Pre starts off behind the eight ball

From c|net:

Sprint Nex­tel and Palm announced on Tues­day an offi­cial release date and pric­ing for the Palm Pre.

The Pre will be avail­able nation­wide on June 6 for $199.99 after a $100 mail-​in rebate and with a two-​year con­tract on Sprint’s Every­thing Data plan or Busi­ness Essen­tials with Mes­sag­ing and Data plan. In addi­tion to Sprint stores, the Pre will be sold online and at Best Buy, RadioShack, and some Wal-​Mart Stores.

Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Pretty much what we expected, and com­pet­i­tive with cur­rent iPhones.

Sorta. Don’t for­get to read the fine print. Like how that $200 price tag is after a mail-​in rebate, so it will actu­ally cost you $300+tax to walk out of the store with it. And then there’s the date, June 6^th. That gives them 48 hours to sell this thing before Apple announces the iPhone 3.0 at WWDC. From Wired:

The source told iPhone fan blog Apple iPhone Apps that the new iPhone will launch July 17. Many of the pro­vided spec­i­fi­ca­tions cor­rob­o­rate with past rumors that the device will intro­duce a dig­i­tal com­pass and a video recorder, among other fea­tures. (The source did not pro­vide a photo; the image to the right is from a past rumor report for the sake of com­par­i­son.) Here’s the list:

• 32GB and 16GB stor­age (up from the cur­rent 16GB and 8GB models)
• $199 and $299 price points to be maintained
• 3.2-megapixel cam­era (up from the cur­rent 2-​megapixel camera)
• Video-​recording and edit­ing capabilities
• Abil­ity to send a pic­ture & video via MMS
• Dis­con­tin­u­a­tion of the metal band sur­round­ing the edge of the device
• OLED screen
• 1.5 times the bat­tery life of the cur­rent models
• Dou­ble the RAM and pro­cess­ing power
• Built-​in FM transmitter
• Apple logo on back will glow
• Rubber-​tread backing
• Sleeker design
• Built-​in compass
• The cam­era, GPS, com­pass and Google map com­bined will iden­tify photo and inform about photo locations
• Turn-​by-​turn directions

Again, this is pretty much what we expected, though both I and Wired find the FM trans­mit­ter and OLED screen details a lit­tle dicey. But the rest parses with what I’ve heard else­where, as well as fit­ting Apple’s evo­lu­tion­ary update style.

So, this means the Pre will have 41 days, not quite six weeks, to sell against the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of iPhones. But once July 17 rolls around, the Pre will have half the stor­age of the sim­i­larly priced iPhone (8GB vs 16GB at the $200 price point, or a quar­ter of the 32GB that costs the same $300 as the pre-​rebate Pre) and will lose a lot of the soft­ware advan­tages the Pre has over the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion iPhones. The iPhone 3.0 firmware will pro­vide sim­i­lar uni­ver­sal search and push noti­fi­ca­tion fea­tures that the Pre will already have, clos­ing the gap between the two plat­forms. The Pre will still have true mul­ti­task­ing, but rumor has it Apple’s look­ing into that as well, and I can attest it’s not hard to add on your own (I love being able to play Pan­dora in the back­ground while I’m reading).

And on the other side, Black­berry Curves are out­selling the iPhone if you count all the Curve mod­els as one. And for half the price of the Pre. So I don’t think Palm is going to cut nearly as much into the full QWERTY mes­sen­ger mar­ket as they will into the sleek touch screen smart­phone market.

Is the Pre, on Sprint, worth pay­ing the same price for half the capac­ity com­pared to an iPhone 3.0 on AT&T?