[PCWorld]

Post your comments for Palm Pre: Can it Live Up to the Hype, or Will it Flop? here

[slappy]

Will there be an App store as robust as iTunes? Music/PodCast/Movies/AudioBooks/MusicVideos/Games (NFSU or 2XL Supercross/Current TV Shows/iTunes U/Vast number of Peripherals/iTunes University. I'm sure the iPhone doesn't multi-task group is ready to throw that in, but iPhone already does multitask on select apps, extending that on 3.0 along with push notification... its just on and on and on that will get tacked on this platform. When you talk to mobile developers in the Market the platform they are all gunning for is the iPhone/iPod Touch platform. Not the Palm Pre. The hype from the Pre is not from consumers, but a majority of bloggers and tech writers with an eye against Apple.

[Reazonunknown]

IM SO SICK OF PEOPLE ALWAYS TRYING TO DOG ANYTHING NOT APPLE, I AM A APPLE LOVER AS I TYPE THIS ON MY MAC ,BUT COME ON YOU WATCH ALL THE NEW TECH NEWS HOPING THE PRE WILL FAIL . THE PRE IS A HOT PHONE ,SO DEAL WITH IT !!! ITS NOT THE IPHONE ITS A REFINED ONE ,BETTER ONE,ITS THE NATURE OF THE BUSINESS, I UP YOU , YOU UP ME . WHO WINS?? THE CONSUMER!!!! BE HAPPY, NOW APPLE WILL HAVE TO STEP UP THERE GAME.

[mrwhite]

Agreed with slappy, there is "nothing" on the market that competes with the iPhone, period. It has its flaws, but those flaws are so small they're almost unnoticeable. I like slappy said, iTunes and the app store and its ease of use integration is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. Heck even Nokia's newest phone still requires you to download apps via a computer then sync to the phone. Is this 2009 or 1995? One day they will catch up to the iPhone, but the iPhone will be ahead of them at that time as well. All these copy cat "me too" phones are a nice try.

[DTNick]

Reazonunknown said:

IM SO SICK OF PEOPLE ALWAYS TRYING TO DOG ANYTHING NOT APPLE, I AM A APPLE LOVER AS I TYPE THIS ON MY MAC ,BUT COME ON YOU WATCH ALL THE NEW TECH NEWS HOPING THE PRE WILL FAIL . THE PRE IS A HOT PHONE ,SO DEAL WITH IT !!! ITS NOT THE IPHONE ITS A REFINED ONE ,BETTER ONE,ITS THE NATURE OF THE BUSINESS, I UP YOU , YOU UP ME . WHO WINS?? THE CONSUMER!!!! BE HAPPY, NOW APPLE WILL HAVE TO STEP UP THERE GAME.

Whoa! Calm down!

I think anytime there's a new, heavily hyped product, there will be some doubt about whether it can deliver. But read the last paragraph:

>I have high hopes though, as both a journalist and a consumer. The iPhone and BlackBerry-centric smartphone world desperately needs to be shaken up. Android isn't quite there yet, but I think the Pre (and the subsequent webOS devices) has what it takes.

[Reazonunknown]

Nah wasn't talkin about the person writing the article , I think it was fair .

[sfoalex]

The Palm Pre is going to b!tch-slap the iPhone easily.

[riadev]

The advantage the Pre and webOS have over the iPhone is that it uses a much more familiar development model for Rich Internet Application developers. iPhone's objective c is ok, but it's not familiar to the most creative developers out there. Those using javascript libraries (Prototype is actually included with webOS SDK), HTML and CSS will feel much more at home with the MVC programming model of webOS.
More developers = more cool "apps"
Yeah, there's a cooler app for that...on Pre.

[quixel]

Yeah I agree with everyone else,These douchey Apple Fanbois should all just go have themselves a circle jerk slappy and mrwhite already sound like names that would be interested in doing that with each other. They can not go a day without saying OHHH i love apple everything else sucks..LOL even other people that like APPLE products get sick of these dumba$$es. GET A LIFE and GO PLAY with each other guys.

[slappy]

"Yeah, there's a cooler app for that...on Pre."

Wow your reaching there. Webkit, javascript libraries, HTML and CSS, already there on iPhone also. Palm will realize soon enough that it won't be as robust as native apps.

