Why the Palm Pre Will Fail
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The analysis here on HN is 10x better than the article itself.
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This author doesn't seem to understand the implications of having a web-based operating system of the quality that the Palm Pre promises to deliver.
In my opinion, here is a better evaluation of the Palm Pre's business viability: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10234043-94.html. This author also questions the phone's ability to win business users. At the same, he acknowledges the advantages of it's new operating system and a provides a fair evaluation of its UI.
The UI doesn't look as intuitive as the iPhone.
Multitasking sounds good but how well will it work? Apple didn't "overlook" multitasking. They saw that it would be a nightmare in implementing it while maintaining their usability standards and decided against it. If the Pre can't multitask efficiently, it's a useless feature that does more harm than good. And push notifications may be enough for Apple to compete in this area.
QWERTY keyboard. The "big" defense against the iPhone. Having come from using a Blackberry for several years before switching to an iPhone this year, I can say that the virtual keyboard wasn't an issue at all. I'm not sure if the extra bulk of a physical keyboard is necessary, especially if the keys are too small.
SDK - Web O/S sounds "sexy" but it isn't. It's not nearly as powerful and capable as the iPhone's SDK. If you thought the App Store had a lot of noise in it, wait until you see the nonsense that gets churned out by Pre "developers". Which brings me too:
App Store - This was the killer feature of the iPhone v2. The built-in phone interface and integration with iTunes was killer. And the ALREADY ESTABLISHED popularity of the iPhone was enough to convince big time developers (and the small guys) to invest the time into developing for the iPhone. The Palm doesn't have this luxury. How well the Palm interfaces with it's app store and how well it integrates into synching with a computer remains to be seen. I doubt the Pre will have anywhere close to the quality of apps that the iPhone has.
Hype - Hype (and killer demos) brought initial conversions for the iPhone to AT&T. The quality of the phone continues to bring them in. The Pre doesn't have this level of hype. In the tech sphere, it has hype, but nowhere close to the iPhone. And outside of the tech world, it's a big nothing. And Palm doesn't have the money Apple had to market their new phone.
Release - When the iPhone released, the "gold standard" was the Blackberry, with great email, and awful internet browsing. The iPhone changed the smartphone game. Now everyone has consumer smartphones. The Pre doesn't change the game. They are just doing the same thing as everyone else. They have nicer features but it's not enough to shift markets like the iPhone did.
Some of the minor features - Cut and paste. Never a big deal for me that the iPhone didn't have it. I can think of maybe 3 times in the past year that I wanted to copy and paste something. Once again, on a pure touch phone, cut and paste probably wasn't easy to do without hurting something else. The new iPhone software supports it and it's adequate enough.
Price - iPhone wins by costing $200 out the door. Not a $300 price with a $100 mail in rebate. And if the rumors are true that the 8GB iPhone will be dropped to $99, it's goodnight Palm.
The UI looks great. In fact, I think it's better than the iPhone's in many ways. The calendar, contacts feature, the merging of conversations across different platforms, and the universal search are all great, for example. It all seems super-slick.
Multitasking looks great, and it's a massive oversight in the iPhone's featureset. The fact that you can't run a MSN Messenger client or a streaming audio application in the background, for example, kind of cripples it. The fact that Apple hasn't managed to do it doesn't mean that the Pre can't, any more than the fact that Internet Explorer Mobile didn't mean that the iPhone browser was crap. The card interface in particular looks fantastically intuitive and deserves all the praise it gets. On the other hand, "Notifications" are simply a poor substitute from proper multitasking functionality. I think Apple will reveal proper multitasking, possibly exclusive to a next-gen iPhone, over the next year.
People are divided over the QWERTY people, but it's undeniable that it some people prefer physical buttons. In particular, the audience that Palm are likely aiming at, which is primarily business Blackberry users, prefer physical keyboards. I don't think trying to differentiate itself from the iPhone will do them any harm though.
