Why the Palm Pre Will Fail | Hacker News Reader

Why the Palm Pre Will Fail

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7 pointsahoyhere10 comments

I think a better title for this article would be "Why the Palm Pre Will Fail to be an Immediate Smash Hit Like the iPhone". (Maybe there wasn't enough space)

Here's hoping that Palm has the financial resources to withstand a slow uptake. I love my iPhone, but I hope Palm succeeds here. Competition == good

Indeed! I got a chance to handle the pre and it's not a bad phone. I had a bunch of nits with it, but it was a pre-production phone. I think it'll do well.

Crap, this post is pretty contentless....hmm...one nit they won't fix is the screen is , like the iphone, bezeless, but they take it a bit futher and mask/darken the edges of the ui to make the screen a more integrated thing with the whole device. That said, it makes it feel thicker and not in a substantive way.

I also felt the slide out mechanism had too much friction to it in the middle of the slide out. (but I think they can fix that?). But compared to a genera=berry or ericcsson it's wildly better. I'd say its philisophically between my droid and the iphone, but I'd prefer either of them to it. So, if they can get the price point well under both of them it'll do fine. (the price has more to do with a phones popularity than most other factors)

I don't know much about the cellular demographics so it is difficult to argue that but some of his 'gotchas' are a little silly.

>One analyst predicts fewer than 150,000 units units at launch.

This is because Palm knows its audience. No one who wants a Palm Pre is going to sit in a line like they are waiting for Halo 2. Why would they overstock stores and allow media spin it as a massive failure before it even truly launches?

>The second major "gotcha" is that we're in a massive recession. People aren't buying phones like they would in better economic times.

This makes sense and all but the Pre isn't competing against the iPhones ALREADY sold. It is competing against the iPhone being released this quarter. Which will endure the same economic terms.

But iPhones are showing huge gains among the lower income classes. And middle to upper class kids are getting them as birthday presents when they turn insert-teen-age-here.

They have totally crossed the chasm.

The Pre hasn't even begun. And the author makes an excellent case for why it won't.

And here's one he left off: Apple has experience making this chasm-crossing happen. Palm does not.

Can we at least wait until people have the possibility to try it out before debating that? The title is as likely as "Why the Windows 8 will fail". The author doesn't know what kind of apps will be available, doesn't know how Pre usability will be received by a "typical user", doesn't know a lot of things that people from Palm already know.

Yet people from Palm decide to launch and I believe they have much better market analysts than Joe random blogger. Can't we leave "Why the <thing that is not even available yet> will fail" topics for sensationalist blogs? They sure like earning ad revenue during events such as Pre launch and will write anything to get more clicks.

I'm really impressed that Palm was able to create a product with the potential of the Pre, given the number of nails in Palm's coffin before this. With Rubenstein at the helm (being a previous Apple guy), they just might pull this off. Not instantly -- the iPhone won't be dethroned now. But WebOS actually sounds like a promising operating system, and given a few years we might see real competition from WebOS as a platform. One phone won't do it, but over time this should bring good competition for Apple.

Google should buy Palm and graft the UI part of WebOS onto Android, with the V8 Javascript interpreter running natively. Better yet, Google could have both Palm Pre and the Android phones. The point is to position Google as the search/infrastructure provider for the mobile internet. Having three brands deeply integrated with Google (iPhone, Pre, Android) will provide an even deeper market penetration.

Fullily, the pre' os model would be very easy to support inside the browser on an android. Watch Dan Morrill's talk 'how can I code thee' when it hits youtube and you'll see how you could expose different internals to such a thing. And someone asks him this very question, and his answer was really interesting (that question might have been posed at the Fireside chat we did, too, so check that)

It's worth saying that there doesn't need to be an acquisition of palm for us to work well together, you know?

That said, I prefer the android approach to a mobile os. (but I work at google and help with android, so grain of salt...)

This item was here on HN before http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=630116

"Palm's new phone will be June's flavor of the month"

He forgot the new iPhone will be out in the same month.

And also forgot the power of the Apple brand.

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