iPhone rival Palm Pre to sell for $199 after rebate on June 6th - Page 3

In my post I clearly, and in depth, described a system that had no multitasking and didn't need it. Did you actually read it?

Maury

Maybe the designers sat around snorting lines of pixie sticks when coming up for ideas

I love the way fanboyz on here are bitching at the Pre's unveiling $299 costs with a $100 rebate.
How much was the iPhone when it originally was relea$ed?
$600!!!!!!!!!

For the last time. GO TO BEST BUY. THEY DON'T DO MAIL IN REBATES!

Not sure why you are getting so defensive, as those were objective concerns.

I have watched all the Pre videos and haven't seen an instance of multi-touch yet. Running old Palm apps in emulation isn't exactly a plus since most of those are terrible.

I have no doubt that new apps will be released but a) they are competing with an established iPhone App Store and b) I don't see nearly the developer traction that the iPhone has. Not saying they won't get it, but it seems like a seriously murky area.

Also as someone pointed out the webOS doesn't appear to pack quite the punch as the iPhone for a lot of things like games.

As I said, the Pre looks promising to me but until I get a chance to handle it and see how those issues are resolved I am not going to get too excited.

First sane bit of advice in this thread!

Oh so it also has an on screen keyboard?

I am curious how this works. So what, if product X offers a rebate, Best Buy simply pays you it up front?

If so, my guess is that this won't be coming to Best Buy any time soon, unless they have an air-tight deal worked out with Sprint. I know that I, for one, would not be terribly interested in paying out more than my profits in an up-front rebate and then waiting for a 3rd party to pay be back some time in the future. I like the cash in MY bank account, thank you.

Maury

Does the Pre record video?

Six months before the release of iPhone 1.0 (Macworld 2007), journalists had their hands on prototype iPhone to try out, and to write reviews about.

So, now we are 1 months before the Pre release. Has anyone outside Palm tried Pre?

Does any $299 phone not?

Good question.

So now we have to depend on legacy Palm apps for our apps when we get the phone, lol.

Well the Pre doesn't.

This is a good point, but you have to remember, when the iphone came out, there wasn't anything like it really. The pre has to be competitive.


And to everyone who's bringing up the existence of the app store as a reason not to get a pre, just answer me one thing: What if Apple decided that they were going to give up because they had to compete with the popularity of Windows? Apple once was (and still is in some regards) the underdog that fought past the naysayers. Why wouldn't you relate to Palm in the same regard?

Let's just hope this has an impact on iPhone rate tariffs. Life cycle cost of the Pre looks much better. Not a big fan of the added girth, but I hate typing on my iPhone for anything more than a few lines...

No, Pre does not have soft keyboard.

Well then it has 2 years to get it.

not right away...

Does the Pre record video?

Palm said the Pre will not have video recording capability when it first launches, but it is something they are looking into for future updates.

I live in NYC where everybody uses their phones 24/7 and I don't know a single person who carries around a spare battery. I also travel extensively and have yet to meet anyone anywhere who carries around a spare battery.

Where do these people live?! Do they really exist?!

And what feature is this Pre bringing that haven't been out in phones for years, name one feature?

Errrm that was 2 years ago, we are in 2009, different landscape.

Hey something else occurred to me that I'd like people's take on: With the iphone, when you invest in a ton of apps, you're locked in pretty much so you can't go to a different phone and bring your apps. Since Palm developed an OS that will be used in many different phones in the future, you should be able to switch to a different model and bring your apps, correct? They've already announced another phone that will run the webOS, I'm sure there will be more to come.

Hey that's a plus isn't it?

For everyone so quick to jump on the "no background apps for iPhone", I wouldn't be so sure about that. Check out this recent article:
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple...hone-30-2009-5

WebOS

Damn I thought the Pre had every feature the iphone lacked.

(snipped)

[ed: if you're going to tend to let out personal insults and excessive profanity, please go somewhere else]

Yes and yes. It's not about carrying one around- where did you get that from? It's about you walking into a store and you replacing it, when and if you need it. And swapping batteries is common place for cameras- we do have them in NYC and sell batteries at JandR. Many of us buy them. Why buy a brick to hook on your iPhone when you could simply travel with a battery?
Have you ever been outside of an Apple store or Teckserve?

Lame.

I really exist. At least I think I do. Oh god what if I don't really exist!?


I have 2 spares I take with me camping

They are working on bringing a mobile version of Flash 10 to WebOS, but the date I last read was estimated at 2010.



I think it will be great, for what it is. It’s just HTML, CSS and JS after all. Think of changing webpages in your web browser.

This is a great move for Palm at this point. If this device takes off they will eventually have to make a more robust development system, but this is a simple way to get tried and true apps on their device out of the gate. And it’s easy for web developers, too, though the DB stuff will be new.



I think the rebate will hurt the device’s sales tremendously. It has a sale price 50% more than the iPhone. The fact that you can get the money back within 4-8 weeks is not comforting to many people who want the discount now or just don’t have the funds. I’d wager that they are going to drop the price and get rid of the rebate system pretty early on.






