Good for you, Palm.
Something weird is going on with me and the Palm Pre release: I don’t entirely care.
I do care at an industry level, because I want Apple to feel some competition so they start fixing their problems instead sitting on their hands (and mountains of cash), but personally the phone just doesn’t interest me that much. There’s definitely a good amount of interest regarding the UI, multitouch and gesture implementations they put in, as an interaction designer. But the phone itself? Eh.
Currently, I see the phone marketplace in two categories right now: Mutable or Focused.
Being Mutable isn’t just about the connectivity of the device, but about how else you are using the device in new places with new people or in new contexts. The iPhone absolutely tears up this category: thanks to its popularity, plus the ease of over-the-air downloads from the App Store, you can almost immediately pair up with someone else in a new social media experience on the spot in a foreign location, for example. OS 3.0 will extend contexts with the new API, solidifying the device as a handheld device that can simply become anything you want it to be.
Focused devices need to be connected too, but not nearly as much as Mutable ones do because their hardware features are meant to be outstanding. A prime example would be Samsung’s 12-megapixel cellphone, what the industry used to call a “feature phone” but is now being built on a smartphone platform instead of a custom OS like it would have been before. The personal value of having the Focused device trumps the Mutable value of it, but does not remove it — in particular, there must be some mutability of the essential feature that spurned the purchase.
Palm is just finding its legs. It won’t be able to fully compete as a Mutable device until it gets more users and more developers, which is why you’ll see crazy experiments with billboards that can be controlled by iPhones before you’ll see them on the Pre. This kind of catch-up is what any competitor in the smartphone business has to do, and the gap simply can’t be filled until the handsets are sold and in enough user’s hands.
As a Focused device, it has no outstanding hardware features. It has no widescreen optimized-for-movies display and has no dedicated music controls. It sports a 3.2 MP camera for the same reason Apple’s will — it would be laughed off the stage if it didn’t include one — but there is no dedicated camera button and no auto-focus. The energy at Palm went into making the Pre a really rich PIM experience for its owner, such as beautiful calendar management and great contact features like “Synergy” which lets you aggregate details about a person live off of multiple services like AIM and Facebook automatically.
So clearly, the Pre aims to be a Mutable device, trying to lure developers into exploiting the wide but basic features within — which means its going straight for Apple’s lunch. Judging by certain moves like making it masquerade as an iPod for the Pre’s iTunes compatibility, it seems like Palm really is trying to force Apple into making a move that Palm laywers want to jump on — either Apple leaves it alone and lets Palm try to muscle in on its turf, or Apple goes after Palm and risks having a court force Apple to let everyone in on its fun if it loses.
But that battle is happening on turf I gave up on long ago. Mutable devices amuse me to no end, but the lack of a quality camera kills it for me. After experiencing how valuable it was to me having the N95 8GB in my pocket when my son was born, I’d never go back. I no longer want to look at cameraphone photo that turns out to be a wonderful moment and think “if only I had a better/real camera on me.” This is why I pre-ordered an N97, with an improved 5 MP camera (better sensor and flash) but with other improvements (like touch) to make sure I don’t miss out on anything that lets me use the camera and my photos in new and interesting ways.
If Palm is successful, either Apple will need to differentiate further to keep their lead, or this newly-recharged Palm can release a high-end Pre for those still waiting for better hardware features. Which is why I’m rooting for Palm to kick Apple’s ass. I finally want to see that when Apple kicked everyone else’s ass when they introduced the iPhone, that someone out there learned from it.
