Palm Pre – Latest from Palm is Reviewed Around the Web

I’m pretty sure that you’ve heard a little rumble about Palm’s new smartphone over the last couple days. Palm has been trying hard to generate some buzz around their all new smartphone which runs their new “webOS”. So far, it seems to be working. It hasn’t reached the level of buzz that Apple managed to generate.

Palm first announced the Pre back in January at CES in Las Vegas. Last Saturday, Palm, along with Sprint, officially launched the Pre to mixed reviews. It’s still early and there’s a lot of miss-information floating around about this new device. The biggest concern seems to be around battery life and whether the device has enough power to make it through a day. We’ll have to wait for more tests to see how it fairs with daily usage.

If you’re looking to learn more about Palms new device, check out the list of reviews that Craig has assembled over at GearBits. It’s a great list of reviews and provides a great amount of information about the Pre. Give it a read and see what people are saying about the latest device from Palm.

Will the Pre be Palm’s Tonic?

I got thinking about the Palm Pre the other day and started wondering if it will be enough to save Palm.

First let me say that I think the Pre is great and is certainly going to be a successful product on its own but I would think it would have to be a smashing success to keep a whole company afloat. Yes, Palm still has the Treo Pro and Centro but those have not been anywhere near hot enough to get Palm out of its financial hole despite the number of units they have sold.

The argument of whether the Pre is going to be better than the iPhone, Blackberry, Windows Phone or Nokia is not the question here. There is no doubt that many will prefer the Pre and as such will buy one. But the Pre would need to be a runaway commercial success and I don’t think that it will.

Most of the buzz for the Pre has been coming from people that know about mobile phones. They can see that much of what Palm has done has been a very nice evolutionary step for smartphones, especially for social networking smartphones. They understand how different those things are from current offerings and are able to decide whether they will buy one or not. Still, many of these mobile enthusiasts will just take a wait-and-see approach because they already have a smartphone that works just fine.

So, who will buy the Pre? Will it convert the faithful from the iPhone? Will it erode Windows Phone sales? Is the Blackberry is danger of losing some of its momentum? Or will it draw in an all new crowd of feature phone users that are ready to upgrade to the big time?

All of the above platforms are going to have some defectors, but again, Pre needs to be a very big success to keep Palm alive. Let’s take a look at each of the above.

First, iPhone: I highly doubt we are going to see a lot of people dropping their iPhones for the Pre. The iPhone will do most of what the Pre will do and the iPhone has some kind of Voodoo hold on its user’s minds. Most are white-knuckling their iPhones and will not let go for anything. Plus, with 3.0 coming out they have more functionality to play with. I just don’t think there will be a lot of people walking out of the iPhone camp.

Windows Mobile users: I can see Pre actually stealing a lot of the Windows Phone users. WM users tend to be less emotionally tied to the OS than iPhone users; it’s more about functionality. If the Pre can do everything WM can then it is not a hard decision. Unfortunately for the Palm they are really targeting consumers and not business users with the Pre. There are bound to be a lot of WM users that will consider the Pre to be only for social networking despite this not being the case. Plus, WM come in MANY different shapes and sizes while the Pre is only coming out in one form (unless the Palm Eos is real).

Blackberry: Nope. I just don’t see this affecting Blackberry sales much at all. Blackberry phones are like cockroaches (is it possible to mean that in a good way?), they can survive anything!

Feature and regular cellphone users: Sure, there will be a good number that decide to make the move up and get a Pre but I still doubt the numbers are going to be significant enough. Many just want their phone to be phones and don’t want the added expense of a data plan.

The bottom line is that the Pre has a chance of keeping Palm alive but I think it is a pretty slim one. It’s going to be a fantastic phone but I doubt it is going to be enough for Palm’s ultimate survival. If Palm was to follow up the Pre with a number of new form factors they would potentially be able to create enough momentum to make it through but that takes money and erodes the profitability of the Pre itself.

Honestly, I hope I am wrong. I was a Palm user all the way back to the III and used to write a guide to sales software for Palm. I would love to see them survive and bring out more products like the Pre. I just can’t help but think that they will end up being bought out by someone else. That isn’t all bad as long as they can remain intact as a group in order to continue to advance the platform, but only time will tell if that future is autonomous for Palm.