Talkin' Pre -- Week ending 4 September 11
In a week where Disney added some of the world’s best-known superheroes (Spider-Man, the X-Men, Thor, Iron Man and the Fantastic Four) with their purchase of Marvel for $4 billion, Sprint announced their own "Hero." No, they weren't hailing the Palm Pre as the customer acquisition victor. Rather, they let the world know that "The Now Network" would be gaining an Android-based phone: The HTC Hero which would be going on sale Oct. 11. That could mean that the Pre will become second fiddle in Sprint's ads (and perhaps the carrier's heart and mind).
While the financial community tried to digest Sprint's move (Is there a "cash-rich acquirer" in the midst?), Palm had an interesting week which closed with talk about webOS version 1.2 potentially becoming available this month and with MotionApps showing a video preview of HotSync in MotionApps Classic.
Let's talk Pre!
Pre & Privacy: Boy Genius Report had a story that delved further into privacy concerns, noting that Palm's motivation was location-based advertising. "We’ve uncovered a patent application filed by Palm in November of last year that could end up being one of the worst things to happen to webOS since its birth."
Pre & Shipments: The "How many did they ship?" question arose again. According to a story appearing in Barron's Tech Trader Daily:
Town Hall Investment Research analyst David Eller asserted that sales of the Pre “are continuing to slow,” and “likely will come in dramatically below” Sprint’s (S) reputed target of 1 million to 1.5 million customers for the year.
Eller now sees the company selling 416,000 units in the August quarter overall, down from a previous estimate of 488,000. For the November quarter, Eller expects the company to ship 785,000 units.
Advantage Pre: A new report from Credit Suisse stated the Palm Pre, Apple, Research In Motion, and Motorola "have the advantage over current cell phone giants such as Nokia and Sony Ericsson," per a story by Dan Gallagher of the Dow Jones Newswires:
In a study issued Tuesday morning entitled "Smart phones ... smarter investments," the broker predicted strong growth in the smart-phone category, which includes popular devices such as the iPhone, BlackBerry and Palm Pre.
30 Apps in 30 Days: Gear Diary just wrapped up its jaunt through the Palm Pre App Catalog before its official launch.
Pre Missing Manual Available on Amazon: It's 287-pages. too!
TIP - Sprint Navigation Made Easier: JKontheRun says, "It’s fairly easy to enter destinations into the Pre’s keyboard, but I find it far easier to enter them on my computer and have them pushed to the Pre."
TIP 2 - Ready for Some Football? Sprint just announced that its NFL Mobile Live application will start off the 2009-10 season by simulcasting the NFL Network's telecast of the pregame celebration on Thursday September 10. Great news for Palm Pre owners.
That's a wrap! Enjoy the last day of the holiday weekend!
11 Comments
The number sold was a disappointment. Has to be said though, it was a soft launch. Palm put out a few whacky commercials as always. Sprint never detailed the phone in any of its commercials. A lack of big name apps that Palm failed to get on the phone...yet they got pandora. Not paid ones..the big popular free ones like facebook, or Kindle, etc.
Video & audio recording as well. Unless you were hiding under a rock, you didn't need to wait til Apple's big event to know they were going with video and would repopularize that feature. You knew it months in advance, palm knew it as well. Speculation turned then to that Palm was simply waiting to see what Apple had going. Well, they've known for a few months now. Time to get that on Palm. The Hero, iphone, you name it..they all have this.
Going into the holidays with the Hero debuting next month, these lack of features will hurt.
It's a great phone & OS. No bashing here. In fact, it's still much a wow factor. But you have to sell it.
I dont even use the camera and could care less for video.
longest. sentence. ever.
The lack of KEY features on the Pre going into the holiday season will, inevitably, lead to the end of all positive coverage from the "major" sites out there.
Face it, if Palm release the 1.2 update in the state we know it, it will be an underwhelming update to prospective Pre buyers. The update is a welcome one to current Pre users who have had to put up with the slow calendar, lack of UNIVERSAL search, etc. Believe it or not, these features are enough to convince someone of buying the device or passing on it. Palm need to release this update soon, and "leak" information on another update coming in the near future, ie before Christmas.
Make no mistake about it, the HTC Hero is a huge competitor. While it may not be the most powerful or versatile device out there, the fact that it is an Android based device will get the attention of many Sprint customers. And not only customers, but developers as well. The release of the Hero on Sprint is a huge gain for Android supporters. This means another major carrier with millions of new potential customers. Developers will look at this as an explosion in the number of Android device and will be a nice incentive to start developing for said platform.
Hopefully the rumored price cut is true, but that's still not a guarantee that the Pre sales will see any kind of spike. As an early Palm Pre adopter and absolute WebOS lover, I would love to see the Pre sales live up to it's full potential. But with the seemingly lack of support from Palm and with the imminent release of the HTC Hero, jumping to the Android ship is looking like a very tempting proposition.
Anyways, best of luck to the Palm Pre.
In a ton of ways Palm had naive planning, is generally slow, had poor marketing and flat dropped the ball. It's a good phone and a good O.S. but it needed lots of work, and the majority of consumers will never wait for a company to get it's act together when there are viable alternatives.
Sprint has invested in a level of exclusivity so until that ends they are not going to drop promotion of the pre. It would be foolish from a business standpoint. like paying a massive fee for a Dwayne Wade and then not playing him cause he's not Lebron.
The other thing is android is a platform and Palm has been slow in my opinion to release a no keyboard version or at least announce a no keyboard version of the Pre.
at $200 i don't exactly think it's a budget phone that said considering how poor the economy has been in the past two years, and that most people don't have some rich allowance being a budget anything is not a bad sport to be in.
none of that however negates the fact that it's utterly naive, in my opinion, to think you can release a phone to compete with iphone, rim, and microsoft without a working app store. I think it's naive to think nonfanboy average, never gonna go to precentral, never gonna homebrew people will give new tech the benefit of the doubt by just waiting. fanboys will wait, give the benifit of the doubt, be patient, compare pre to iphones in 2000whenever, but the average consumer will go with whatever is the least avenue of resistance. And things like lacking a decent itunes replacement makes it hard for the average person.
I mean, what moron thought that wasn't important. Why not make a software, add an interface for the amazon store, add your app catalog, done. Then screw with apple and itunes at your leisure but it doesn't matter.
I just think they've taken a good os, a ton of potential, and after the lackluster release of the android, they've basically did an android. Now they are playing catchup. Not to mention the fact that they pretty much allowed analyst stories to control perception of their product. It's fine to say oh we'll let the earnings talk, and i pray when they do so they talk loudly, but deep down at this stage i think they should have nipped the negative news in the bud with some real numbers. Because if people think the platform isn't doing well they aren't going to buy it for fear that it won't nearly get the third party support that an iphone or blackberry would.
i mean i like my pre but i used an iphone yesterday and i have to admit, it is a very polished product in terms of responsiveness of the touch screen. There's no noticable lag. The media player is loaded and it's logical just like the ipod. And then there is the loaded app store. I'm hoping and that this week really continues the flood on the app store but i'd love to have palm officially announce the store open and just approve 40 of 50 per day for like a week or so straight. But i'm hoping solid earnings will be a positive. And i'm hoping they hurry up and announce a webos phone for other platforms because then you've got an even larger user base for your phones. hopefully the future is a lot of positives. Cause it's a good phone.