I'm talking about Palm. I sold phones for a long time. I saw all the phones coming back with problems. The Palm software was beyond buggy.
Palm was so bad, people would come into the store and talk about being interested in a smartphone and then they would ask me what I thought about different phones. I usually didn't even bring Palm up in conversation and then the customer would ask....what do you think about Palm? I would be honest and tell them there are better options. If they really pushed me, I would give them detailed information on all the problems. I can't tell you how many times, they would look at their wife or husband and say....I know he's telling the truth, either because they used to have a Palm or they've heard all the horror stories about Palm in general. People would come off the street and a lot of customers thought the salesperson was selling a certain phone because their commission was higher. To be honest, sometimes this happens but not as much as the old days. A lot more spiffs in the old days.
Overall, Palm is the most unreliable phone I ever sold. I got a lot of my business from referrals. If I sold you a piece of crap, you would hate the phone and be a lot less likely to refer your friends and family to me. On the other hand, if I put a very dependable phone in your hands, more business would come my way.
As far as Sprint goes, many many many people dislike their service, it depends greatly in the area you live. Horrible customer service. In my area, they are not bad. Long term, they will not survive alone, most likely, they will get gobbled up.
Palm was so bad, people would come into the store and talk about being interested in a smartphone and then they would ask me what I thought about different phones. I usually didn't even bring Palm up in conversation and then the customer would ask....what do you think about Palm? I would be honest and tell them there are better options. If they really pushed me, I would give them detailed information on all the problems. I can't tell you how many times, they would look at their wife or husband and say....I know he's telling the truth, either because they used to have a Palm or they've heard all the horror stories about Palm in general. People would come off the street and a lot of customers thought the salesperson was selling a certain phone because their commission was higher. To be honest, sometimes this happens but not as much as the old days. A lot more spiffs in the old days.
Overall, Palm is the most unreliable phone I ever sold. I got a lot of my business from referrals. If I sold you a piece of crap, you would hate the phone and be a lot less likely to refer your friends and family to me. On the other hand, if I put a very dependable phone in your hands, more business would come my way.
As far as Sprint goes, many many many people dislike their service, it depends greatly in the area you live. Horrible customer service. In my area, they are not bad. Long term, they will not survive alone, most likely, they will get gobbled up.
I have been following this phone since it was announced and PALM stock went from 3 to as high of 13 the other day. I have about 40k in AUG SEPT and JAN 2010 puts (5, 7, 11) on this company. I'll pretty much loose all that if the stock stays there over the next few months so obviously I think this phone will do poorly. What's going to kill every other smart phone that comes out is Apple's app store, nothing will match it. Also, there going to introduce the 3rd generation iphone this Monday along with there new OS which can doing everything the pre can do and more. I think the pre will be a nice alternative and I plan on checking it out come Saturday. Gizmodo did there full review and it wasn't anything great. I know Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Jounal has been testing it and I expect his full review any day now. I think it will be a nice phone, but not enough to turn around PALM.
Even with the iphones new software it CANNOT multitask at all. You cant have muliptle open webpages, applications, emails, calender ..etc all while listening to pandora or your itunes that CAN sync with the Pre, OPEN ALL AT THE SAME TIME and be able to flick back forth between them...plus it has a physical keyboard...
I don't mean to sound rude, but i/m betting you never owned an iphone. Everything you mentioned about multitasking, opening multiple webpages, email & calender you can do since the first generation iphone has been out. I can listen to my itunes while viewing email, opening multiple safari pages, checking my calender and viewing quotes on my brokers application. I think what iphone got knocked for most was not having push notifications, which it will have in the new OS next week. Since my iphone has been receiving my gmail instantly, I really don't have anything bad to say about it. Yes people do want a keyboard and that's were RIMM is king. I think it will be a good phone but not enough to help palm much. Also, Sprint is losing a million customers a quarter and they only ordered 400k Pres. Obviously the other side is that it will have a strong following, enough for Verizon to go ahead and offer them 6 months from now, in which case I would be way off....will see...
I've never owned a Palm, but I don't think you can necessarily assume that just because past Palms have been bad that this will be too. They've been working on this for awhile. Hoping to get one on Saturday and will let you guys know how it is. Here's a new review...
