Palm’s Next Steps#
With the Pre out a bit less than six months and the Pixi coming out tomorrow (well, today) I think it’s time to speculate about where the might be going. Or at least, where I think they should be going.
Palm, clearly, is at a significant mind share disadvantage. The iPhone, Blackberrys and Android phones are at the forefront of everyone’s minds. My brother, upon showing his Pre around his high school, has been asked (multiple times!) “is that the myTouch?” I’ve talked to people who want to get the Droid but have no idea what the Pre is.
The solution to this problem: advertising. Palm desperately needs to get the word out about the Pre and the Pixi. There need to be billboards, ads on the subway, and constant TV ads—and not the shitty ones with that creepy chick talking about jugglers. They need to make sure that people can’t go five minutes without hearing about the Pre or the Pixi in some way. This would also be good for Sprint, which has been absolutely hemhorraging subscribers.
Palm also needs to get webOS in better shape, NOW. The highest priority things to add are video recording and OpenGL ES. A good Facebook app would also be really nice—other than the browser, that’s probably the app that people most use as the baseline for comparing phones. In Robert Scoble’s review of the Droid, he describes the Facebook app as much worse than the iPhone’s. He says:
Most people will see this and say Droid sucks. Just this one app will affect millions of people’s decisions as to whether or not the phone is a real product. If I were Google I’d make sure that Facebook had BY FAR the best app on Android and if they weren’t willing to play ball with you I’d build my own and put my best engineers on it.
He’s absolutely correct, and Palm needs to be taking this very seriously as well. And while they’re at it (although this isn’t nearly as urgent) they need to make the Google Maps app stop sucking. It’s way too slow.
Speaking of apps, Palm needs to get the App Catalog out of beta and officially open, stat. I know they’re working on this, but it needs to happen faster. They also need to make sure that they treat developers well. They’re already doing better than Apple by supporting the homebrew community rather than trying to undermine them, but they need to treat actual developers well too. There’s already been one App Catalog horror story; we don’t need any others. Palm needs to make it easy for developers to get their apps into the catalog, and ABSOLUTELY UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES REJECT APPS FOR STUPID REASONS.
The final, and least obvious thing Palm needs to do is directly go after the iPhone, and not in the stupid way they’re going about it now (the whole iTunes sync debacle). They already have two webOS phones: the Pre and the Pixi, the Pixi being a slightly worse version of the Pre. Both of them, however, go after RIM more than they do Apple. Palm needs to jump on the bandwagon and release a phone with no physical keyboard—a phone with the form factor of the Pixi but the function of an iPhone.
First of all, that would round out a nice trio of webOS phones, three just being a nice number. It would also allow Palm to cater to the (decidedly large) group of people who prefer a virtual keyboard to a physical one. And an extra nice screen on a webOS device would be, well, extra nice.
Mostly, though, it would allow Palm to beat Apple in their own market. If they could release a phone that directly compares to the iPhone, but better—and I do truly believe that they could do it—Palm could seriously establish themselves as a serious contender in people’s minds.
Ultimately, all the problems with webOS and Palm’s lineup of phones notwithstanding, that is still their biggest obstacle.
