Yeah, provocative headline, but weve lamented in that past that the Palm Pre was too iPhone-like for us based on the involvement of transplanted Apple brain trust and how wed have loved to have seen a truly next generation Palm device. Could it be, however, that the former have saved us from being tragically wrong about the latter?
Wed heard before how the previous Apple iPod-lead Jon Rubenstein argued and lost with Steve Jobs over a hardware keyboard on the iPhone (much as Tony Fadell, father of the iPod and another former Apple exec, argued and lost over using Linux rather than OS X on the iPhone). Flash forward and Rubenstein is recruited by new Palm backers, Elevation Partners, to help oversee the development of Palms next generation handset and potential company-saving gadget the Palm Pre. (And Rubenstein brought over iPhone engineers and Apple PR people to help).
So whats new? According to Fortune (via PreCentral.net) it turns out Rubenstein first had to save the Palm Pre from Palm:
Rubinstein started, in his words, hanging out with Palm people in late June. He didnt like what he saw. The hardware for the Pre needed to be scrapped and rebooted. For one thing, prototypes were using old resistive touchscreen technology that responds to a user physically pushing the screen, not the newer capacitive technology manipulated by the electricity in the users body. Rubinstein tossed out the old phones hardware and built a new one in about 15 months. We were basically running a marathon and doing a heart transplant in the middle of it, says Rubinstein.
(And does that mean if Rubenstein and Fadell had won their arguments, maybe the iPhone would have been the Palm Pre fully two years ago? Were ecstatic they didnt and it wasnt because now we get to have both visionary products to choose from and to compete for our choice.)
Wed heard before how the previous Apple iPod-lead Jon Rubenstein argued and lost with Steve Jobs over a hardware keyboard on the iPhone (much as Tony Fadell, father of the iPod and another former Apple exec, argued and lost over using Linux rather than OS X on the iPhone). Flash forward and Rubenstein is recruited by new Palm backers, Elevation Partners, to help oversee the development of Palms next generation handset and potential company-saving gadget the Palm Pre. (And Rubenstein brought over iPhone engineers and Apple PR people to help).
So whats new? According to Fortune (via PreCentral.net) it turns out Rubenstein first had to save the Palm Pre from Palm:
Rubinstein started, in his words, hanging out with Palm people in late June. He didnt like what he saw. The hardware for the Pre needed to be scrapped and rebooted. For one thing, prototypes were using old resistive touchscreen technology that responds to a user physically pushing the screen, not the newer capacitive technology manipulated by the electricity in the users body. Rubinstein tossed out the old phones hardware and built a new one in about 15 months. We were basically running a marathon and doing a heart transplant in the middle of it, says Rubinstein.
(And does that mean if Rubenstein and Fadell had won their arguments, maybe the iPhone would have been the Palm Pre fully two years ago? Were ecstatic they didnt and it wasnt because now we get to have both visionary products to choose from and to compete for our choice.)
