It’s official, the hot item that is the Palm Pre will launch on June 6th, for an on contract price of $200 (after $100 mail-in-rebate that is). What’s so exciting about the launch of this particular device that’s different, than your ordinary smartphone or even the latest Blackberry? Plenty, both Palm and Sprint have a lot riding on this device. Both companies have had extremely rough times over the past few years, just last quarter Sprint lost 1.3 million subscibers, most jumped ship for the likes of Apple’s iPhone on the god-awful network that is AT&T. Palm has been stuck on a dated OS on their mobile phones for the latter half of this decade and with fledging modern mobile OS’s such as Apple’s mobile OS X or Google’s Android platform taking center stage, Palm’s Garnet OS has been left in the dust. The last time a mobile phone got the Palm Garnet treatment was Palm’s own Centro, which has surprisingly been a smash and has been keeping them afloat. Since then even Palm has jumped shipped and has even agreed to have Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS on some of it’s devices in 2006. We all know Palm can make great hardware, the Treo was a breakthrough in mobile computing with its dual input, full sized qwerty and touchscreen inputs, but each iteration has been too minimal for anyone to care. Everyone that I knew that carried a Treo has moved on to either a Blackberry, an iPhone or one of those HTC devices.
However, early indications that the device is the first true “iPhone-killer” was evident in it’s unveil at this year’s CES, generating a mass amount of buzz amongst, not only the tech community, but in the mainstream media as well.Their stock price jumped from a anemic $1.40 to nearly $11, which is quite an amazing feat, in this economy. Since then, Palm has been coying giving out more demos of the device and bits of details, as well as giving some developers an early preview of the webOS SDK, all building to the impending release of the device that will, hopefully, bring Palm back from the brink of death. So far, Palm has enjoyed some fantastic news and it seems they are actually listening to their end users.
Now with rumors of device shortages on launch day, you can’t help but think, that if Palm and Sprint don’t get this one right, it’ll surely be the last time you’ll hear of either company. I, for one, hope that those rumors are, in fact, rumors and I might be seeing myself switch from my loved/hated Blackberry on the crudiness that is AT&T’s network back to the network that broke my cellphone virginity, Sprint.
*image source from Gizmodo
--written by Peter To--
