in June. My AppleCare will be expiring then, and I will need to buy a new phone. If the Pre is shipping then, and if Palm is still viable, I will seriously consider a Pre. I don’t think they’re shipping until later in the year. I honestly have no idea what I will do at the time.
I am not looking forward to buying an iPhone 3G. My service contract will be more expensive. The phone doesn’t seem near as durable as the first gen, since it’s no longer made of metal. Hm.
Please don’t get me wrong. I love my iPhone; it is by far the best phone I’ve seen. I know it can be better, and I don’t see the proper environment for those improvements to develop on their own.
I wish things looked better, both for Palm and for the iPhone.
Wes