I've not used the SDK, but I understand their approach. It's a trade-off. It's not very useful for real-time applications like games. However, web applications are becoming more and more popular, even on the desktop with applications like AIR. Whatsmore, people know HTML/CSS/JS tech (particularly compared to Objective-C), and that makes it easy for them to encourage people to develop applications on their platform, even if it remains a niche. It seems like a reasonable trade-off. I'm not convinced games are really that important either, the case in point being Mac OS X users.
The iPhone has a leg up over the Pre in sheer quantity of applications. On the other hand, long did Palm OS and Windows Mobile. And Windows still does over Mac OS X. It doesn't really matter as long as there's thriving communities on all unless there's one single-platform "killer app" which can't easily be replicated on the others, which currently doesn't, and is unlikely to, exist. All that matters is that there is a thriving developer ecosystem.
Hype doesn't have to equal to sales, as Blackberry and Nokia have shown by outselling the iPhone in the United States and Europe. It's also worth adding that if Palm sell half the amount of units that Apple do, they'd probably be celebrating in the streets and their share price would rocket. Palm's measure of success is almost certainly not anywhere near "beating the iPhone".
If we measure success by innovation and "X did it first", Opera would be the most popular browser on the planet and we'd all be running BeOS right around now. Being a "game changer" really doesn't matter in the long-term.
The price is higher. But it is a brand new phone with a brand new operating system, and they likely want to charge early adopters more. I doubt Palm are going to choose the Apple pricing strategy of keeping the price static for months or even years, and are more likely to compete in price as time goes on, especially when their exclusivity agreement ends and if they remain the underdog.
There's also other reasons. The fact it's on a different network to the competition works in its favour - not everyone has a choice of having good coverage for all the networks. The lack of a removable battery has likely discouraged corporate users from the iPhone. The DOC/PPT/XLS and PDF viewer will appeal to corporate users and is a nice touch. I regard avoiding iTunes as a big win. A decent camera with flash is a nice touch too.
Well, take a look what kind of apps take the top spots on AppStore. However the most amusing thing in this kind of discussion is a take on SDK. When Apple initially offered to develop apps using web technology it was greated with "booo". Now Palm says the same and it is greated with "Wow, cool". Go figure.
On the other hand, Palm are offering their web development platform as a first-class platform where the applications look, act like, and feel like native applications, as well as providing full interfaces to local APIs.
I don't think games are that important. The Sims sold 16 million copies, but no-one bought a PC simply to play The Sims. I think the same is true for phones - for the vast majority of people it's a nicety rather than a true selling point.
The difference between the Palm SDK and the iPhone web API is that they've extended the web apis to build regular palm apps -- the builtin apps are (afaik, mostly) built with the same APIs provided to developers.
Also:
1. Palm knows PDAs. The iPhone's calendaring and contact management is toyish at best compared to what we had on the old PalmOS.
2. Palm also knows how to treat developers better. HN's full of complains by iPhone developers on the App Store process. Palm's had a strong developer community before, and they treated them (us -- I was one of them) well.
As for games, I can say that I've never played a native OSX game in my 6 years of using Macs. However, I have an entire page of games on my iPhone. They wouldn't be a deal breaker for me but they're pretty nifty to have around and the power of the SDK allows them to be much more sophisticated on the iPhone than the Pre.
I'm also not convinced that the Pre is a business smartphone. It seems heavily designed as a consumer product.
Your comment on the quantity of applications is misguided. Palm OS and Windows Mobile never had the popularity that the App Store does. The App Store changed the mobile app distribution game completely. Your comment on Blackberry and Nokia "outselling" the iPhone is also a bit silly. The Blackberry Curve was the #1 smartphone but they were also selling them as a 2 for 1 deal and on multiple carriers. And if you account for all RIMM models, of course they're going to have a larger share. They have multiple models on every carrier. What the iPhone has done as a single phone on a single carrier has not be duplicated and the Pre certainly won't be the one that matches its success.
Also being a game-changer may not matter in the long-term. However, for a company like Palm that doesn't have a lot of money and is essentially going "all-in" with Web O/S, the short term is much more relevant. This company was essentially done with until the Pre was announced and they needed a substantial investor to come in to finance the launch of the Pre. Also, with cell phones in the U.S., we are used to 2 year gaps between changing devices and carriers. Being a game changer makes people switch. Doing something different but not necessarily better, does not.