Palm’s credible challenge to the iPhone
By
avid Pogue
Jun 03 2009
You’ve seen that movie, right? The one where a pair of lovable, sad-sack losers team up to defeat the smug, athletic golden boy? If not, you’re about to. It’s called ‘‘Palm Pre vs. iPhone.’’ The star of this summer blockbuster is Palm. Over the years, this once-great company lost its talent for everything but making business blunders. Pundits were predicting Palm’s passing—but then the new Palm Pre appeared.
The Pre, which goes on sale first in the United States on Saturday and sometime in the second half of 2009 in Europe, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone that seems intended to be ‘‘iPhone, remixed.’’ That’s no surprise, really; its primary mastermind was Jon Rubenstein, who joined Palm after working with Steve Jobs of Apple, on and off, for 18 years. Once at Palm, he hired 250 engineers from Apple and elsewhere, and challenged them to outiPhone the iPhone.
That the Pre even comes close to succeeding is astonishing. As so many awful ‘‘iPhone killers’’ have demonstrated, most attempts to replicate the iPhone result in hideous, designed-bycommittee messes.
The Pre has the usual feature checklist: Wi-Fi; GPS; 3G (high-speed Internet); Bluetooth (including wireless audio); 3.2-megapixel camera with tiny flash; ambient light sensor; proximity sensor; tilt sensor; standard headphone jack; 3.1-inch, or 7.9-centimeter, touch screen (smaller than the iPhone’s, but the same 320 x 480 pixels, just packed more tightly). But the hard part is getting the design right—and for the most part, Palm nailed it.
HARDWARE The Pre is a shiny, black plastic, flattened capsule, coated with a hard, glossy, scratch-resistant finish.
When it’s turned off, the screen disappears completely into the smoky finish, leaving a stunning, featureless talisman.
It’s smaller than the iPhone, and therefore more comfortable as a phone. It’s a half inch shorter, and a quarter of an inch thicker.
PRICE The Pre costs $200 after a rebate, with a two-year contract. Sprint, Palm’s equally downtrodden co-star, offers a better deal than the iPhone’s AT&T. For example, the $70-a-month plan (450 talk-time minutes) includes unlimited Internet and text messages; the equivalent iPhone AT&T plan includes no text messages at all. Similarly, Sprint’s unlimited-everything plan costs $100 a month — $240 a year less than AT&T.
And these plans include the excellent Sprint Navigation (turn-by-turn GPS, spoken street names and all) and streaming TV shows and radio (pretty neat if you have a strong cell signal).
Still, I know what you’re thinking: Sprint? Like that’s a huge improvement over AT&T, which iPhone owners love to hate? But read on; there’s good news ahead.
TYPING Unlike the iPhone, the Pre has a real keyboard. The phone’s top and bottom halves slide apart, revealing four rows of keys. They’re really tiny; a BlackBerry’s keyboard is expansive by comparison. Even so, thanks to the domed key shapes and sticky rubber key surfaces, you’ll probably find this keyboard a faster, less frustrating way to enter text than typing on glass.
PHONE To make a call, just pop open the keyboard and start dialing. Or just start typing; matches from your address book come up immediately. Or set up speed-dial keys. Call audio quality is about average. The ringer, however, is too quiet; expect to hear a lot of people complaining about that.
SOFTWARE The Pre’s all-new operating system, called Web OS, is gorgeous, fluid and exciting. It shares some iPhone ideas — pinch or spread two fingers on the screen to zoom in or out, for example, or flick a list item sideways to delete it — but has its own personality and ideas.
For example, once the bright screen comes to life, the strip of black plastic beneath it is also touch-sensitive. Slide your thumb leftward, for example, to go back one screen. Drag upward to summon the animated, bendy, quicklaunch strip. It holds the icons for the five programs you use most often (phone, calendar, e-mail and so on). In other words, you can switch programs without returning to a central Home screen first, as on the iPhone.
That’s important, because the Pre can keep multiple programs open simultaneously.
Play Internet radio while you read a PDF document, or compare two open e-mail messages—you can’t do that on the iPhone.
Thoughtful grace notes are everywhere.
When watching a video, you can flick right or left to skip forward or backward a few seconds. Empty time slots on your daily calendar collapse to save space, denoted by a ‘‘3 hours free’’ strip. When you magnify a Word document, the text reflows so that you never have to scroll horizontally.
BATTERY Everyone griped about the iPhone’s permanently-sealed battery.
