If you were one of those early adopters of the iPhone, then hey: look at this Palm Pre.
Let’s face it, the iPhone is not that much of a step forward for technology. It’s a beautifully made piece of hardware made to sit on top an overpriced, spotty and somewhat slow 3G Internet experience. Plus, they make you use it as a phone in order to subsidize the cost by selling you pricey calling plans.
It doesn’t mean you can’t use it, it just means that despite the hype surrounding the phone and the amount it’s sold, the real money is probably being made by AT&T.
But whatever the case may be, the Palm Pre essentially becomes the Sprint version of the iPhone. It’ll be sold the same way, through phone contracts, because it costs 599 dollars. So what do you get for that price?
Technical Specifications of the Palm Pre
Oh 8 gigs of memory, a critically-acclaimed simple user interface (like the iPhone) a tiny little keyboard to perhaps make texting a bit faster, and a beautiful but tiny 320 by 480 screen. It essentially combines the functions of a $20 cell phone with a #200 netbook and put it into a very petite package with a fairly useless keyboard.
But then function isn’t necessarily all these things are about, are they? In today’s culture phones need to function as status symbols. And among those the Palm Pre looks to be pretty decent, but it doesn’t have all the Apple hype surrounding it.
Then again, it also doesn’t have too many of those apps available either, so that may work in favor of its end user experience, which has been highly praised by the media.
So is the Palm Pre an iPhone Killer?
So in the end the Palm Pre isn’t really much of a breakthrough product, but perhaps just a stop gap until universal WiFi comes along to make all cell phones obsolete. Then all you’ll have is nice little VOIP phone that you can make phone calls with while you use your little portable e-book or netbook to actually surf the Internet at regular speed.
And then all those "apps" and the entire cell phone infrastructure could possibly even evaporate. When you think about it rationally, it’s just too slow and too expensive and the money doesn’t go to the innovators or the public who own the airwaves to begin with. It just goes to the people who got the bandwidth out of the government to begin with. Those are the people the Internet helps us get around. But if you need a iPhone but you have to use Sprint then the Palm Pre is right for you.
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