Palm Pre

Today is the opening day of the Apple World Wide Developer Conference in San Francisco. This morning they announced new Macintosh laptops, a significant upgrade to the Mac OS and, what everyone was really waiting for, a software and hardware upgrade to the widely popular iPhone.

In honor of the iPhone announcement I thought I would take a few minutes to write about the other phone getting all the news coverage right now: the new Palm Pre. Most of the coverage leading up to the launch of the Pre over last weekend was about how Ed Colligan (Palm CEO) lured Jon Rubinstein (the brains behind the iPod and iMac) out of retirement to take on his old company in the phone space. The coverage -- and there was a lot of it -- focused on this battle between the old leader and the new leader in the handheld / smart phone market segment.

Now I should be fair and disclose that I was a huge Palm fan throughout the 90’s. I was an early Palm Pilot adopter and ended up purchasing three or four over the course of a decade to upgrade or simply replace an older unit. (I have a bad habit of dropping my phones and PDAs, usually with a bad result.) I invested Palm apps and used my PDA for everything I could. When the Treo smart phone was introduced I was ecstatic. I owned my 600 for years. With a few hardware exceptions -- that annoying buzzing sound aside -- I was a happy user. That is until Palm abandoned me wholesale. They introduced Windows CE phones and no longer advanced the Palm OS. They were happy to take my money but were never happy to advance me along the lifecycle of products.

With that said the one thing that impressed me the most about the iPhone -- no, not the interface or multimedia or handwriting recognition or applications -- was the fact that despite owning the first generation of phones I could upgrade to the 2.0 software for free. Yes the hardware doesn’t support all the bells and whistles but Apple was going to continue to advance the technology for me. More shockingly is that they were going to advance my software capabilities for FREE. I was happy to pay for it but the upgrades (with dot revisions there have been four or five now) continue to come for free.

Today Apple announces iPhone 3.0 software. Guess what? I’ll download it when it comes available on June 19th for free. I’ll flash my first generation iPhone and get additional functionality. Guess what? I’ll be happy...

Palm will never again get my business. I can’t afford their model. The Pre may be cool but if you’re interested in buying one you should ask for a commitment for future upgrades (paid or free) before you walk out the door! Palm is the number five phone OS vendor behind Apple, Nokia, Blackberry and Android. Do you really want to take a risk that they’ll be in business long enough to provide the support you deserve for something as business critical as your phone?!