Will The Palm Pre Kick The iPhone Out Of Your Carry-On?
The long-anticipated Palm Pre, widely considered to be the first credible challenger to Apple's insanely popular iPhone, finally drops into Sprint stores this weekend. We've been following the hype with an eye towards whether it'll appeal to frequent travelers. The results thus far: a very definite, very firm maybe.
The Palm Pre's removable battery has gotten a little bit of play, half because it's genuinely useful and half because it's a poke in the eye to Apple. A removable battery is less important today than it used to be, since batteries these days last and last. But if you're on an international trip and your smartphone doubles as your mp3 player, a removable battery isn't exactly insignificant. Plus we just get physically nervous traveling without a spare battery for each peripheral.
We're also of two minds about the Palm Pre's camera. On one hand no real traveler is going to use a smartphone camera for serious photos. On the other hand, people who are supposed to know about these things have been positively agog about the Pre's LED flash and the software-side image processing.
The Pre's biggest problem, at least at launch, is going to be the weakness of its applications variety. The iPhone app store is legendary, so much so that Apple's most recent campaign focuses on the store instead of the phone itself. There's a reason Jaunted has an entire category turned over to iPhone travel applications. Until Palm has something close, frequent travelers will have a reason to stay with Apple. And if it's true that no one is interesting in designing location-aware Pre apps, Palm might never catch up.
That said, the Pre's existing travelish apps sound intriguing. One of the upshots of Palm's new WebOS is that applications can talk to each other. If you book movie tickets through the Palm Pre's Fandango app, it adds the showtimes right to your calendar. It's not going to be long before someone expands that functionality to hotels and flights. In fact, we'd be surprised if TripIt—which makes one of our favorite iPhone travel apps—hasn't already done it. Maybe they will now.
[Photo: Palm.com]
Related Stories:
· Palm Pre [Sprint]
· iPhone Travel App Coverage [Jaunted]
· Travel Tech Coverage [Jaunted]
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