Palm Pre: the first credible iPhone challenger
The much-awaited Palm Pre smartphone will be released in the US today, and the consensus of the reviewers seems to be that it is the first credible challenger to the iPhone. This is hardly surprising: it is the creation of an ex-Apple executive, who has apparently poached a large team of Apple engineers to build the software.
David Pogue of the New York Times has given the Pre a very positive review: his only complaints are battery life, and the paucity of applications on Palm’s equivalent of the App Store. But the Pre does have some advantages over the iPhone: for one thing, the battery is removable and replaceable, and there are other improved features such as multi-tasking and a flash for the camera. If you prefer a real keyboard, the Pre has one, although it is apparently smaller than a BlackBerry’s: not sure if I would like that!
There is some controversy over the method that Palm have chosen to synchronise the music on the Pre with your iTunes library: the Pre apparently pretends to be an iPod! When you plug it in, it appears in iTunes as an iPod. No-one’s sure how Palm have done this, nor how Apple will react to this, but it does seem a bit of an odd approach. There is no reason why Palm could not have interfaced with iTunes more honestly: the iTunes library is very much an “open” one, and when, for example, you buy music from Amazon’s music store, the Amazon downloader has no trouble adding your music to your iTunes library. So why Palm felt they had to be so underhanded is not clear.
There is no release date confirmed for the UK, although it seems that Palm Pre users will also have to suffer the awfulness of O2: iPhone users in the UK already know how crap O2 are, and it’s a real shame that the best phones are being crippled by the worst network in the UK. The UK release will be complicated by the fact that the US Pre is a CDMA phone, a standard used only in the US (and being phased out even there in favour of GSM). Obviously here in the UK we use GSM like the rest of the world, so Palm would have to create a GSM version of the phone. They have done this before, Palm’s Treo phone came in both CDMA and GSM flavours, so it shouldn’t be a major issue, but obviously creating a version of the phone based on a different technology is more complicated than simply releasing the same version in a new country, as Apple did with the iPhone, which is based on GSM everywhere.
It’s certainly good to see other smartphones using the ideas that Apple pioneered, like the touch-screen interface and downloadable applications. The competition will hopefully act as a spur to Apple to make the new iPhone (which may be out on Monday!) even better.
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