I’ve had my hands on the upcoming Palm Pre
for a few days now and have followed the development of this device / platform
for over a year. What I
really love about this product is that Palm demonstrated that the latest and
greatest technology or some novel feature is not always what is necessary to
drive interest / demand for a product. The new Palm Pre more then anything else innovated
upon the experience with a mobile device.
Palm took the most used applications phone,
contacts, and calendar and made them all better. They looked deeply at what people do and want to
do with their mobile devices and brought developed features, software and user
experience that helps people do the single most important thing a mobile device
is used for and that is communication.
Things like universal
search make finding a contact very quick and easy but then by integrated all
the options you have to communicate with this contact, IM, text, call etc and
quickly gives you the option to communicate with people. Communicating is key and making
communication easier is what Palm had done with the Pre.
Now I can’t talk about the Pre without
talking about the Web Operating System, which will be so central to Palm as a
company moving forward.
I agree with many in the media who are optimistically criticizing the
beta application store that will be available on the Pre. That being said I think it is
important to understand that the way Palm has architected this Web OS is
intentionally in a way so that creating software for the Pre is essentially as
easy as creating software for the web. Now in case it is missed this is largely
important because what they have done is offered to the software development
community a platform that does not require a new language or a new / foreign
development environment.
Simply their message to developers is: If you can write software for the
web you can write software for the Pre. This essentially gives them one of the largest
software development communities right out of the gate. This point cannot be overlooked
by the industry because it is a very strong position for software development
on the Pre platform.
No one will argue that in the smart phone
space we are well beyond our fascination with hardware and we are into our love
affair with software on these devices. One of the primary purchase decisions for the iPhone
currently is the apps, there’s an app for that. Apple has made great strides and will continue to make
great strides attracting great software developers who will develop great
software. Apple’s developer community will
continue to grow but what Palm has done was instantly open themselves to the
millions of people who write software for the web, essentially giving them one
of the largest software development community’s day one.
Now Palm is not without some pretty
significant hurdles to overcome.
Getting volumes of Pre’s in the hands of consumers so there is a strong
user base for developers to develop for, adding other carriers, and many
more. For Palm however the scariest
challenge is the company a few cities away from them, Apple.
One thing I know for sure is that Apple will
keep innovating. They
understand what it takes to compete in this market and what their consumers
want like no other company in the consumer business. Yet I would not count Palm out, their brand is solid,
they are the first device the media is acknowledging competes with the iPhone
and I would not count them out.
However my advice to Palm is: Do not take
your foot of the innovation pedal, in fact press it to the floor.
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