Palm’s Pre-emptive Strike – An Act of War, or Ho-hum?

It’s official. Palm announced this morning that it will be releasing its new touch screen phone, the Palm Pre, two days before Apple’s Steve-less Steve-note address at the WWDC on June 8th. Will Palm’s preemptive strike be enough to steal the thunder from the iPhone? Is this a serious threat to the iPhone? We got our hands on the Palm Pre and here’s what we think.

First off, the Palm Pre is a very mature, well-designed device. The ergonomics are nice, the slightly rounded back feels great in your hand. The screen is sharp and seems smaller than the iPhone’s screen, but then maybe that’s because there’s a black border around the screen which makes it appear smaller than it needs to be. The touchscreen interface is very intuitive, borrowing familiar gestures from the iPhone, Apple patents be damned. The slide-out qwerty keyboard is a great feature that will instantly appeal to BlackBerry users, although the buttons are very small and take some time to get used to.

Overall, we like the Palm Pre, very much. In addition to the tactile keyboad, the Pre has other noteworthy advantages over the iPhone platform. The most significant of these features is its support for background processes. This means you can actually run an IM or Twitter app while you listen to music, talk on the phone, or whatever, without constantly having to open and close apps all time.

Palm Pre’s web browser, like the iPhone’s mobile Safari, is based on webkit. This means a web browsing experience similar to iPhone, in most respects. The device we tested didn’t have Adobe Flash, and unlike the leakers at Apple, our insiders at Palm gave up nothing when we pressed if Pre would ship with Flash. Maybe, maybe not.

The other big difference in the Palm Pre is its operating system, WebOS, which is a 180 degree departure from the legacy Palm OS. WebOS is pretty much what it sounds like; an operating system that supports apps built on web programming languages instead of something like the iPhone’s Cocoa Touch language based on Objective-C.

This means that the web development community at large can quickly create WebOS apps for the Pre without having to learn new programming skills, which could spark a wildfire of Pre app development right from the get go. Our insider told us that Pandora re-built their mobile app for Pre in just two days. That’s very significant, especially if the WebOS version performs as quickly as the native iPhone version. Additionally, the Pre will also offer an option for users to enable an emulator to run applications written for older Palm devices. Palm calls this “classic mode”.

Let’s make no mistakes here… This is Palm’s hail mary pass and they know it. Palm, a company that has struggled in the past several years showing only glimmers of hope (Treo, Centro), is betting the farm on the Pre. Feeling the increasing pressure from iPhone, Palm had even gone out and recruited former Apple visionary Joe Rubenstein to lead the product team at Palm. If the Pre fails, Rubentstein’s move will be much like Brett Favre going to the Jets, or Beckham joining the LA Galaxy. It’s true, one person can inspire a team to greatness, but there’s absolutely no guarantees.

Rubentstein has done a remarkable job with this product and his experience at Apple was evident as we used the device. However, will this be enough to put a dent in the iPhone juggernaut and save Palm from obscurity? Given today’s launch announcement, we aren’t convinced.

The Palm Pre will be available to you on June 6th at a price of $200 with a 2-year Sprint contract (after a $100 mail-in rebate). This price places the Pre squarely in line with the iPhone 3G’s pricing, hardly incentive for any new users looking for a touch screen phone. The Pre will most likely appeal to current Sprint customers looking to upgrade, BlackBerry users searching for something new, or even older Palm users that want to run their apps on a new touch screen phone.

We think if Palm is serious about the Pre, then they should come out of the corner swinging, offering a steep discount in order to gain more users. Microsoft did much the same thing with Xbox when going after Sony’s Playstation. Xbox was priced so low that Microsoft took a huge loss on the sale of the hardware for two years. It was a very risky move, but Xbox dominates the home console business today.

With the Pre’s pricing about the same as the iPhone, consumers will have to weigh the features of each. While the Pre does have some unique features not found in the iPhone, we’re not sure it’ll be enough to sway consumers who are sitting on the fence. We suspect Apple will update the iPhone OS with support for background processes soon, especially since the Pre will offer that from day one. And given the number of apps currently available for the iPhone (over 35k, as of today), it’ll take a lot more for Palm to build a competitive base of users.

Will you be buying a Palm Pre? If so, let us know and tell us why.

 

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