"Yeah, there's a cooler app for that...on Pre." - Like Need For Speed Undercover or Sims or 2xl Supercross. Oh and :Music/PodCast/Movies/AudioBooks/MusicVideos/Games/Current TV Shows/iTunes U/Vast number of Peripherals/iTunes University.

Nope, there no cooler app like that...on Pre.

[riadev]

"Wow your reaching there.
Webkit, javascript libraries, HTML and CSS, already there on iPhone
also. Palm will realize soon enough that it won't be as robust as
native apps."

You really should do your research before making more Apple-loving naive comments like that. Mojo SDK and webOS DO allow access to native services. Why don't you go check out the free e-book on the Palm developer site...

[ahumanbean]

Not true. The iPhone does not multi-task. iTunes is a spyware laden computer jacking product. Palm has a history filled with more apps that anybody. The Pre does not have all the old Palm apps, but the Palm development community makes Apples look like a grade school playground group. Developer will wait to see if the Pre is a hit. If people can get past the false mystique surrounding the iPhone, the Pre will trounce it. It is simply a much better business class product. It is also a better consumer class product. Developers will just on board with a rising tide. It is simple Pre will not flop because it is inferior, because it is clearly superior. If it flops it will be because people cannot get past the iPhone mirage.

[ahumanbean]

The iPhone is one big toy. Name a few ways it is "so far ahead." In fact, it is so far behind the Pre. The iPhone is not even ahead of the storm, let alone the Pre. When you look at a real side by side comparison the Pre rockets past the iPhone because a toy looks like a toy and a business class product looks like a business class product.

[sfoalex]

ahumanbean said:

The iPhone is one big toy. Name a few ways it is "so far ahead." In fact, it is so far behind the Pre. The iPhone is not even ahead of the storm, let alone the Pre. When you look at a real side by side comparison the Pre rockets past the iPhone because a toy looks like a toy and a business class product looks like a business class product.

I have to agree that the iPhone is a toy. I'd like to see the pro iPhone user make a good argument regarding this. All I have seen Apple fans say is they like the design or the experience. I'm a business user. For me, it's about getting the job done.

ActiveSync in my experience is not nearly as good as BES. No matter what device we're talking about, if it has ActiveSync, it's already at a disadvantage to the BES / Blackberry. Now I'm guessing that iPhone fanatics have rarely owned a smart phone prior to Apple brain washing them into buying theirs. To them, it's yet another Apple product they buy because Apple sells it. Nothing more. They justify anything as a need once Apple offers it. Suddenly they needed email and web and thank God Apple delivered that. Where as the rest of the world had a very specific need, and RIM, Microsoft, and Palm have been filling that need for a long time. That need is to connect business contacts, email, calendar from Lotus Notes / Domino, MS Exchange, or GroupWise. Outlook / Exchange being the most demanded. My BB gets my email before my Outlook client does. Don't know why it is so fast, just that it is. The iPhone however, with ActiveSync, mostly works, but often will not receive mail for some time. Not saying it is a common thing. I am saying once or twice a week, you will find email to be delivered to the device a couple hours after it was sent. ActiveSync is simply not perfect. And it can be an iPhone or a WinMo phone. It doesn't matter. BES is simply the better technology. I don't care why or how it works. I just care that it does work.

I have had the 2G iPhone, and the 3G iPhone. And I bought was seems like over 50 applications from Apple. Some were VNC clients. A few were games, aka the 30 minute battery drainer, some are productivity.

Start with productivity. The email app in the iPhone is a sick joke. It is the worst email client on a smart phone, period. If you are an Apple fan boy, and you cannot admit to that simple fact, there is zero point arguing with you. The BlackBerry's email is extensible. The iPhone is not. It's that simple. But like I said, if you never used a BlackBerry with applications that do this, then you haven't experienced anything. You're not a pro user. You're a consumer wasting your own time and money to fill an emotional gap in gadget-dom and have no business discussing productivity at all.

REXWireless ToDoMatrix. When I bought an iPhone, I called AREXWireless and begged them to port ToDoMatrix to the iPhone. They said they'd look into it. Said the development needs to be JAVA or it wasn't likely they would. Palm Pre is a perfect candidate for RexWireless. iPhone is far from it. Apple decided the full OSX kernel is a good idea for a small mobile device. The stupidest, most ridiculous thing Steve Jobs did. And Jon Rubenstien the guy behind the iPod tried to get Steve Jobs to wake up and smell the coffee. Jon wanted something like the Pre, but instead Apple went with the full kernel for OSX. As a result, you have extremely poor battery life.

