Palm are powering up for the release of the Palm Pre on October 16th. The handset, which has already been available in the US for quite some time now will come to 02 with a price tage of between £0 and £96.89 depending on the contract. Expect pre-orders from Phones4U and Dialaphone to begin early October.
The current 02 tariffs are…
There’s no mistaking the mobile’s mission: Palm are out to hack back some of the market share they’ve lost over the last few years. It remains to be seen if the combination of multi-touch screen with a sliding keyboard and whole new operating system are enough.
It’s no secret that Palm needs to makes something work – they’ve posted losses in every quarter for two years straight. Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s Blackberrys have been blowing Palm products out of the water, and the shiny new Pre is their primary hope of getting back in the game. With a new webOS, a linux-based operating system built from the ground up for smartphones, they’re hoping an easy integration of first and third-party applications will pull people back to the Palm.
With the now almost-standard smartphone additions of GPS, 3.2 megapixel camera, touchscreen and accelerometer, Palm and O2 are banking on style and slick software to sell the unit – they certainly aren’t offering financial incentives, with most packages coming out the same price as rival iPhone units. The message is clear: we think ours is better, it doesn’t need to be cheaper.
Which may raise questions as to why they’re stealing Apple services. The Palm famously fools iTunes into allowing it to sync with your music library, leading to a software update arms race with Apple blocking the faux-iPhone and Palm unblocking it again.
With industry associations okaying Apple’s understandable “we don’t really want our competitors using our services” approach, we wouldn’t count on this Pre-syncing working for very long.
The October release date is obviously aimed to be in time for Christmas, so come 2010 we’ll have to see what their smartphone share looks like.
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One Comment
I do have an idea as to why others compete with the iPhone — if nothing else, it’s a huge market. But I truly am nonplussed as to how they do it.