Palm’s patience pays off with the Pre
Saturday morning Cameron and I ventured out at 6 AM looking for a Sprint store in Chicago (we were there for Adwords Seminar for Success, Pay-Per-Click training which was really good).
We were 5′th and 6′th in line and the store opened at 8. We managed to get 3 Pre’s between us (I got one for myself and one for my wife) after waiting a couple of hours.The phone is amazing - I do have some gripes (the email app seems too clunky, the battery life isn’t great and I often find myself wanting to type when I’m in landscape mode, which isn’t possible), but overall the phone blows me away. I love loading up one window and running a big report and going and doing something else while it runs.
This post isn’t really about that, though - if you want a more in-depth review check out PalmPreReviews.net, Cameron’s Pre site.What I’m really impressed with is the leadership and vision of Palm’s management - a year ago I thought the company was on life support and would be going under. I loved my Centro, but was looking longingly at the iPhone and even the Samsung Instinct. Palm seemed to have lost the “cool factor” they once had.
And boy did the press notice - they were beat up for being out of touch and stuck in a different era. The Foleo was an epic disaster that made everybody wonder who could have allowed such a catastrophe to happen. But with an ace up their sleeve Palm just bided their time.
There was some chatter in late December/early January that Palm was introducing a new phone - finally we got a peek at the Pre at CES and the rest was history - five months later and they were finally available. A lot of people try to tell me that Palm built the Pre in those 5 months - that’s simply not possible. In 5 months they probably had enough time to find and fix major bugs and sharpen up a few features, but they couldn’t have done the bulk of the heavy lifting - that must have been in the works while Palm was constantly being criticized for being behind the times and clueless about what consumers wanted.
So what’s the moral of the story? Don’t listen to the haters. Palm didn’t even worry about it because they knew they were going to release a device that would raise the bar, even for the king of cool, the iPhone. They played it cool and now they have the last laugh.
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I love the pre too - the size is a lot more convenient than the iphone. The design is sleek (and it really makes the iphone look a bit outdated!). I also like that i can run multiple apps at once.
Comment by Jenny — June 9, 2009 @ 9:52 pm
Nice article - I agree. I always thought Palm could do more - they just had a really hard time with that whole operating system thing (selling it off, buying it back, etc.). Once they got reorganized I knew they would come up with something good.
Once the Pre comes to AT&T I’ll probably get one.
Comment by sam — June 9, 2009 @ 11:33 pm
webOS and the real keyboard were the tipping point for me to get the Pre over the iPhone.
Comment by cameron — June 10, 2009 @ 8:42 am
I have an iphone and love it - I’m just glad that there’s something out there that will hopefully help raise the bar.
Comment by tim — June 12, 2009 @ 12:28 pm
dang, you gotsa be pymp statuz to be able to have a pr3…
excuse me while i leech some link juice ^_^ Future Tech
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