What’s your flavor?
In my initial article on the Palm Pre, I had decided to take a more neutral approach and not make a particular suggestion as to which of the products was better and for several reasons which I’ll expain in my summary.
Let’s Dive in
First, let’s cover what both phones do equally under perfect circumstances:
- Touchscreen
- Make phone calls
- Voicemail
What I find to be a win in the Apple category:
- Ergonomics – Treo users would appreciate the weight of it, although the iphone is lighter than a Treo, it has metal which let’s you know you’re holding something powerful.
- Applications Galore! The iphone has basically every application the imagination could dream up and publish.
- Size of screen wins hands down if that’s important to you.
- Cool factor – until last week, everyone drooled over the iphone as it really was a bar raiser.
- Storage space for the price – 8gigs for $99 bucks.
- You don’t have to have Sprint.
What I find a win in the Palm Pre category:
- It’s built by Palm- they know their consumer, and they didn’t need to reinvent the phone to start that relationship.
- Voice and text plans are just cheaper with Sprint.
- Intuitive enough in the first release to get basic functionality like cut/paste and screenshots meaning that your experience on your Palm phone will more closely emulate your desktop or laptop experience.
- A real keyboard.
- You don’t have to have AT&T.
- Built in navigation.
- Run background applications (a big deal for multi-tasking).
- Removable battery (critical to our business)- swap when needed.
- Simple credit limitations compared to AT&T.
All in all
Palm will (in my opinion) win the hand held device race in the long run, but if you need apps and the cool factor now, iphone may be your way to go. Proof is in the “where’s the” factor. Like I said earlier, Palm knows its consumer.
I’m still disjointed over Apple’s exclusion of so many possible consumers when it gave exclusivity to AT&T. I cannot tell you how fed up I am with Apple’s need to go proprietary from every start. Equally, Sprint has it’s consumer issues as well, but soon, if I dislike Sprint, I can switch to Verizon and still use the equipment I’m accustomed to.
The one flaw in the Palm Pre is that it has the ergonomics of a very light weight bar of soap. When I’m holding it, I’m nervous- it’s plastic, and it’s a slide phone, leaving you to wonder how soon will the plastics wear out.
The one flaw I find with Apple is that if dropped it’s doomed- it may be metal on the bottom, but the top is as delicate as they come.
In summary
I’m not sure you go wrong either way, but in the end, I chose the Pre, and I chose Pre because I know Palm, and Palm knows me.
[cb type=”company”]palm[/cb]
[cb type=”company”]apple[/cb]
