Ken Fitzgerald of San Jose, Calif., with his new Palm Pre (Robert Mullins Photo)
No one was camped out overnight or sitting in lawn chairs, but there was a line of almost a dozen people outside the Sprint store in Palo Alto, Calif., when the Palm Pre smartphone went on sale Friday night.
“I’ve been dying for this thing,” said Ken Fitzgerald, of San Jose, as excited as a kid on Christmas morning as he held his Pre for the first time. “Nothing has worked for me but the Palm.”
Fitzgerald was one of a number of select Sprint subscribers invited to Sprint stores in 10 cities to see and buy the much-anticipated Pre smartphone the night before it officially went on sale Saturday June 6.
Fitzgerald was one of the first to buy a Pre, which sells for $199.99 after a mail-in $100 rebate and a two-year contract for wireless service.
The Sprint store on University Avenue in Palo Alto is just a few doors down from an Apple store, where people were camped out and sitting in lawn chairs in advance of the first sales of the iPhone two years ago. With a launch party (see below) featuring demos of the phone, Sprint executives on hand and free food and drinks, Palm and Sprint are trying to match the excitement of the iPhone with the Pre.
Jesse Jones, of Sacramento, was the first person to buy a Pre at the Palo Alto store, having followed coverage of the Pre “almost religiously” since it was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The Pre will replace his Palm Treo 700P.
“The 700 was a great phone but there were so many things that fell short and the Pre fixed them,” Jones said. The Treo Bluetooth application failed him many times and the phone sometimes crashed in the middle of calls. But even those glitches wouldn’t cause him to switch brands.
“I hate the virtual keyboard,” Jones said, referring to a common complaint about the iPhone that it doesn’t have a keyboard with buttons the user can actually press. The Pre and other Palm smartphones have what are called tactile QWERTY keypads.
“And I despise Windows Mobile. It's ancient,” he added, referring to the Microsoft operating system that powers many smartphones on the market, including some of Palm’s. The Pre introduces a totally new OS for Palm, WebOS.
Fared Adib, vice president of product development for Sprint, showed me how the Web browser worked on the Pre, even calling up my home page on Examiner.com. He also addressed complaints from existing Sprint subscribers that, in order to upgrade to the Pre, they would be forced to drop cheaper service plans that included unlimited data, and sign up for one of Sprint’s “Everything Plan" contracts that cost $70, $90 or $100 a month.
“If you’re going to buy something as powerful as the Pre, you don’t want to use it for just voice,” Adib said. He also went through a price comparison of call plans for Verizon and AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone, which showed Sprint’s plans were actually less expensive. Service plans for the iPhone run as high as $150 a month while Verizon plans for smartphones can be as high as $160 a month.
But not so fast. Fellow Gadgets Examiner David Becker, writes that there's a Web site that calculates the TCO (total cost of ownwership) of iPhone versus Pre that readers should check out.
Much of the buzz about Pre is that it may be Palm’s best chance for an “iPhone killer.” Ron Rosberg, a technology commentator on several radio networks, said many have tried before Palm. Rosberg, who was at the event, said LG and Samsung introduced smartphones they thought would dent the iPhone’s sales lead, but failed to.
Palm hasn’t had a hit since the Treo 600 was introduced in 2003, followed by several updated versions. In recent years its sales have fallen behind those of the iPhone and the RIM BlackBerry. Asked why it took so long for Palm to come out with a serious challenger to the iPhone, Rosberg replied, “They wanted to really do this right.”
UPDATE: Pre is now on sale as of Saturday at Sprint stores and major retailers such as Walmart and Best Buy. What was your experience shopping for a Pre? Was it in stock? Were there lines? Did you buy one? How do you like it so far? Feel free to click on the Comments link to tell me your story. Thanks.
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