Palmloyal.com - Palm's Pre: Dead on Arrival? Maybe Pre-mature.

By Tim Beyers wrote an article at fool.com titled, "Palm's Pre: Dead on Arrival?" the other day. Be wrote that "A recent survey of 4,292 adult smartphone buyers by ChangeWave Research found that only 4% of respondents planned to buy the Pre in the next six months. By contrast, 37% planned to buy Research In Motion's (Nasdaq: RIMM) BlackBerry, and 30% planned to buy Apple's (Nasdaq: AAPL) iPhone."

Clearly most people (outside the media and fan sites) don't even know about the Pre yet and those who do don't know clearly how it will do. So this article is clearly a ploy to get readers to the site to generate more signups and readers to generate more income from the ads and such. Here is my response.

Blackberry has done a great job of promoting its devices to the consumer market over the last couple of years after years of being a professional tool. They only succeeded with this because Palm push their awareness of the Smartphones into the forefront of their minds.

As people are more dependent of email on the go (or realizing they can do it on the go), RIM will still get customers if Palm does not sell this is as an email machine to the masses. If Palm can do that and promote it that they don't have to pay the Blackberry email monthly fees, many will abandon RIM at the next contract out point.

Apple has done a fantastic job with the upgrades to the OS and the App store offerings. The iPhone has become (in the open) what Palm has always done in the dark (provide great apps). They made it simple to get the apps as opposed to having to find the apps or be told about them on Palm fan sites (like mine).

So Palm has to make their App store a hit, BUT they have to come out with their revised OS to allow "real" apps to be created. They should have learned from Apple who released the crippled OS and then released the powerhouse that is 2.2 and the upcoming 3.0.

Palm could deliver a KO if they released their "real" OS day one as opposed to delaying it.

It is OK to duplicate the good that Apple did, but why duplicate the bad?

People buy iPhone because it is fun. They buy RIM because it works great with email. The Pre has to be both fun and it must work great at the tasks that people need it to do.

I used to carry a candy bar phone and a Palm PDA; the Treo made me carry one device.

When the iPhone came out, I got the iPod Touch to have the fun stuff the iPhone could do (watch movies, listen to music, surf on big screen, etc). So I carry two devices again.

The Palm Pre has to give me the best of these two worlds. I love my Treo 755p because of the keyboard. I love the iPod Touch because the screen size and all the exciting new apps it provides.

Will the Pre allow me to gift my Treo 755p and iPod Touch to my family and carry one device again? It better. My fear is that is will arrive not dead, but pre-mature. If they had enough time to deliver it the right way, it would indeed knock the socks of RIM and Apple. I was born premature and I made it, maybe the Pre will too.