Palm Pre is close, but no cigar

Don’t get me wrong. Palm’s keynote at CES was impres­sive (I wasn’t there, but thanks to live­blog­ging from gdgt, Tre­o­Cen­tral and cnet, I feel like I was). Palm’s webOS plat­form and Pre smart­phone take the best of the iPhone and Google Android, mix them together and fix all their flaws. It’s an excel­lent smartphone.

And a year ago, maybe even six months ago, that might have mattered.

The mobile mar­ket is crowded and get­ting more crowded. The line between smart­phones and fea­ture phones is blur­rier than ever, and might be erad­i­cated entirely if Android ful­fills its promise to become the dom­i­nant “fea­ture phone” OS. Here in the US, the bat­tle lines are drawn, with each major car­rier hav­ing a pre­ferred smart plat­form. Ver­i­zon has Black­berry, T-​Mobile has Android, AT&T has the iPhone, and now Sprint has the Pre. And even there, Palm is snatch­ing defeat from the jaws of vic­tory, hitch­ing their wagon to a car­rier that is best known in the last few years for hem­or­rhag­ing cus­tomers and money alike. The Pre doesn’t even sup­port Wimax.

See, here’s the prob­lem. The Pre doesn’t fit. It’s a great smart­phone, but that’s not enough any­more. You have to plug into a whole ecosys­tem to make it work. Palm’s intent is for the Pre (which comes with Exchange OTA sync out of the box) to plug into any­thing, and it might work, but it’s a longshot.

I’ll be stick­ing with Win­dows Mobile for my smart­phone needs at least for another year or so. Because I use Microsoft Office on my other PCs, sync my files with Live Mesh, man­age my media with Win­dows Media Player, email with Exchange, man­age my pho­tos with Live Pho­tos, etc. I use a Microsoft smart­phone because I’ve already bought in to Microsoft ser­vices. And ser­vices are com­ing to drive device selec­tion, not the other way around. And Palm, as cool as their new plat­form is, doesn’t sup­ply services.

Maybe this is where their part­ner announce­ments will pay off. Face­book fea­tured promi­nently in their keynote, as did Google. But can some­one other than Google make a bet­ter Android than Android? I wouldn’t put money on it. Palm’s last fight will be a good one, they’ll go down swing­ing, but the end­ing is not in doubt.

January 8, 2009 · Filed under Technology

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9 Comments »

  1. Harold Said,

    January 8, 2009 @ 5:07 pm

    Jeff — 

    I think you’re wrong. Win­dows Mobile will be old by the time the Pre emerges, and there will be no new ver­sion on the hori­zon, as Microsoft will be focus­ing on get­ting Win­dows 7 out by year’s end.

    I also think the tar­get mar­kets are dif­fer­ent. They may be com­pressed, but they are dif­fer­ent. I know lots of folks who have WinMo phones but no data plans (and no real use for the Win­dows Mobile on their phones).

    I know you have come to love that plat­form, after many years on gar­net. I think you’ll be back by the end of 2009 and run­ning WebOS.

    Harold

  2. Jeff Said,

    January 8, 2009 @ 6:01 pm

    I can’t tell you what Microsoft has in store for Win­dows Mobile, but I’ve seen some of it, and it’s pretty darn cool. And, unlike Palm, it has a full ecosys­tem of other appli­ca­tions and ser­vices from Microsoft to back it up. It’s a shame, really. Palm gets the fact that inte­gra­tion is every­thing, but they don’t con­trol what they inte­grate with the same way Apple, Microsoft and Google do.

  3. Kent Pribbernow Said,

    January 8, 2009 @ 8:01 pm

    It’s amus­ing to that you’ve invested your­self in Microsoft’s ecosys­tem at a time when the mar­ket is mov­ing away from it.