The Pre’s battery, however, is easy to swap. That’s fortunate, because battery life is the Pre’s heartbreaker. On days when I used the Pre a lot, the battery was dead by late afternoon. On days when I used it only occasionally, it was dead by dinnertime. Yikes.
Palm calls those unusually poor results, probably stemming from the poor Sprint coverage where I live; hunting for a signal eats up power faster. (Palm rates the battery at 5 hours of talk time or 12 hours of music playback.) MUSIC Most phones do a feeble job as music players. Especially compared with the iPhone itself, which, after all, is an actual iPod.
But so, apparently, is the Pre.
When you connect it to your Mac or PC, the Pre shows up right there in Apple’s iTunes software, labeled ‘‘iPod.’’ A couple of clicks later, you’ve synced your music, photo and video collections (minus the copy-protected items) and iTunes never knows the difference.
BUILT-IN PROGRAMS You might keep your family schedule on Google Calendar, your work calendar in Exchange or Outlook, and some events in Facebook.
The Pre consolidates these online agendas, presenting them all on a single, color-coded calendar.
It does the same thing with your various online address books (Google, Outlook/Exchange, Facebook, AIM).
You wind up with only one entry for, say, Snuffy Smith, containing all contact information from all sources. The Pre can also consolidate e-mail accounts into a single Inbox, or AIM and Google Talk buddy lists. It’s done well, and it makes enormous sense.
APP STORE A big part of the iPhone’s appeal is the app store: 35,000 free or dirt-cheap downloadable programs.
The Pre’s app store is starting small.
Palm intends to approve thousands more in the coming weeks, but they won’t be as diverse or powerful as the iPhone’s. At the outset, at least, Palm is limiting programmers’ access to the Pre’s features.
All right, then: the Pre is a spectacular achievement. Zero to sixty in one version. But is it an iPhone killer? Silly bloggers! The Pre will be a hit, but the iPhone isn’t going away. First of all, Apple’s 20 million-phone lead will only grow when the new iPhone 3.0 software (and, presumably, a third iPhone model) comes out shortly. Second, Palm’s audience for this model is limited to the United States. It requires a CDMA network, so it won’t work overseas.
Third, even the Pre has its annoyances.
Opening certain programs can be very slow—sometimes 8 or 9 seconds—and there’s no progress bar or hourglass to let you know that it’s still working. There’s no memory-card slot to expand the 8 gigabytes of storage, and no Visual Voicemail (where messages are listed like e-mail). The onboard search function won’t look through your e-mail or calendars. There are a few bugs left to exterminate, too.
Finally, the Pre is not quite as simple as the iPhone. All those extra features, by definition, mean that there’s more to learn.
So do the Pre’s perks (beautiful hardware and software, compact size, keyboard, swappable battery, flash, multitasking, calendar consolidation) outweigh its weak spots (battery life, slow program opening, ringer volume, Sprint network)? Oh, yes indeedy. Especially when you consider that last weak spot might be going away. Verizon Wireless has announced that it will carry the Pre ‘‘in the next six months or so.’’ Can you imagine how great that will be? One of the world’s best phones on the best U.S. cell network? If the story of Palm’s rise from the ashes really is like a movie plot, then that twist will give it one heck of a happy ending.
Palm’s credible challenge to the iPhone
By
avid PogueJun 03 2009
You’ve seen that movie, right? The one where a pair of lovable, sad-sack losers team up to defeat the smug, athletic golden boy? If not, you’re about to. It’s called ‘‘Palm Pre vs. iPhone.’’ The star of this summer blockbuster is Palm. Over the years, this once-great company lost its talent for everything but making business blunders. Pundits were predicting Palm’s passing—but then the new Palm Pre appeared.
The Pre, which goes on sale first in the United States on Saturday and sometime in the second half of 2009 in Europe, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone that seems intended to be ‘‘iPhone, remixed.’’ That’s no surprise, really; its primary mastermind was Jon Rubenstein, who joined Palm after working with Steve Jobs of Apple, on and off, for 18 years. Once at Palm, he hired 250 engineers from Apple and elsewhere, and challenged them to outiPhone the iPhone.
That the Pre even comes close to succeeding is astonishing. As so many awful ‘‘iPhone killers’’ have demonstrated, most attempts to replicate the iPhone result in hideous, designed-bycommittee messes.