ToDoMatrix is an application that has two parts. A web interface, and a BlackBerry native app. It is a widely multi-dimensional ToDo. Nothing on the iPhone comes close. It's why RexWireless can charge $59 for the first year, and $24 each year after on a subscription basis, and ToDoMatrix customers will keep coming back. When ToDoMatrix didn't get ported, I simple dropped the iPhone and went back to the BlackBerry. When do you drop a whole platform for a single app? When the app is so good, you lose money or your mind without it, that's when.

DataVault, which is a security app on the BB, extends email. More options become available in the blackberry email. Such as sending encrypted email using the encryption from the DataVault. BB is already encrypted, but this adds on top of it. Or I can use custom fields in the DataVault, and cause it to email records. Example, I can create a small database of needed items. Perhaps log ins of FTP accounts for my clients. I get an email asking me for their log in info. I can use datavault to look up that record, and then send it. So the customer gets an email with all their log in info. I do this in DataVault by saying Send Record, and the record fields are injected into an email document by way of the extended email.

Likewise, a client can ask me for a schedule change, and I can inject that from my mail, into TodoMatrix.

The Stock Manager I have for the BlackBerry is smart. It knows how many lots I bought. It knows the commission I paid. If I sell a lot, the money is added to my cash value. If I add shares, that amount of cash is deducted. There are stock apps for the iPhone. Tons in fact, but none are as good. Everything I had on the iPhone is a sub-set of a full app. A small, simple single thing for $3 or $5 dollars. As a result, you have a ton of stupid apps that cost little, and get little things done.

I don't care to listen to music, watch videos, and play video games on my phone. I just want the phone to be a phone and an email device. I want a great todo interface, and I need some lookup data. I need stock updates, and IM that can run in the background. Yeah the iPhone has some of that, but not nearly as great as the BlackBerry.

Now the Pre, if you watch the videos, you'll see how Palm set this up to be a connected device. Where data is shared from the web and the device. It reminds me a lot of BES. Data being pulled from the cloud and integrated into the device. It's clear Apple wanted this badly. Hence it is why the first yeah of the iPhone was web-based software. But ultimately Apple could not make it work. They were too web, and not truly pulling from the web. There is a difference. You want a native app, that calls data from various sources, but remains local. Pre figured this out, and Apple never could. Likely because Rubenstien, the guy with the actual brains at Apple, left the company. Thankfully, PALM picked him up, and a real product is resulting.

Funny how Apple fans love anything Apple. NeXT, no one cares about. Apple buys NeXT, and suddenly everyone loves it. Rubenstien's best work is the Palm Pre. You love your iPod? Who created it? The same guy who created the Pre. You guys buy the company. You have brand loyalty, but it's unrealistic. Watch the videos of the device. I am frankly amazed how blinded people are. This Pre is so much better. Oh I know, iPhone users will chime and say things like, you haven't even used it. Correct I have not. But the online videos are live recorded. And you watch them pull up web pages, use apps, etc. And it is so much faster, so much better, than what I have on the iPod Touch, which I still own, and the iPhone, which I no longer own. I don't need to use it to watch the online videos with an open mind.

Frankly I don't even know why I bang out these posts. Apple fans are blinded consumers. You keep using your iPhones. You're just having fun watching TV on the mobile. I have a real and valued need for my mobile. We're not in the same category. You guys are time-wasters, and I am trying to organize my business life. My device makes me money, yours wastes your money. You likely live check to check and owe thousands of dollars on your high interest rate credit cards, and I am an investor looking at every penny and making sure they have a reasonable return. We're different people.

I'll buy whatever saves me time and helps me best respond to my clients. I don't care if it has album art or stupid tip calculators. I can add in my head.

Alex

[ecupip]

sfoalex, if you are so worried about watching every penny then why did you buy/own a 2G and a 3G iphone, when they were essentially the same device. Even I was stupid enough to buy the 3G since I already had the 1st iPhone.
I am in business too and owned many of smart phone, my iphone does everything all my other smart phones did and I can do it much faster. I hate little keyboards I prefer the on screen which I can type much faster on. The Pre lost me there.

