Sleeping giant comes back from the dead – Launches Palm Pre!
Finally, yes finally, the Smartphone pioneer Palm woke up from its deep slumber and rather errant ways in the last few years and released the Palm Pre yesterday ending years of anxious wait by the Palm Smartphone and PDA user community. Thousands of Palm fans who had over the years lapped up the company’s PDA, Treo Smart phones had finally something to cheer about from the release of the Palm Pre – a long overdue next gen smartphone Gladiatress video .
Cass hd To many the way to describe this lanch is ‘Oh damn, finally! It better be worth the long wait!”
The launch of this phone means the following:
- It gives Palm a fair chance to stay in the smartphone game after being one of the pioneers in the space.
- It would open up some serious competition in the smartphone space with everyone vying to bring in more innovations.
- It bring the focus back on to Linux being as serious long term player in the Smartphone OS space – With the Android, Web OS and the ALP platofroms.
- It opens up immense opportunity to former Palm OS developers and companies to get back into the fold and ride the Pre wave (Yes, I see one coming).
- It makes the migration of users from Palm OS based Treos to Pre easier with the application backward compatibility.
What remains to be seen however is the following:
- How well Palm is able to use the mometum it generates with the Pre to roll out newer and better versions of both the hardware and the software.
- How fast and rapid is Palm going to be rolling out the product truly globally. The have struggled in the past with their rollouts of the Treos in the past. (They have been terrible at this to say the least)
- How many mainstream platforms can developers support with Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile leading the pack? Will the inability of developers being able to adopt / support multiple platforms hurt Palm? How many of them will come back and ignite the platform?
- How well does Palm leverage the numerous PUGs (Palm User Groups) that have been dormant for a while? Palm has neglected these vibrant forums for a while.
- How well can Palm bring back the droves of Palm OS fans who migrated to the iPhone, Winmobile and Blackberry devices.
- When will Palm roll out the GSM version? How soon?
All said, the Pre launch is a good “resurrection” for Palm. The rest of the trench battle remains to be fought.
All I can say is Palm – Jai Ho with the Palm Pre!
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ipod
P.S: Like Palm, this blog author is back from a long “hiatus”. The blog post author is the founder of the Bangalore Palm User group (BPUG).
I have no idea why Palm decided to launch without a GSM option! Yuck! Not cool at all! They might just be a little too late. 99$ Apple phone is definitely in the offing! Just swallow the pill and get yourself an iPhone.
Arjun Ram
8 Jun 09 at 5:04 pm
Lovely post! Very professionaly written.
Kishore Kumar
9 Jun 09 at 9:47 pm
I think Palm has finally made Apple eat humble pie!
You have all that you need on the phone with the added joy that it is opensource, most existing apps on the palm platform will soom move to this platform and to boot it will have the same in GSM version too.
The 3G will not be far I guess!
Palm played a watch and learn game, pulling it off real neat. For all the critisism that people gave and years of taking flak (I still lived through the downturn with my fav Treo 650, still have the old faithful) – I think no one else can hold Palm back.
Does it have anything that the iPhone lacks? Amazing come back.
I would like to hear from those who said Palm – RIP !
Looks like it should now be RIP -ley’s believe it or not.
Long live the Palm, the Palm is dead? – No?
Srini Yelandur a.k.a Astro-"palm"-ist
11 Jun 09 at 10:38 pm