Until now I’ve written next to nothing about the upcoming Palm Pre smartphone, and with good reason: it’s probably going to be lousy, flop badly, signal the end of Palm, and have no effect on the iPhone one way or the other. And if that’s all you’ve got to say on the matter then there’s really no point in saying it, so I’ve kept quiet. The Pre is coming to market years too late to matter unless it was a category killer or a market changer, and it’s neither of those. So it’s just the Zune all over again, except Palm doesn’t have deep enough pockets to continue propping up the Pre after it’s already flopped.
So why am I finally bringing up the Pre now, a few days before it launches, instead of just letting it die in peace? All along there’s been the fact that one of Apple’s former top executives, Jon Rubinstein, is leading the charge on the Pre. In other words, Palm hired the guy who used to run Apple’s iPod/iPhone division to help develop an iPhone competitor. That’s juicy stuff when you consider that while the iPhone wasn’t publicly introduced until eight months after he left, Apple has since admitted to have been secretly working on the iPhone for a few years before it launched. So you have to wonder just how much he knew about Apple’s iPhone plans at the time he “retired” in the Brett Favre sense of the word before rather quickly finding his way over to Palm. At this point it may not matter, though, as you have to wonder if there’s anything that Apple knew about the iPhone back in mid-2006 that hasn’t already come out in the wash by now one way or the other. And even if he were pumping Apple’s trade secrets into the Pre, that would ultimately be a matter for Apple’s attorneys and Palm’s attorneys, which couldn’t be more boring. And any personal betrayal angle between Rubinstein and Steve Jobs would be the stuff of tabloids.
As it turns out , what suddenly has my interest about the Pre is a lot less sexy and more, well, nerdy, but I believe ultimately more substantial. Palm recently announced that the Pre will sync with iTunes. On the surface it sounds like a clever, if potentially limiting, shortcut. Palm cedes any ambitions it might have had in the area of selling digital content, but it’s not as if Palm was suddenly going to become a digital music retailer anyway. Nearly all Mac users and a healthy chunk of Windows users are already using iTunes as their primary digital content player anyway (including millions on both platforms who’ve never owned an iPod or iPhone), so why not start off by accepting the dominance of iTunes and positioning the Pre as a device that fits right in with the iTunes universe. Almost as if it were the iPhone’s long-lost stepbrother.
Except that in reality, the Pre is more like the iPhone’s long-lost stepbrother’s uncle’s cousin’s former roommate. Try syncing your Pre to iTunes and some, but not all, of the music you’ve bought through iTunes will work on the Pre. None of the TV shows or movies or music videos, as far as I can tell. Photos, I’m not even sure. But it doesn’t matter, because you’ve already lost anyone who cares about music the minute they attempt to sync their Pre and are presented with the harsh reality that most of the music they’ve purchased through iTunes prior to 2009 is simply not going to end up on their Pre. Sure, you can screw around with burning the music to a CD-R and then reimporting it back into iTunes and then syncing it with your Pre, but only the geekiest of the geekiest of the geeks is going to play those kinds of games. And music isn’t even the Pre’s biggest iTunes problem.
Because no matter how much fine print Palm includes on the box, in its advertising, or in the script memorized by the salespeople, some portion of Pre buyers are going to hear “sync with iTunes” and assume that includes the iTunes App Store. Mark my words: you’re going to see people buy a Pre expecting to be able to take it home and purchase iPhone apps from the app store and have those apps somehow magically work on their Pre despite the fact that it isn’t within a country mile of being possible for too many technical reasons to list. If you think users aren’t capable of making such an off-base assumption, keep in mind how many iTunes users download iPhone games and can’t understand why they’re not playable directly on their computer until they finally have the “well duh” moment of remembering that their computer screen isn’t a touchscreen. And even if you think someone buying an iPhone app and expecting it to work on their Pre is the user’s fault for being so clueless, it won’t change the fact that those users are going to consider their Pre to be defective once it happens. In fact some of them will have considered it to have been their primary reason for purchasing the product, and will conclude they’ve been scammed. Nevermind that Palm plans to have its own app store, most Pre users won’t even get that far. After they’ve spent $4.99 on Bejeweled in iTunes only to find out it doesn’t work on their shiny new Pre, and that new Coldplay album they bought through iTunes last year doesn’t work on their Pre either, they’re going to be (rightly or wrongly) furious with Palm – and their brand new Pre is going back for a refund.
Not that it ultimately matters in the scheme of things. The Pre, being a geeked up smartphone that no one but geeks even seems to have heard about yet, is no more an iPhone competitor than the Blackberry is.The iPhone all along has been aimed not at Blackberry users but at the mainstream user who’s been carrying around an iPod in the left pocket and a cheap generic flip-phone in the right pocket, which allows the iPhone to compete for nearly the entire population while Blackberry remains confined to the niche it’s already carved out for itself. And the Blackberry Storm, if anything, merely served to demonstrate that Blackberry has no idea what it is that people like about the iPhone. So if Apple gets to gradually swallow up the mainstream cellphone market, and Blackberry gets relegated to geeks and raw power users, that leaves Palm and its geeky Pre in a position where the best it can hope for is to salvage just a little meat off the bones of the carcass that was once the Palm-based Treo platform, and to steal away a little of Blackberry’s growing-but-inherently-limited market base. And so in the end, whether the Pre ends up with a few percentage points of the smartphone market and allows Palm to limp into the next decade, or whether the Pre ends up with zero percent of anything and finally puts Palm out of its misery, it doesn’t affect the iPhone one way or the other. And it wouldn’t even be worth writing about if not for the irony of the fact that the Pre’s attempt to directly piggyback onto the success of the iTunes ecosystem could very well be what takes away any chance the Pre might have had of not flopping.
And that’s before we even get to the fact that two days after the Pre launches, Team Apple will be delivering a keynote address in which they’ll probably introduce both the new iPhone 3.0 operating system and the new iPhone hardware model.
Not that we’d ever get an answer, and not that it could probably ever happen at this point anyway, but you do have to wonder if Jon Rubinstein is going to end up wishing he were back at Apple when it’s all said and done. Well there is one way he could end up rejoining Apple, but if you haven’t already figured it out them I’m not going to go all tabloid on you by spelling it out.
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