The Palm Pre was just released on Saturday at $199. Reports seem to be consistently saying that Palm was successful in selling the quantities that they wanted over the weekend. The Palm Pre looks like a great device with lots of potential for techy consumers that want some thing new and something non-Apple, Blackberry, etc.
The biggest question for Palm is whether they’ll be able to continue selling their device. Today at the big Apple Keynote for the WWDC, Apple made this question even bigger. Apple has officially announced a new device, the Apple iPhone 3GS with a superior camera and a few great new features at $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB. What’s more potentially disastrous for Palm is that they also announced that the old iPhone 3G 8GB will continue to be sold and is now priced at $99. That price is the same as several phones that are nowhere near as good as the iPhone and $100 less than the Palm Pre.
These two announcements quickly took over the “Trending Topics” on Twitter.com and flooded all the tech blogs quickly. The biggest question for Palm will be if they can regain the hype online around their phone and whether they’ll do anything to counteract this challenge or if they feel their phone speaks for itself at it’s current price and with it’s current marketing. I don’t know any non-tech friends that know a thing about the Palm Pre and I’m concerned that they haven’t made it desired enough. I think the competition is great and I don’t think Apple’s news will kill Palm (or others for that matter), but it does present even more challenges for other phone manufacturers as Apple continues to add to their feature sets.
I mean I’m pretty “teche” and I don’t know much about the uniqueness of the pre except the charging system. Now I did not know that the older iPhone was going for $99. LOL If I read that right then that is a definite game changer. I have a cheap pre-paid phone rite now cause I don’t “need” the bill. But If I had to choose it would be the older iPhone.
@ Thomas Reggi
Game changer indeed. Of course, I’m leaving out all the details about how there’s subsidizing going on for the phone prices, but that’s true of just about every phone out there (basically if you have to sign a contract). I used a T-mobile pre-paid phone for a long time so I can certainly appreciate your position. The service cost is out of the world, but once you have the capabilities of an iPhone in your hand you’ll never want to be without it. Oh, and the Palm Pre is technically $299, but they have a $100 rebate. Why they’ve done that is beyond me… I really want Palm to do well and I think the Pre will give them a much needed boost, but… something is still missing. Only time will tell.