If you happened to miss the Pre‘s unveiling at this year’s Computer Electronics Show (CES), it seems that the smartphone market just got a little more crowded with Palm’s most recent entry.
The Linux-based phone
looks promising and has a lot of industry bloggers excited because of it’s fluid webkit-based UI. From what I’ve read so far, it seems that Palm is taking a similar approach to what Apple did when it introduced the iPhone two years ago…having developers create “web-apps” in sort of a sand-box environment.
In any case, I just wanted to post some of my thoughts on the Pre and what’s been unveiled so far..I just want to say beforehand, I’m excited about this phone and what it means to the expanding smartphone market. Remember folks, choice and competition is good for everyone.
I see a few trends that could possibly play out here and in the first one, I think that there is obviously room for more than the “one smartphone to rule them all.” My opinion is that like computers or game consoles, this new breed of smartphones have markets they can serve. I see the G1 as the “enthusiasts” phone, Blackberries and WinMo phones as the business-users phones and iPhone as sort of a “jack-of-all trades.” (Btw, I didn’t forget about Nokia Symbian, I’m just not too sure where they’ll fall.) Oh yes and the Palm Pre is somewhere in between, sort of like the iPhone but it’s marketshare will be smaller, fierce and loyal. Hmmm who does that remind you of, about 10 years ago?
On the other hand, the cellular market could continue to be dominated by the iPhone much like the desktop market is dominated by Windows. Basically it’s a snowball effect, because a lot of phones have been sold (approx. 10 million), developers will be writing apps and with a huge library of software, more people will buy iPhones and the cycle continues…We’re already starting to see this happening with developers like Konami bringing their hits,
Metal Gear Solid and Silent Hill (oh ya and Frogger, how could I forget) to the iPhone platform (you’ll notice I didn’t call it a phone).
In any case, even though this is an iPhone-centric website, we don’t feel the second scenario is necessarily the best case scenario. As time progresses and this smartphone market matures, what I am afraid of is that Apple will fall back into the “
Not invented here” syndrome and feel like there is less of a need to innovate (ie. see lack of cut and paste functions & flash support) as it feels it can dictate what the market wants. Nonetheless with all these new entrants, it’ll be interesting to see who’s left standing at the end of the year or at least see how things pan out.
