talkingDigital

My first smart phone

Adam Cochran here – I am anxiously waiting for the release and availability of the Palm Pre. I see those as two separate events. I hope too get one on release day, but who knows how the Sprint store in Grand Junction, CO will handle the distributing on release day.

I have been in the store three times in the past three weeks and each time I have been given a different story on how they would be distributed. First come – first serve, invites only, special Friday night event…

I am hoping for the first come – first serve scenario. I plan on being in line early Saturday morning. 

Gadgets are wonderful, but unlike the crew at CNET, I don’t have the opportunity to buy each new gadget that comes out. I must carefully wait until just the right gadget comes along. That is not to say that I am a stranger to gadgets, I read all the tech news, listen to the podcasts and encourage my friends to buy the gadgets I am unsure about so that I can gadget by proxy.

Smartphones have always been a favorite gadget of mine. My first smartphone was one of the first smartphones – the Kyocera QCP-6035. It was awesome! I kept it around and replaced it a couple times but didn’t replace it until the Palm Treo 600.

I debated switching to a Windows Mobile device but hated the Windows look and feel. I didn’t want to go through all the menu systems to get everywhere. I debated going with Blackberry, but it felt clunky. So, I stayed with my Palm devices. I loved them for their simplicity and their agility.

When the iPhone came out, I bought an iPod touch. I compared plans, data, text and decided that I had to stick with Sprint for my budget’s sake. Sprint is about 25 percent less than AT&T for my uses. I am also very happy with the Sprint data network in my area.

It is important to clarify that no carrier is superior in all areas of the country, but Sprint has always preformed well for me in every area I have lived or vacationed. With prepaid plans so easily accessible now, if I did vacation somewhere that Sprint’s coverage was shoddy, I could always just buy a temporary phone and number.

I have used my iPod Touch for surfing the web, listening to music, watching movies, and running a variety of apps and games. I love the iPod Touch and I can see the beauty of an iPhone. However, the iPhone has four major hangups that prevent me from even considering it…

1. No tactile keyboard – I can touch type with my Centro. I don’t care if the keyboard is cramped and difficult to use on the Pre – at least it has a keyboard. You can’t tell me that the iPhone keyboard is less annoying than the Pre keyboard. I have written rather lengthy emails on my iPod Touch. I make a mistake about every three words on average. I can type three or four sentences on my Centro keyboard without making an error.

2. Background processing – I want to be able to keep an IM program running while I check my email. I want to be able to look up a contact, then map it, then go back to the contact and make a call without having to go to home screens or restart apps in between. 

3. It’s on Sprint – I don’t get any deals from Sprint. I buy the plans at regular rates and with standard contracts. I pay $200 for 4 phones with unlimited data, text, picture mail, protection plans, and 1500 minutes shared between phones. Go ahead and compare – the next cheapest plan will likely be $30/month more. I have considered leaving Sprint at least three times until I did the math.

4. It’s not an iPhone – Last year we must have seen at least half a dozen “iPhone killers.” They all failed. Whether it was the Blackberry Storm, the HTC Touch Pro or the Samsung Instinct, they all failed. You can’t take on the iPhone by simply resembling the appearance of an iPhone. The Pre is not trying to be an iPhone, it is something much different. Anyone expecting the Pre to be an iPhone killer should write their negative reviews now.

The iPhone’s strengths are the apps (developer base), the sexiness, and the fact that it is made by Apple. Pre touches on these things, but it also is presented as an entirely different phone. I don’t want a Palm Pre because I want it  to be an iPhone or because I expect it to be better than an iPhone. I am buying the Pre because I expect it to be different than the iPhone.

I don’t need a device that will download 200 different tip calculators or run countless apps. I want a device that is small, versatile and capable of combining all of my means of communication. I communicate on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, and a variety of Google services. The concept of the Pre fits my needs more than the iPhone. I plan on buying the Palm Pre because I want my money to go to the guys willing to take on Apple by creating a device that targets the weaknesses of the iPhone directly.

I don’t expect it to work perfectly at launch and the Pre 2.0 will certainly be a better device, but you have to admire Palm for making so many gutsy moves with the Pre launch. In many ways, the Pre is similar to OS X. Palm has reached a point where their product, both hardware and software, has become stale. They had two options, they could try to fancy up the existing product (the Microsoft approach) or they could reinvent themselves as Apple did with OS X.

Reinventing your image is always much more risky, but the payoff is much higher if successful. Palm has tossed backwards compatibility aside and told all old developers (whatever developers there are left) that their existing skills would no longer be useful. In what appears to be a dangerous move on the surface, is seens as a very necessary move to users, geeks and analysts who follow the smartphone market.

Palm as a company may be a punchline, but their devices are a force to be reckoned with.

By next Saturday it will be written that the cell phone/smartphone industry hasn’t seen release buzz like this since the iPhone. Before the iPhone it was the Treo. The Blackberry was great, but never caused any significant buzz over any particular model. Android caused a buzz until people saw it in the G1.

The Palm Pre release is significant. Of course there will be shortages. There will be problems with Gen 1 models. There may be patches or even a recall as there often is with devices manufactured quickly and rushed to market to meet demand.

