The smartphone wars got more intense last week with the arrival of the touch-screen Palm Pre.
The previews and reviews of the phone indicate that Palm may have a company-saving winner, a possible rival to Apple’s iPhone.
And what’s good for Palm may also be good for Sprint, the troubled carrier that has exclusive rights to the phone, if only for a little while.
Palm executives must be particularly pleased that the two most influential personal technology reviewers in the U.S. found the Pre much to their liking.
“(The Pre’s) a beautiful, innovative and versatile hand-held computer that’s fully in the iPhone’s class,” wrote Walt Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal.
“The Pre … is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it’s the iPhone remixed,” wrote David Pogue of The New York Times.
Each man supplemented his review with a video explanation of the phone that sells for $200 after a $100 mail-in rebate. (Best Buy is offering the rebate upon purchase.)
Typically, Mossberg’s video is a straightforward, lucid account of the phone’s positive features and relatively few drawbacks.
Mossberg speaks from his office, holding the phone up, much as if he were showing it to a colleague who dropped by for a chat.
Pogue gets out of the office. And as he did in his celebrated videos that previewed and reported on the launch of the iPhone in 2007, he interjects plot and humor into his review of the Palm Pre.
The premise of Pogue’s video is that he has been obsessed with the Pre since seeing the prototype of the phone in January.
“Pretty soon, the Pre was all I could think about,” Pogue says as the video shows him hearing the word “Pre” by mistake in a variety of situations.
Finally, the Pre arrives and Pogue opens the phone’s box as if the Holy Grail were inside.
Both Mossberg and Pogue find some fault with the Pre.
Mossberg is especially concerned that the Pre’s Apps store - the place for downloadable programs for the phone - has so few Apps.
Until the supply increases, the Pre won’t be a strong competitor to the iPhone or to the BlackBerry, Mossberg concludes.
Pogue worries about the lack of Apps as well, though he seems to view it as a problem that’s not that hard to fix.
His main concern, especially in the video, is the exclusive agreement with Sprint. But then he cheers up.
“You know what gets me pumped,” Pogue says. “In six months, Verizon is going to have the Palm Pre.”
Both Mossberg and Palm also noted that Apple would soon announce a new version of the iPhone, as it did Monday.
Any resemblance between the iPhone and the Pre and the Pre and the iPhone is not accidental, the reviewers note, as Jonathan Rubinstein, Palm’s executive chairman and the man behind the Pre, is a former key player at Apple.
At Apple, Rubinstein helped develop the iPod, as well as the iMac and iBook.
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