26th
Palm Pre vs. iPhone 3G-S
Well after much consternation and second guessing myself, i’ve decided to go w/ the iPhone. My decision came down to three rational issues and one irrational one.
First the irrational - I’ve always just WANTED an iPhone. Due to good old phone subsidies and 2 year contracts I couldn’t pull the plug and make the buy. But i have always coveted them and I couldn’t get over that longing.
On the more rational side:
1) I’m a Mac user and have a lot invested in Mac software that is directly portable to the iPhone so my wired/wireless life will be much easier.
2) I need a new iPod. Just 3 weeks ago my 60GB iPod Photo (v3?) completely died. Sad Mac face, no way to reformat to get any response from it. I’d already paid $100 once to replace the battery. It would have cost more to repair it than to replace it. And a 60+ GB ipod today runs $249. The 32 GB iPhone kills two birds with one stone.
3) Apps - There’s just so much more available for the iPhone and the innovation shows no sign of stopping. The Pre will eventually catch up, but the fact that Palm isn’t releasing the full developer SDK until 3 months after the device launch is not a good indicator to me as to how the software ecosystem is going to evolve. In a couple of years, we’ll see.
Having said that there are some things that the Pre does MUCH better than the iPhone that I am going to miss.
1) Speed dialing - This is such a simple feature, I can’t imagine why the iPod doesn’t have it. Palm allows you to assign single key dialing to your contacts. They let you use every key on the keyboard. (e.g. H=home, C=Christine, D=Dan, etc.) Just go to the dialer, press and hold that key and it auto dials. I would expect iPhone to at least let me have 8 or 9 speed dial slots. 1 speed dials voice mail. Why can’t I assign 2-9 to my favorite contacts? (I’ve searched online to find it but I haven’t found it - am I missing something. Please tell me.)
2) Push Gmail - the Pre Push email from Gmail is fantastic. It just works. As good as GoodLink ever did. That push Gmail isn’t available on iPHone is absurd. I am fairly confident that this is an Apple imposed limitation in order to encourage/require subscriptions to Mobile Me. There is NO technical reason why it can’t be done.
3) Multitasking - The Application management interface on the Pre is much better. THeir Card metaphor and the ability to jump out of a single application and scroll across to another app is really simple and elegant. Yes you can listen to your iPod and write email on an iPHone, but the overall experience of multiple apps running and moving between them on the Pre is better. No question.
4) Palm’s Mail and Messaging Apps - they way they pull together all of your various ‘inboxes’ was really nice.
5) Sprint Network - Better coverage at my house, and better coverage and data rate overall around the triangle. And great voice quality. Remember, that second T in AT&T stands for Telegraph. That may be what you need.
Apple can learn a lot from the Pre and I hope they will borrow as much from Palm as Palm did from Apple in designing the Pre. So we’ll see what happens in 2 years when I’m up for a new contract @ AT&T.