  4. Jeff Said,

    January 8, 2009 @ 8:09 pm

    Who says the mar­ket is mov­ing away from Microsoft’s ecosys­tem? Dell just agreed to replace Google stuff with Live Essen­tials, Win­dows 7 is the most eagerly antic­i­pated ver­sion of Win­dows since 95, and noth­ing can touch Live Mesh for cloud sync. Microsoft is mak­ing some of the best soft­ware on the mar­ket today, but some peo­ple have their minds so already made up that they don’t real­ize it.

  5. Kent Pribbernow Said,

    January 8, 2009 @ 9:34 pm

    Yes, Dell did agree to do that…as part of MONEY deal (i.e. Microsoft paid for space on Dell’s hard dri­ves). That’s hardly an endorse­ment. Win­dows Live is a joke, espe­cially search. Google owns that space for good rea­son — their ecosys­tem is BETTER. And for that rea­son Microsoft is in decline.

    Live, much like every other project Microsoft invests in these days, is merely a response — not an inno­va­tion. If Google entered the toi­let paper busi­ness today Microsoft would buy up Proctor&Gamble and be print­ing rolls of Win­dows Live shit paper by Fri­day morn­ing with­out even fully com­pre­hend­ing why. Look at their schiz­o­phrenic busi­ness strat­egy over the past 3 years: Google seach>Live Search — Google Docs>Office Live — cloud computing>Windows Live Ser­vices — Adobe Flash>Silverlight — iPod>Zune — Vista>OSX. All were responses — and all were infe­rior to rivals.

    The only intel­lec­tual prop­erty Microsoft has exe­cuted well is Xbox, and that even was due is no small part to Sony’s blunders.

    Win­dows 7 the most eagerly awaited ver­sion since 95? Who spiked your Kool-​aid? 7 is a bailout pack­age — a hasty effort to wipe away the fail­ure of Vista. I’m run­ning the build 7000 right now. It’s largely what Vista should have been from the start — MUCH faster, more sta­ble — but still Win­dows — an ecosys­tem in its wan­ing days. Win32 appli­ca­tion envi­ron­ment is dated and appli­ca­tions writ­ten for this plat­form are show­ing their age now. Look a typ­i­cal desk­top app in Vista and com­pare it to a Cocoa app under Leop­ard. They are worlds apart. OSX apps look gor­geous, with pow­er­ful com­po­si­tion layer and OpenGL graph­ics. Microsoft attempted to clone that expe­ri­ence with a hack job ren­der­ing engine in WPF. Only prob­lem is devel­op­ers are refus­ing to develop for it, opt­ing instead to con­tinue writ­ing apps in the XP era Win32 model. The result is the same ugly dated-​looking app run­ning inside a shiny translu­cent win­dow frame. Garbage.

    As for Win­dows Mobile — it now earns the honor of “least desir­able smart­phone plat­form”, look­ing all the more obso­lete by Apple and Google. iPhone is out­selling WM, RIM, and the mar­ket will see a slew of Android hand­sets this year. Microsoft’s share of the mobile pie will shrink right along its share of the browser and desk­top markets.

  6. John Said,

    January 8, 2009 @ 9:50 pm

    (con­tin­ued)

    I hope that I am wrong and that Palm car­ries on with the attrib­utes of rel­a­tive sim­plic­ity of use and robust­ness that I have come to rely on both per­son­ally and professionally.

  7. Jeff Said,

    January 8, 2009 @ 10:35 pm

    Wow, Kent, you really take your email address seriously.

  8. renantech Said,

    January 8, 2009 @ 11:08 pm

    wow nice phone I like it.. I think it is so expensive.

  9. Josh G Said,

    January 9, 2009 @ 12:32 am

    WinMo sold 20 mil­lion hand­sets last year. The iPhone sold 10 mil­lion. WinMo isn’t a dying plat­form just yet, and with Win­dows 7 and every­thing else, Win­dows is shap­ing up to make a come­back in a big way.

    I love what Palm have done here. The Pre is sexy, it’s fast, and it seems to be really sta­ble. It’ll be inter­est­ing to see how it fares in the GSM world :)

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