The Pre has the usual feature checklist: Wi-Fi; GPS; 3G (high-speed Internet); Bluetooth (including wireless audio); 3.2-megapixel camera with tiny flash; ambient light sensor; proximity sensor; tilt sensor; standard headphone jack; 3.1-inch, or 7.9-centimeter, touch screen (smaller than the iPhone’s, but the same 320 x 480 pixels, just packed more tightly). But the hard part is getting the design right—and for the most part, Palm nailed it.
HARDWARE The Pre is a shiny, black plastic, flattened capsule, coated with a hard, glossy, scratch-resistant finish.
When it’s turned off, the screen disappears completely into the smoky finish, leaving a stunning, featureless talisman.
It’s smaller than the iPhone, and therefore more comfortable as a phone. It’s a half inch shorter, and a quarter of an inch thicker.
PRICE The Pre costs $200 after a rebate, with a two-year contract. Sprint, Palm’s equally downtrodden co-star, offers a better deal than the iPhone’s AT&T. For example, the $70-a-month plan (450 talk-time minutes) includes unlimited Internet and text messages; the equivalent iPhone AT&T plan includes no text messages at all. Similarly, Sprint’s unlimited-everything plan costs $100 a month — $240 a year less than AT&T.
And these plans include the excellent Sprint Navigation (turn-by-turn GPS, spoken street names and all) and streaming TV shows and radio (pretty neat if you have a strong cell signal).
Still, I know what you’re thinking: Sprint? Like that’s a huge improvement over AT&T, which iPhone owners love to hate? But read on; there’s good news ahead.
TYPING Unlike the iPhone, the Pre has a real keyboard. The phone’s top and bottom halves slide apart, revealing four rows of keys. They’re really tiny; a BlackBerry’s keyboard is expansive by comparison. Even so, thanks to the domed key shapes and sticky rubber key surfaces, you’ll probably find this keyboard a faster, less frustrating way to enter text than typing on glass.
PHONE To make a call, just pop open the keyboard and start dialing. Or just start typing; matches from your address book come up immediately. Or set up speed-dial keys. Call audio quality is about average. The ringer, however, is too quiet; expect to hear a lot of people complaining about that.
SOFTWARE The Pre’s all-new operating system, called Web OS, is gorgeous, fluid and exciting. It shares some iPhone ideas — pinch or spread two fingers on the screen to zoom in or out, for example, or flick a list item sideways to delete it — but has its own personality and ideas.
For example, once the bright screen comes to life, the strip of black plastic beneath it is also touch-sensitive. Slide your thumb leftward, for example, to go back one screen. Drag upward to summon the animated, bendy, quicklaunch strip. It holds the icons for the five programs you use most often (phone, calendar, e-mail and so on). In other words, you can switch programs without returning to a central Home screen first, as on the iPhone.
That’s important, because the Pre can keep multiple programs open simultaneously.
Play Internet radio while you read a PDF document, or compare two open e-mail messages—you can’t do that on the iPhone.
Thoughtful grace notes are everywhere.
When watching a video, you can flick right or left to skip forward or backward a few seconds. Empty time slots on your daily calendar collapse to save space, denoted by a ‘‘3 hours free’’ strip. When you magnify a Word document, the text reflows so that you never have to scroll horizontally.
BATTERY Everyone griped about the iPhone’s permanently-sealed battery.
The Pre’s battery, however, is easy to swap. That’s fortunate, because battery life is the Pre’s heartbreaker. On days when I used the Pre a lot, the battery was dead by late afternoon. On days when I used it only occasionally, it was dead by dinnertime. Yikes.
Palm calls those unusually poor results, probably stemming from the poor Sprint coverage where I live; hunting for a signal eats up power faster. (Palm rates the battery at 5 hours of talk time or 12 hours of music playback.) MUSIC Most phones do a feeble job as music players. Especially compared with the iPhone itself, which, after all, is an actual iPod.
But so, apparently, is the Pre.
When you connect it to your Mac or PC, the Pre shows up right there in Apple’s iTunes software, labeled ‘‘iPod.’’ A couple of clicks later, you’ve synced your music, photo and video collections (minus the copy-protected items) and iTunes never knows the difference.
BUILT-IN PROGRAMS You might keep your family schedule on Google Calendar, your work calendar in Exchange or Outlook, and some events in Facebook.
The Pre consolidates these online agendas, presenting them all on a single, color-coded calendar.