As for games, I play them on my PC (I have a hundred games in Steam), but I don't play them on my phone, which suggests we agree that it's of secondary importance and people only get them when they're available.
Perhaps "business" is the wrong term, but I meant that hte emphasis is on "professionals". Those people who buy Blackberry's, those who used to buy Palm products, who have particular need for features like contact sync, multiple calendars, and other similar features, rather than real-time features like games. I think it will be these users who will really feel the benefit from multitasking on their productivity, because, for example, being able to flip between an e-mail and a calendar would be extremely useful.
I think my main point about applications makes sense. The point is there may be more applications on Platform X than Platform Y, but as long as there are no "killer apps" and both have thriving developer communities that's all that matters.
I think my comparison with Blackberry and Nokia was perfectly apt, because that's the market Palm are actually entering. Palm are going to be releasing many phones on many networks on multiple price points based on the same operating system - the Pre is just the first of many. If you were to believe the hype, you'd imagine that Blackberry and Nokia don't matter, rather than selling the millions of smartphones they do, and that Palm couldn't potentially have huge success without selling their phones to a single iPhone customer. I think it's only fair to compare it to other manufacturers on many carriers, not Apple's self-enforced network limitations.
I'd be very interesting in reading what you personally think Palm should be doing, because apparently a relatively small company building something that compares favourably to the market leaders in their (expanding) product area isn't good enough. I think the Pre is exactly the product they should be making rather than forgettable Windows Mobile handsets, and I think the fact we're actually having this discussion and the hype over the Pre shows that to true.
It's a trade-off. It's not very useful for real-time applications like games.
However, web applications are becoming more and more popular, even on the
desktop with applications like AIR. Whatsmore, people know HTML/CSS/JS tech
(particularly compared to Objective-C), and that makes it easy for them to
encourage people to develop applications on their platform, even if it
remains a niche.
And now this is considered a developer attraction point of the Pre? I've worked with development languages from C to VB to Scheme, and compared to the current stack related to web development, Obj-C and Interface Builder is cake, cake, compared with the amalgamated hodgepodge that is HTML/DOM/CSS/JS...
I think creating a web-driven SDK would have been good thing, if nothing else to increase the development opportunities of non-Mac users.
(Well, technically, you can, but you do it by creating a stub ObjC wrapper around a WebKit view and point it at your HTML content... but that's not satisfying enough for most users, since you lose some UI functionality, like multitouch and sensor detection that way.)
* The UI looks extremely good and intuitive. This is the biggest factor in people like iPhone. Blackberry and Nokia though that adding a touch screen to their existing clunky interface is sufficient but it was not be
* Verizon will carry Palm Pre in 6 months. This is really big. verizon is huge and has much better coverage than Sprint or At&T. They have been losing some customers to AT&T due to iPhone. Pre will allow them to stop that slide and offer a real competitor to iPhone. This is a win-win for both Palm and Verizon. Many were of the opinion that the biggest weakness of Pre might be its sole association with Sprint. If verizon backs Pre, it has a huge potential to be a hit. http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSN283374932009...
* Palm Pre Will Sync With iTunes: The feature will be built right into the device so you don’t need any third party software. But it won’t be able to play the songs you bought from iTunes Store as they have DRM. http://www.tuaw.com/2009/05/28/fortune-palm-pre-syncs-flawle...
Anyways, unless Pre attracts developers it is just a phone. The iPhone is almost another new gaming market and that is just one facet of the developer attractor.
Of course, I speak as an iPhone afficionado, so I'm probably one of those irrational Apple fans that just won't buy the "better" phone.
Isn't the ideal that our choices always produce the best results? So why would you choose the counter intuitive of picking the worst result?
Curious.
PS. Not saying the Pre > iPhone, but your statement is rather ... strange.
I'm willing to bet that iPhone users will generally continue to stick with the iPhone because a) they're familiar with it and generally pleased with it, b) they have certain investments in apps/iTunes that won't transfer.
I doubt there will be any mass exodus of iPhone customers. I'm sure MANY of them took the re-up deal with the 3G release.