A few more thoughts on the Palm Pre as June 6th nears
Posted By RichC on June 4, 2009
As a long time Palm OS user from Palm Pilots to Handspring Visors to Samsung i500 phones (my mother is currently using it) to the latest Treos and Centros … I’m waiting … and waiting … for the new Web OS … and waiting for a new physical keyboard PDA smartphone. The Palm Pre is almost here.
After reading and listening to Walt Mossberg (WSJ link) talk about the lack of an App Store, I started to wonder why it is really such a big deal? Frankly most business users want a smartphone to handle normal business tasks and need a good contact manager, calendar, some text messaging and strong email ability.
It would be nice to have a few fun gadgets like music and video … or even a game or two for entertainment, but that’s not necessary really. Perhaps it is because I don’t have a iPhone that I’m not all that interested in the “App Store” thing and will be just as happy to have a few good quality productivity enhancers that help handle normal business tasks.
My biggest concern is the lack of a memory card for the growing sizes of data as video, music, podcasts and mapping databases come to mind. I’m sure I’ll want to store additional programs since not everything is going to run wirelessly from “the cloud“ and I assume that the normal OS bloat will eventually come Palm Pre’s way. Even the iPhone is now doubling their memory … and frankly speaking as cheap as memory is nowadays, I’m shocked to only see 8GB on the Pre? (I suspect generation 2 is not all that far away?)
Thankfully I’m a Sprint (only carrier this year) customer with very good 3G coverage almost every where I regularly travel (except Europe this summer) and have been ready to retire my trusty Palm Treo 700p … although would have probably been happy with a Blackberry realizing what I use a smartphone for; that said, unlike the iPhone I be glad to able to be able to open an “flick through” multiple programs, use a physical keyboard to enter text or handle emails, replace the battery if need be and still be able to slip a smooth skipping stone looking smartphone into my pocket. Stay tuned … June 6th is coming.
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