Not being released is not the same thing as vaporware. There is more than enough proof that they exist and will be on sale soon.



If the data plan is not required then the subsidy by Sprint is probably considerably lower than what AT&T pays Apple. I look forward to see what the parts costs.



Nope, I wouldn’t say that. I have historically had 2 spare batteries for my Mac notebooks despite them having good battery times than other notebooks. I travel a lot and having the juice is a good thing. Despite that, I hope they make the next Mac update with the same non-user swappable battery bay as the 17” MBP as it will add battery life and will allow them to use more of the sides for ports, while maintaining their design standards. But I understand that my needs are from being typical so I don’t expect Apple to change their business model or call it a “FAiL” just because they don’t do things in the exactly the way that suits my needs best all the time. Luckily we have many products to choose from.


I have 1 very large external iPhone battery that will recharge the internal battery a few times. I don’t use it much but it’s nice to have just in case. A user-swappble battery has never been used with the iPod line, is moving away from their notebook line and shouldn’t be expected with the iPhone. Why using a battery that plugs into the dock connector and charges it back up is an issue is beyond me. Both methods have their issues, but I’ll take an iPhone with a “tumor” hanging off of it for 30 minutes over a the alternative issues that will be with me every time I use the device any day. I don’t think people realize that the battery packs recharge the internal battery.



Sprint is CDMA, so the Pre is already radioed for Verizon.



That $400 is the in-contract price, which requires you to re-sign up for another 2 years. The retail price is more around $600 from many estimates.



It’s a better solution for many app, but it doesn’t solve every problem. It’s not designed to and I think that the rumors of Apple allowing you to choose an app or two to work in the background will come to fruition, but it will never be active on the original or 3G iPhones. They just don’t have enough RAM for it to be a viable solution. Just like the iPhone video camera, if you want a poor, just functional solution for those devices go with the jailbreak. However, if the next iPhone really is ~600MHz and, most importantly, has 256MB RAM and Apple still doesn’t offer background apps then the jailbreak solution should work very well.



Did you mean to reply to yourself?



Since when? Link?

yet another example of how this phone is gonna have about a 45 min battery life....I log into a website that is flash heavy while also listening to music and there are a few "essential" apps in the background that keep pinging the network or the processor or the memory.

I think one thing that will mitigate app lock in is that most Apps are pretty cheap. It's also possible that someone could just make a Pre version of their app and migrate the data via the internet or even device to device sync (if such a thing is possible).

It's also worth noting that the pre runs old Palm apps in a WebOS emulator that could just as easily run on the iPhone, and that the majority of those 80,000 apps are old junk that no one in their right mind is interested in.

Many Palm OS apps are highly specialised business apps that were created for specific situations and companies that no longer even exist. Many of these apps were written in the 90's for a tiny black and white screen. An absolutley huge amount of them are trivial games using either 8 colours or just black and white on a blocky pixelated screen. No one is going to be running most of these except for nostalgic reasons.

The best and most commonly used of those 80,000 Palm OS apps are completely superseded by the feature set of the pre itself. Why use a Palm OS text editor when the system does it? Why use a Palm OS calendar when the system has it's own calendar etc.?

It's fantastic they were able to write such a good emulator and it will help with people transitioning from Palm OS to the pre, but to suggest that the pre has 80,000 apps that are useable or desirable is a bit ridiculous. The iPhone's apps are all current, currently useful, and currently being downloaded in large numbers.

That's a big, big difference.

That's the best you could come up with?

The phone doesn't have flash.

You should be asking yourself that question for explaining a $600 to $300 price differential in 2 years in those terms.

WebOS is not a feature, it's a basic part of the system. Your argument is like saying the "one unique feature" of the 2010 Mustang is "has the Mustang engine".

WebOS may indeed have some unique features, but so far I've been repeatedly underwhelmed.

Maury

Please read up on WebOS.

Essentially, it is a web server running on the phone, and all the apps (including the built-in Palm apps) are written with HTML/Javascript. They are web apps running on the phone. I don't even know how it is different from the web apps on iPhone, other than they are local.

Note, those apps are WEB APPS! That's why they can run "multitasking". You can run multiple web pages on iPhone too. Web pages do not use that much memory.

It has limited access to the lower level stuff. For example, no 3D (forget about cool games). I don't even know if it orient the UI according to the accelerometer.... some apps are landscape, but it seems they are always landscape. They don't rotate based on the phone.

I doubt memory/processor intensive apps (like photo editing, or even good 2D games) are possible.

No video recording and no AUDIO recording.

And how are they going to manage the music library? Will they write an iTunes competitor?

How about unicode support? iPhone can switch to foreign languages from day one, and even if your OS is english, Asian language (Chinese, Japanese etc) websites work flawlessly. Apple has the Mac OS X to base on and everything works. Palm has to start from scratch. It will be interesting to see their language support.

How about P2P? Doubt it will happen on Pre.

Mind you that Sprint has a 30-day return policy. If the new iPhone kicks enough ass, and is out within that time, there's no telling how many of these things could come back. Especially if Apple and AT&T make ownership more economical.