For Palm, Yet Another Wrenching Crisis

I'd love to do some Palm development, but even the photo upload stats (recent news on YC) show Android is the next best place to be, not that far behind Apple (l)App(land).

On first play, the Palm WebOS is really nice, but if there's no audience, why would I want to bust a gut developing and supporting an app.

So despite the Android geeky reputation, the Android emus are not actually that bad. Not Apple levels of polish, but it has a rough sort of charm... Though I do hope the actual phone runs faster than the emu on my iMac.

One of their failings has been a lackluster ad champaign. Ads for Pre are poor at showing off any of the phones capabilities. More importantly, the market is split between Android and iPhone with Verizon and AT&T acting as proxies. Each of their ads implicitly or explicitly plays to that standoff. They ignore Palm and Sprint as non-existent, and the later have failed to place themselves somewhere within that environment as well.

Maybe the future for Palm would be to preempt Google and go without being attached to any one carrier.

I would risk saying that launching a phone that could actually function outside the US would be a smart move.

Seriously: unless they can't build enough of them to cover for the lower than expected sales, it makes no sense to neglect the rest of the planet as a potential market.

Pre and Pixi compare favorably to both iPhone and Android offerings. I see no reason to actively prevent sales on GSM markets. It looks downright dumb.

With the low number of apps, the good news is that good Palm Pre apps get noticed a lot more easily.

There are opportunities to be the big fish in a smaller pond.