Before the Pre is even released, it is already an historic device. Palm has a legacy of changing the handheld market. Whether it was with the original PalmPilot or the spin-off Handspring, or the Treo or the Centro, Palm knows how to make a reliable product that does everything it is supposed to – but little more.

There have been a few lemons along them way, but with each model, they have addressed the complaints and shortcomings of the last. The original Treo 300 did not offer expansion, the Treo 600 did but did not offer a user replaceable battery, the Treo 650 did. With each new model only a few things continued to remain unaddressed, WiFi, GPS, and background processes – at least in the Palm OS versions. To bring these features to the device, Palm had to allow Windows Mobile on the device.

Palm has dropped the ball so many times the company has become an industry joke – yet they remain. While the company has become a laughing stock to the business world for its horrible decisions to split, merge, sell, buy back and change its name a few times, the Palm products have remained serious competitors.

If Palm has done anything along the way it’s been to introduce new concepts, products and platforms that give everyone else and idea on how to take those ideas and improve upon them.

Take a look at your iPhone home screen – can you see anything but an original Palm home screen? The iPhone’s ability to add applications galore… yep, Palm started that too. How about the concept of a converged device? You will have to look to someone different for that… Handspring’s VisorPhone. Of course the Handspring Visor ran on the Palm OS and was developed by the Palm inventor.

There are two ways to approach a converged device. You can fill it full of features and impress everyone at the Swiss Army Knife qualities. Or you can look at what people need a converged device to do and create a device that meets those needs.

The iPhone is the Swiss Army Knife of converged devices. It does so many wonderful things – but it does them in such limited ways. Email is great, but what if you want to email a URL? It only took Apple 2 years to introduce copy and paste into the iPhone – Apple invented copy and paste. Apple provided GPS as long as you don’t want a GPS that shows you turn-by-turn directions.

Apple provided the ability for developers to build any application they saw need and market for, as long as that application didn’t play SouthPark cartoons, run background processes, add copy and paste functions and didn’t contain any references to Kama Sutra.

Palm took a little different approach with the Pre. In the end, the Pre will not be remembered for everything it did, but for the way it went about doing what it did.

To realize the advantages of the Pre over Blackberry, iPhone, G1 and others, you have to look past the phone and analyze how such a device could be helpful.

How many email addresses do you have? How many social networks are you a part of? Do you ever want to check your messages, friend’s status, tweets, etc. from your phone? You can with many converged devices. If you want to check Facebook, you either go to m.facebook.com or you use a Facebook application. If you want to use twitter, you do something similar.

Sites like Friendfeed are finding ways to merge all of the ways we communicate into one area. However, these sites only address the desktop method of communications. Cell phones, IM, tweets, voice mail, text messaging, SMS, email, etc. This concept is where the success of the Pre begins.

Just as the Treo converged communication gadgets, the Pre aims to converge communication platforms. Rather than jump from one app to another or one site to another to communicate over various platforms, the Pre aims to bring all contacts together.

Currently there is some debate as to whether it is a good idea to merge your email, Twitter and Facebook contacts into one area – but why not? The people who conceive a massive number of contacts as overwheming and bulky are probably iPhone users. Palm OS users haven’t ever looked up a contact by scrolling through a list.

The Pre’s secret weapon is its universal search abilities made possible by two things that the iPhone does not have – background processes and a tactile keyboard.

Navigating the Pre is simple, there are few menus to scroll through. In the home screen, start typing what you are looking for. That’s it. It can be a name, an application, and appointment, an IM handle…

All you need to know is what you are looking for.

A nice platform, background processes, user replaceable battery, tactile keyboard and universal search aren’t enough to break the market barriers – that takes the one thing that only Android offers – an open platform.

While it is proprietary and the core will be locked down, the Pre will be no iPhone when it comes to the OS. WebOS has been described by Palm as an open platform developed on Linux. This means that the true threat to the Pre will not be the iPhone – it will more likely be Android.

Already the responces from Palm’s competitors have been along the lines of, “Our devices will be able to do that stuff soon too.” No one is debating the concept of the Palm Pre, the current naysayers are addressing issues like the cramped keyboard or the feminine design.

Whether the Pre itself is a wild success bringing Palm back from the brink of extinction, or whether it is Palm’s final breath before dying – the Pre will set new trends in how smartphones are used marking the next step in the converged device evolution.

Just as the Treo converged devices, the Pre will likely show the world how much demand there is for converging all forms of modern communication.

Palm has made little secret of the fact that they are following the new model for building demand buy releasing the Pre in waves. We have seen this with the XBox 360, Wii, PS3, and iPhone. We can probably go back to Cabbage Patch dolls and Furby.

The fact is that, whether the shortages are legitimate or not, the strategy works. I will be in at least one line early. If I can’t get the Pre at the Sprint store, I will be at the Best Buy and/or Wal-mart.

I know, a lot of people want the Pre, but I need it. I really do.

Low inventory is forcing Best Buy Mobile to launch the Palm Pre in two phases : Boy Genius Report.