The Palm Pre
I don’t have an iPhone. I think the iPhone is a great product and a more impressive platform. But because I’m on Sprint and cheap, I use a Palm Centro. It’s a terrible platform and my 3 year old Samsung flip phone has more useful features for alarms and timer than it, but whatever. I get Google Maps and email on it.
But last week, Palm finally unveiled their new device: the Palm Pre.
The Palm Pre
Last winter, I worked on a strategic analysis of Palm Inc. for my high-tech strategy class with a group. We picked Palm because it was a high flying company back in 1999 but had since plummeted into literally ridicule. It’s smartphones were more than 2 years behind the times (eons in the tech world), both in features and in design. The Palm OS looked like a flint arrowhead compared to the sleep B2 bomber of the iPhone. No one is buying Palm Pilot handhelds anymore. The company went through a dizzying array of mergers and re-structurings.
But in doing that strategy paper, I came away more optimistic. Palm got some vital new blood (Apple blood) and really clammed up. We didn’t get a whole lot of info, but a Stanford alum was really great and invited us to Palm and spoke about its challenges. My team talked about what we thought Palm should do as it prepares to launch its new product and platform. After extensive research, here are two specific things we suggested:
“Contacts-centric Approach to Communication – Communication is fundamentally about connecting people. Much of today’s mobile phone software instead partitions by communication channel first. As the number of ways people stay connected grows, we believe this approach obfuscates people’s real needs. Making contacts the centerpiece of communication aids the user experience and leverages one of Palm’s strategic advantages.”
This is very much aligned with Palm’s way of aggregating and synthesizing all the info about your contacts whether its from Outlook, Gmail, Facebook, etc. Palm’s calling it Synergy.
Learning that Palm’s bet was to target the spot between Blackberry (RIM) and iPhone (Apple), we discussed whether Palm should try a touchscreen based keyboard. RIM is famous for its physical keyboards in the same way Apple is rightfully proud of its extraordinary touchscreen keyboard. Ultimately, we did not recommend Palm “to pursue a touch-screen based keyboard for the tactile feedback and reduced power consumption of a physical keyboard are important for Palm’s target markets.”
The Palm Pre features a vertical slide-out keyboard.
Palm Pre's keyboard
We also heavily stressed location based services, seeing this as a new killer app for mobile devices. Few companies have figured out how to effectively do LBS. Palm didn’t mention anything related to this, other than the Palm Pre does have built-in GPS.
Still, I feel pretty good about our analysis, especially with regard to Palm Synergy. I’m really quite excited about the new platform too – Web OS – with applications written in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Another critical feature that Palm seems to have gotten down: multi-tasking. We’ll only know after its out in the market. WinMo claims to handle multitasking, but WinMo becomes sluggish and freezes if you keep things open too long. Apple’s iPhone has an dazzling array of successful applications written for it, so Palm still has a huge hill to climb with its analogous app store. But the smartphone space is certainly heating up! Glad I’m still with Sprint…