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03.24.09 Will The Palm Pre Break The iPhone's Hold?  By Robert Scoble
At CES the product I was most excited by was the Palm Pre. After all, they had hired a bunch of people from Apple and it went further than the iPhone in many places. It had a keyboard. It has an OS that let you run multiple applications at the same time (something the iPhone doesn't do) and did copy and paste. The OS seemed even better thought out than the iPhone was. Contacts collected data from Facebook and other social networks. It looked like it would win in the marketplace. But now it's March and the tides are changing. First, last week Apple came out with a set of APIs for the iPhone that many people missed because they were drinking at SXSW. More on those in a second. But today stuff is leaking about a new iPhone that's coming out. Now I'm starting to doubt whether Palm can make it. I'm not the only one.  It's shocking, actually, how well Apple has done with developers. Remember, I was at the first iPhone Dev Camp (included here is a picture of those who attended the first Dev Camp). Apple didn't show up (a couple of employees did, but they weren't even allowed to acknowledge that they worked at Apple). How did they turn developers onto the iPhone?
1. Apple sold more than 10 million phones. 2. The experience of using the iPhone got geeks excited. So excited that they put together their own DevCamps even though Apple was pretty clueless. 3. Apple turned on a store that let lots of developers build businesses that are rocking and rolling. Success pulls in even more developers. 4. Now Apple is throwing marketing dollars behind developers. I've seen tons of TV ads that Apple's done. I've seen cool Apple ads on the web. The whole front of Apple stores right now features apps. 5. The new OS, coming this summer, lets developers do even more with their iPhones. Pandora's CTO, Tom Conrad, talked with me at SXSW last week and he was drooling over some of the kinds of things he's going to be able to build for the new OS and that was before he heard the rumors of the new iPhone. Can Palm compete with this? If they do, I'll be the most shocked blogger out there. I think the bigger question is can Palm get enough hype to push it into a second place status and tear away market share from RIM, Microsoft, and Nokia. The answer to that one is yes. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net's Vice President of Media Development. Go to Scobleizer ... | ||||||||
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