[sfoalex]

ecupip said:

sfoalex, if you are so worried about watching every penny then why did you buy/own a 2G and a 3G iphone, when they were essentially the same device. Even I was stupid enough to buy the 3G since I already had the 1st iPhone.

I am in business too and owned many of smart phone, my iphone does everything all my other smart phones did and I can do it much faster. I hate little keyboards I prefer the on screen which I can type much faster on. The Pre lost me there.

I honestly don't believe you. Sorry.
And to answer your question, I bought it because of a demo I saw of Salesforce on the iPhone, which in reality was nothing like the demo. The demo was clearly a pipe-dream of what SalesForce had wanted to do, but couldn't or didn't. At least up to the point where I walked away from the iPhone. Like many things on the iPhone, they look okay, sound good on paper, and yet fail to deliver. A real businessman would know that.

Alex

[DTNick]

OK; thanks for clarifying.

[novice14]

I find real QWERTY keyboars so much easier to use than any virtual one, I have tried many of them and if I hit S and get the A or hit W and get and E,it takes 20 minutes to write a simple sentence.

[sfoalex]

novice14 said:

I find real QWERTY keyboars so much easier to use than any virtual one, I have tried many of them and if I hit S and get the A or hit W and get and E,it takes 20 minutes to write a simple sentence.

It takes getting used to. I can type pretty darn fast on an iPhone. The problem I personally have with it is that when the keyboard is showing, that alone takes a lot of the screen real estate, which leaves not a lot left for the app, such as email or texting. I have showed my favorite stock app for the blackberry and the iPhone to friends side by side. My friends all love the iPhone. But they both have to admit that even though I have half the screen on the blackberry, I have more data showing.

Really what we have here is merely a difference in the presentation of information. The iPhone looks pretty. But it's the data I am after. You can make a device look great. And you can present data, text, etc in an eye-pleasing way. But it's still just data. I can more easily see differing types of information about a stock on my blackberry. I can pull up a chart. I can ask it the value of the holding, etc. I can do this with just one hand and my thumb. I can see all my email from multiple accounts, including SMS and MMS all in the same folder, and search all of it with just one hand.

I still own an iPod Touch. And a good friend of mine wants a Palm Pre. And she asked me what I thought. Honestly, I bought 200 shares of PALM, and 1,100 shares of Sprint. So I want Palm and Sprint to do well. I benefit if they do well. But would I switch? Well, I might, but the iPhone taught me a valuable lesson I have not forgotten. It's just pleasing to the eye. It's not more than that. I get less reliable email from the iPhone, or any ActiveSync based phone when compared to the BlackBerry with BES. And working with the screen by swiping it looks cool, but that gets old quickly. Well, not with Apple fans I guess, but it did with me. Even with just two email accounts, having to swipe into one account, then back out, then swipe into the second account, is a bit much. It's adds up. Everything on these touch based phones is almost meant to fun to do as well as be pleasing to the eye. But it is necessary? It is with a screen that also serves as the interface, but it's also cumbersome over time.

The physical keyboard on the BlackBerry is more than just a keyboard. I can be on the main screen, and just start typing a name, and so the BlackBerry knows I am looking for something, and starts to show search results of the character strokes. If I want to call myself, I just start to pound out A-L-E and it knows I mean ALEX and it shows me all the ALEX's I have in my contacts. And if I use my thumb to navigate over one, it expands and shows all the numbers associated. It's just extremely fast to do whatever you want to do on these keyboard phones. It's changes the context of operating the phone more instantly.

Though it doesn't take 20 minutes for me to type anything, it is more laborious to use the iPhone than the BlackBerry. And I suspect the Palm Pre will be similiar but different to this. It's why even though there are yet more touch screen phones to market, I still think that RIM got it right by making a device you can operate with one hand, and one thumb.

I think many iPhone owners are simply first-time smartphone owners. And they love their iPod and well, it just makes sense for them to have an iPhone. Where as even though my BlackBerry has pTunes, a great app for music, and Audible, and even video, I don't care about such things. I have both an iPod and multiple Zunes for that matter. When it comes to the smartphone, I just had to go back to the BlackBerry. And I had to go back to a physical keyboard and a one-handed operating system. I just like it better. For all kinds of reasons.