Mobile users outside of the US will perhaps be wondering this week what all the fuss is about surrounding the Palm Pre, launched over the weekend there, attached exclusively to the Sprint Nextel EV-DO network.
The Palm Pre is pivotal to a number of trends in the handset marketplace, coming as it does at a time when Palm as an organization needs saving, at a time when third placed US operator Sprint, itself needs saving, preferably through the arrival a solid new top end smartphone. There is also an unambiguous drift, especially in the US and Western Europe, towards smartphones and feature phones ‘ and increasing discussion about which handset operating systems will survive this trend. Finally there is the mass adoption of App Stores for phones ‘ long overdue, and triggered by the launch of Apple’s 40,000 strong application delivery platform.
The Palm Pre finds itself launched into all of these debates and trends and relevant in each of them.
It was shown for the first time in January at the CES show in Las Vegas, and kicks off (after some delays) with an impressive specification. It is a 3G phone, with versions for HSDPA or the US centric EV-DO. It has Wi-Fi, built in GPS, a 3.1 inch touch screen, a 24-bit colour 320 x 480 resolution display, and uses gesture touch controls like the iPhone. It has a slide down QWERTY keyboard, offers push email, web browsing, a 3 megapixel camera and 8GB of storage.
But in the end, all the specifications in the world are not going to sell a phone these days, and increasingly critics look to recommend a phone based on the depth of applications available on it, rather like a Personal Computer during the 1980s, when the battle for dominance there harmed Apple and won the day for Microsoft.
While critics, and perhaps future purchasers (though not all current ones) may really be swayed by the number of applications available for a phone, right now the Cool factor, or how it feels in your hand, whether the ad campaign makes you laugh, and how much store space it takes up, and how reverently retail assistants hold it, will, initially, at least, have more of an effect on its sales.
We reckon that half a million have been pre-sold, and that the 1 million mark will be announced only days, or perhaps a few weeks, after launch. Palm is running out of money, pushed to the limit, not only to get this phone to work, but at the same time introduce its own new operating systems called WebOS. Palm in the past has played fast and loose with operating systems, going through most of its life with its own, then swearing allegiance to Windows, then changing its mind. Right now Apple has its own OSX, a derivative of its Mac operating system, which sits on top of a version of BSD, a genetic throwback to Unix; Microsoft has Windows Mobile (WinMob) in versions 6.5 and 7.0, both of which have a) done very badly b) dragged half of the PC manufacturing world into the handset market, so it threatens to do well again soon. There is dominant Symbian, now going open source, and finally Android, the new (Linux based) arrival from Google and as if that wasn’t enough operating systems, in the new Netbook – Smartbook divide, where all of these play alongside new variants such as Intel Moblin, all vying for supremacy. Oh yeah and there’s Java, not exactly an operating system, but with more installations than all the rest put together and just as vital.
So there are too many handset operating systems, and we are rapidly moving to a point where, like the PC operating systems before them, there should only be a single operating system, but no-one can quite see how we get from where we are today, to that point.
In the PC market Windows took the lion’s share, Linux came later, while Apple Mac OS just existed on fumes until it re-emerged with the re-emergence of Apple ‘ so that’s just three operating systems. In handsets and netbook and smartbooks we have around 7, with 5 strong ones chasing handsets alone (plus another 3 or 4 Linux variants) ‘ and around 500 handsets (and more than 3 billion devise) out there which just don’t have a fully fledged operating system at all and yet do perfectly well.
When you make all those points Palm’s WebOS appears to have little chance, but the primary reason for PC operating systems dying in the past was because the weight of applications which chased other operating systems. So far we live in a cellular world where most handsets have around 20 applications, all supplied by operators or handset vendors but we are moving to a world where we are likely to have several 100 applications on a phone, with about 30 or 40 operator or handset vendor supplied and where just a few devices at the top end of the smart phone market can download their own applications from some kind of App Store.
As this unravels over the next few years the Pre can sell itself on good looks and charm ‘ for instance are the graphics well integrated into the touch interface, do the gesture controls work intuitively, do web pages look like real web pages and load fast enough. None of that is true on Windows phones, and on many of the top end feature phones that were supposed to challenge the iPhone. So Palm has a chance. If it can establish the Pre as a pleasantly designed OS on one quality top end phone, then it has a basis for international deals, the ability to raise more finance, and the chance that it will be acquired by someone with more cash to give it a real chance.
We have already repeated the rumour that the Pre might arrive here, through O2, before Christmas, and if that turns out not to be true, there is enough hype to be sure that a rival will bring it to the UK and the rest of Europe in that time frame ‘ so it will become relevant in the UK and Europe.
So it looks like Palm will get the time to build the Pre from its 40 or so Apps available today on its App Store, to several hundred, before the device has to be judged on whether it can stand up to the iPhone (and all the other rival touch screen phones) or not.
For Sprint, which has the Pre exclusive in the US, this might be where it draws a line in the sand and stops the rot, and begins attracting more new customers than it is losing, and on the back of that, ensure that Palm survives either by funding it directly or promising a buyer or investors of Palm that there will be more and more orders.
So that’s what all the fuss is about ‘ the fate of the Palm Pre is likely to mirror the future shape of the handset industry, and everyone is both curious and attracted to the strange little device.