Apple, obviously, has the market lead as opposed to the Pre - but several factors weigh into it standing a fighting chance. Unfortunately, with Palm staking it's future on their newest phone, there's serious possible detractions about it, as you point out. The Pre needs to hustle, hustle, hustle and bring itself up to speed as quickly as possible. If there is no SDK by launch or shortly after and they have Storm-size proportions of failures and problemos, it will tarnish their biggest asset for the Pre so far: The marketing and the hype that is and has been generated. I haven't used it and haven't extensively watched the videos so I'm in no position to judge the interface - but there's no accounting for taste so that's really a non-issue - they have to maintain the hype after launch or the bubble will burst. With the hooplah that's been going on with tech blogs, and even Palm itself, they really have to work to keep momentum and make the transition from Prototype to Consumer as smoothly as possible. The slightest catch could be disastrous given the precarious position Palm is in at this point.shakenmartini said:
So far, all people know about it is the interface and the options checklist. The actual usability of the phone is a major hurdle they have yet to jump, which Apple, for the problems that dogged the iPhone launch, has had two years already to improve and they still have a a level of hype and momentum with the upcoming June thingie.
...that's another bad idea from Palm: They picked June as the month to make the big release. They should have distanced it from the Apple shindig by at least a month. They need center stage for something like this. The Apple show will very easily handicap them, like Apple used to do with the CES (if Steve makes cameo it would handily take the wind out of Palm.. sadly). Scheduling it so close only intensifies the magnification on any fault. People love to tear things apart more than they love to rave over how wonderful and fantastic it is - whatever it is.
That's the first thing I thought of months ago when I saw it: Fisher-Price. No joke... It doesn't look that serious for some weird reason.