It does the same thing with your various online address books (Google, Outlook/Exchange, Facebook, AIM).
You wind up with only one entry for, say, Snuffy Smith, containing all contact information from all sources. The Pre can also consolidate e-mail accounts into a single Inbox, or AIM and Google Talk buddy lists. It’s done well, and it makes enormous sense.
APP STORE A big part of the iPhone’s appeal is the app store: 35,000 free or dirt-cheap downloadable programs.
The Pre’s app store is starting small.
Palm intends to approve thousands more in the coming weeks, but they won’t be as diverse or powerful as the iPhone’s. At the outset, at least, Palm is limiting programmers’ access to the Pre’s features.
All right, then: the Pre is a spectacular achievement. Zero to sixty in one version. But is it an iPhone killer? Silly bloggers! The Pre will be a hit, but the iPhone isn’t going away. First of all, Apple’s 20 million-phone lead will only grow when the new iPhone 3.0 software (and, presumably, a third iPhone model) comes out shortly. Second, Palm’s audience for this model is limited to the United States. It requires a CDMA network, so it won’t work overseas.
Third, even the Pre has its annoyances.
Opening certain programs can be very slow—sometimes 8 or 9 seconds—and there’s no progress bar or hourglass to let you know that it’s still working. There’s no memory-card slot to expand the 8 gigabytes of storage, and no Visual Voicemail (where messages are listed like e-mail). The onboard search function won’t look through your e-mail or calendars. There are a few bugs left to exterminate, too.
Finally, the Pre is not quite as simple as the iPhone. All those extra features, by definition, mean that there’s more to learn.
So do the Pre’s perks (beautiful hardware and software, compact size, keyboard, swappable battery, flash, multitasking, calendar consolidation) outweigh its weak spots (battery life, slow program opening, ringer volume, Sprint network)? Oh, yes indeedy. Especially when you consider that last weak spot might be going away. Verizon Wireless has announced that it will carry the Pre ‘‘in the next six months or so.’’ Can you imagine how great that will be? One of the world’s best phones on the best U.S. cell network? If the story of Palm’s rise from the ashes really is like a movie plot, then that twist will give it one heck of a happy ending.
The iphone PALES IMO in comparision to the pre in terms of mulitasking and ease of switching betwwen apps, webpages. email, sms,... etc
Please watch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbA2ZBhAQgw
And here is an excellent video review....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoBx5O6KKz8&eurl=http://www.precentral.net/&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoBx5O6KKz8&eurl=http://www.precentral.net/&feature=player_embedded
Its official..the Palm Pre has the best and fastest internet browser of any cell phone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dewM...iphone-3g-g1-showdown&feature=player_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dewM...iphone-3g-g1-showdown&feature=player_embedded
Its no accident that Palm has such a small piece of market share. The consumer doesn't like Palm products.
blackberry is the like the camry or accord of the car world. palm is the like the fill in the blank crap car.
6-8 months after the release of the Pre, it will be interesting to see how the phone is doing in terms of sales and issues with the phone.
blackberry is the like the camry or accord of the car world. palm is the like the fill in the blank crap car.
6-8 months after the release of the Pre, it will be interesting to see how the phone is doing in terms of sales and issues with the phone.
I like how you can have multiples web pages opened as cards, turn it in landscape and then just scroll up and down between pages. Looks great for gaming. iphone you have to refresh pages when you go back and forth. Not good. And then if a call comes in no need to shut down the pages. Really does look to be the ultimate gambler's phone.
As for apps, clearly it hasn't built up at all yet, but I understand that development is very intuitive and I would expect apps to be created really fast over the coming months. It'll take awhile to rival iphone in that respect.
I think the apps catalog may bt eh only thing the iphone has on the pre and ultimately that gap is going to narrow.
Then again, a new iphone is supposedly coming out soon so maybe they will jump ahead again.
But if you're someone who likes the iphone concept but wants a real keyboard, the pre is the answer.
As for apps, clearly it hasn't built up at all yet, but I understand that development is very intuitive and I would expect apps to be created really fast over the coming months. It'll take awhile to rival iphone in that respect.
I think the apps catalog may bt eh only thing the iphone has on the pre and ultimately that gap is going to narrow.
Then again, a new iphone is supposedly coming out soon so maybe they will jump ahead again.
But if you're someone who likes the iphone concept but wants a real keyboard, the pre is the answer.
