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Ok, the reviews have been rolling out in force for Palm’s launch of the Pre and WebOS manana. They’ve all been quite positive – glowing at times. Significantly better, if memory serves, than any RIM or Android launch I’ve read about. On par, really with reviews of new iPhones.

This is satisfying – I’ve long been a Palm supporter – they lost me for a little while with their years long blatant refusal to do literally anything. (And technically, they continue to lose me – because I’m going to be getting the new iPhone and not a new Pre – but that’s only a sure thing because I dislike that damn slider, I think history’s going to show that no mainstream hit will ever have been a slider.) What I’ve seen and read about the Pre, though – renews my faith. Palm has always had a great vision for smartphones – hell that their Treo, essentially unchanged over the course of 5 years, was still the best general purpose smartphone out there before the iPhone hit. When my first 650 died, the only option was to buy a new one – WinCE? RIM? Forget it. The Palm had a touch screen, easy user interface and, yes, an app store (palmgear.com) that had thousands upon thousands of apps – including no shortage of games. And that was years ago. So, I’m just saying, hate Palm or whatever, they knew smartphones.

The Main Issues I’ve Read

Assuming that the reviewers haven’t all lost their mind, I believe that WebOS has saved Palm. This was their last chance and they knew it and they did it. Where the rest of the smartphone industry was targeting where the iPhone was, I think Palm went into a dark room, tried to figure out something genuinely innovative and go with that – and that’s going to be the key to success – they’re starting out with something new as their base and it’s going to be a big differentiator as they continue to evolve it. This is Apple’s real and only short term competitor – they’re the ones who are going to be pushing Apple’s iPhone OS team.

I think the major complaints I’ve seen for the phone are a sparse App Catalog, battery life and maybe build quality. App Catalog quantity out the gate isn’t an important factor. As long as it works well and easily – as I believe that the platform is going to do well, the developers will come. Especially since easy apps are super easy given the web based development model – as compared to quite a high barrier to entry of learning Objective-C – something no one outside of the (at least previously) small MacOS development world.

Battery life. LOL. Seriously, when do people not complain about this? The iPhone? Battery life! Non-replaceable battery! The sky is falling! Same with the G1! Oh NOES! Seriously folks, everything I’ve read shows that with heavy usage this will make it through the day, that’s roughly the battery life of any current, good smartphone. Maybe it’s less than the iPhone, but you’ve got replaceable batteries so you can carry a spare, not to mention the higher capacity third party batteries that already exist.

Build quality, eh. It’s a slider – outside of the Helio Ocean, which did have satisfying construction, I think they all tend to be a little plasticky. But, whatever, my guess is that this won’t be a huge factor in purchasing decisions. Hopefully, the next one will just be pure virtual keyboard. (Wait, the Pre has a virtual keyboard, right? I think it does?).

Hacking iTunes!

One super interesting move they made, which I believe was smart – although may prove otherwise – was hacking the system to sync with iTunes. In my opinion, this is critically important. Easy desktop music syncing is key and iTunes does it so well and everyone, but everyone has an iPod already. Making it easy for people to drop their iPod in favor of their smartphone is key. It will be interesting to see how Apple reacts and subsequently how Pre owners react. If they block the Pre from syncing who will the users blame, Palm or Apple? My guess is that the internet world will blame Apple, but the mainstream users will blame Palm.

Will It Fail?

Here’s one of the very few out and out – Pre will fail posts I’ve seen. His first reason is that “The Pre isn’t even as good as the current iPhone, let alone the new one.” – but I think that is an oversimplification. Remember when the iPhone came out and people started comparing it’s features to other smartphone? Man, it wasn’t even as good as them! No MMS? What? No copy and paste? This thing is dead on arrival. Yeah, turns out feature-checklist-itis isn’t a good gauge of how good a phone actually is.

The weirdest one, though has to be:

The smartphone game is rapidly becoming as much of platform game as a device game, and the Pre is nowhere as a platform. As more people buy iPhones and more apps are built for iPhones, iPhones become more valuable to their owners. This creates the network effect that Microsoft Windows users have long been familiar with. Apple is far from having a Windows-like position, but it’s getting there rapidly. And the only companies in a position to derail it right now are RIM and Google.

With no support as to why he believes that RIM and Google are the only companies that are going to be able to get the network effect? If it was the size of the company, well then WinMob should have a huge network effect, which it certainly does not. The network effect comes of having a successful platform and is unaffected by the size of the company – look at Twitter for a great example of this, or Facebook or any other networks – compare and contrast to Yahoo 360 or any of Google’s attempts (do you remember Jaiku?). It simply a silly assertion to make, developers will go where the users go – possibly even more so to WebOS since the barrier to making apps is so low – it already has a pool of developers skilled in its chosen language that is huge.

Ok, this last one is wierd too:

The smartphone game has become a waltz of elephants, and Palm is just a Jack Russell terrier. In the US, the smartphone war is between Apple, RIM, and, to a lesser extent, Google. Palm can yip a bit and run around nipping at the others’ feet, but it’s too late to become one of the big dogs.

What? Again, why is it the size of the company that matters here? It simply doesn’t make sense, why isn’t WinMob thrown in there, then? Also, why just be concerned with the US? These are just weird baseless ideas – I think he’s a smart guy, I wish he’d provide at least some reasoning behind this. The smartphone market is growing by leaps and bounds – the Pre doesn’t actually have to beat the iPhone to make a very, very viable company – it just needs a reasonable slice of that pie. In my mind the smartphone race to watch is for 2nd place and is between Android and WebOS. I personally think that RIM is reaching its zenith and in the next couple years (although they’ve proven more successful than I would have thought so far), unless something radical changes there you’ll see them gobbled up by their younger, hungrier competitors.

In the end…

Anyhow, I think the Pre is truly innovative in a space where everyone thought that Apple had the corner on the “new new” market. There’s things I want Apple to copy from the Pre – especially, *especially* that awesome touch zone next to the button. I desperately want programmable gestures so that I can do more than two things without having to go back to the launcher. It’s a brilliant solution – sorta like how Apple’s mighty mouse, while still technically one button – combines the simplicity for the new user with advanced options for those who need it (except the mighty mouse fails on the execution, where I don’t think the Pre does). I believe that the Pre is going to be the one that pushes Apple to finally enable true background processing instead of (or in addition to) their lame ass push system. I’m looking forward to this launch but even more so to see how this evolves. Do you think it’s going to save Palm? Or are they still going down?