Who do you think will win this epic mobile phone war? Shall our powerful overlord (Apple FYI) come out victorious or will one of the oldest company in the Mobile World come up and decimate Apple? Maybe our overlord has more than a couple of booms for us at WWDC 09?
For me personally: iPhone: $75 a month Palm Pre: $30 a month if it works with SERO (Sprint Employee Referral Osomething), the plan I'm grandfathered in. Which one do you think I'm going for And the iDevice's battery life is so atrocious I prefer to have my cell/web/texting be a separate device.
Nothing from that fail of a company Palm can beat the sexyness and pure innovation contained in the beauty of a device called the iPhone.
You wake up five minutes before you're due to be at work, and it takes you 25 minutes to get to work. The Pre will call or text or email your boss and will let them know you're going to be around 20 minutes late. It will turn off your ringer while at work and will turn it back on during the car ride. Etc etc etc.
Ok, and the iPhone can do most of that too. Maybe not turn off your ringer, but does flipping a switch hurt anyone?
The truly hilarious thing about the Pre is it operates entirely on web kit. Remember how terrible the early iPhone "apps" were that you had to use Safari for that used clever javascript tricks to always hide the address bar? Yeah, say hello to every Pre app. Also, Sprint. In the end, Palm does what it does best in releasing a product that could be innovative, include a heaping help of glaring flaws, and then lock it down to only a small fraction of the interested user base could even buy it if they wanted to. This revolution in Palm OS is a good ten years too late, and I think the failure of the Pre will be the final nail in Palm's coffin.
You are now on my favorite members list. Now, about that infraction you gave me, I'll have to think about that. , but I agree with everything you said. Palm is a fail. Oh boy, lets, rather than making real apps, have a huge development base my making everything in Javascript, Flash, and HTML. Yay, lets have crap for apps, and copy everything that Apple has done great at and fail at it. Let's be the next MICROSOFT. Sprint. Fail Palm. Fail. Javascript and HTML for apps. Fail. Palm is dead. The only thing to save them is go open source and let the user do what they want with their crap for devices and possibly make a decent looking OS, great. Let the community do what it does best.
The thing is, everyone is trying to out-iPhone the iPhone, and no one realizes that similar to the iPod there is so much more to the iPhone than just fancy hardware. The iPhone leverages the power of iTunes, a program most people already have been using for years to manage and buy music (or maybe even rent/buy videos) to sell applications and handle complete synchronization of your device. How does this compare to the other iPhone copycats including the Pre? You have to either install some wacky software, use Microsoft Exchange, or know how to set up SyncML (or even know what SyncML is). A good friend of mine operates a chain of AT&T reseller shops and from hanging around there I have become amazed at one thing in particular: How few of the features of most of the handhelds they sell that people actually use. Hell, a vast majority of people who buy Blackberries are only buying them because they want QWERTY for texting and don't even bother with a data plan. Why? Because even setting your email up on a Blackberry is complicated for your average person, not to mention figuring out how to ever buy or download programs for the phone. The Pre is going to be no different and just another "too little too late" attempt at competing with the iPhone while completely missing the point of what makes the iPhone so great. In the end, people who buy the Pre will fit in to four categories: 1. Sony Bean owners who have all their music encoded to ATRAC because they hate Apple so much that they refuse to even look at iTunes or any other product with an Apple logo on it. 2. People who are grandfathered in to the SERO plan which is so ridiculously cheap you'd have to be an idiot to ever get rid of it. (I actually have seen people on the howard forums offering to BUY grandfathered SERO accounts.) 3. Confused house wives and kids who want an iPhone but are stuck on sprint for one reason or another and want something similar to use on their family plan. 4. Business people with IT manager who are tired of dealing with managing and operating a Blackberry infrastructure and don't want to make the jump to the iPhone
I'm a bit embarassed now to be one of those who got a Blackberry for the above reason. I do want an iPhone though. I'll be getting one on an as-of-yet unknown date. The iPhone is very simple, and setting everything up is a breeze. iTunes is definately a selling point, and true, only FLAC and ATRAC addicts would consider it. SERO is? what exactly?
iPhone 3G anyday. If you MMA it's like this: Anderson "The Spider" Silva (the iphone 3G) vs. a 5 year old No contest..... (no offence the the 5 year old) just that Anderson silva can kick any1's *&^.........
Sprint Employee Referral Offer, easily the best deal in wireless history. It was $30 a month and included something like 500 minutes, unlimited nights and weekends, unlimited mobile to mobile, unlimited text, and I think some ridiculous data plan as well either included or as an extremely cheap upgrade. Thank you for your valuable insight.
$30 a month: 500 anytime minutes 7p-7a is considered Nights. Free nights and weekends Unlimited texting Free roaming Unlimited web Unlimited Sprint Mobile 2 Mobile Closes AT&T plan is $75 with 300 texts or so and 450 anytime minutes. They do have rollover.
Um I'm going to take a shot in the dark here and say that you're going to get biased opinions since you're in an iPhone gaming site. I've never tried out a Palm Pre since you know, they're not out yet, but I'm thinking I would probably sway towards the iPhone. However, to load your opinion with a bunch of insults to Palm is kind of stupid since this phone is getting tons of hype from the outside-the-realm-of-Apple world. In either case, I'm with Sprint so I'm way more likely to get this then to switch to AT&T just to get the iPhone.
Wow. I would pay someone for that. You know, I could live without texting, I do a lot of it, but I'm not addicted, or even like it all that much. I have tons of minutes (like 10,000 rollover) and all that $30 a month for unlimited internet (why can't they have a cheaper throttled option? Like only so much speed up and down and only 100-300MB a month? I would love that) in exchange for the $20 I'm paying for texting now. I'll go into more detail about my desire for a throttled option on AT&T with the iPhone. I only use my iPod now for Mail and Tweetie mainly on the internet. I have WiFi all over the place, but would love always on internet, and thus constant Mail. I have 7000+ messages, and it only consumes 150MB in Gmail. That means that I would have to get 13,000 average sized messages in one month for it to go over. Not happening. In fact, I only use Safari in emergency situations, and that would be a NBD situation. If AT&T would offer a 10 kbps up and 50 kbps down plan with 250MB/month, for a fair price ($15 or so), I would be all over it. It's all I need. Of course that would block downloads from iTMS and App Store, but I'm limited there on my iPod, and have never seen a need to do that. It would be my ideal plan.
I am such a nerd. I get excited for these things. I call doing the whole WWDC news thing on AppMania in my new section that you made me. I'll try and get those reviews going too.
