The Palm Pre: iPhone Killer?

Gizmodo, the leading gadget blog, employs a painful poker metaphor and says the Pre is, "Respectable. Decent. Impressive even. But not the highest hand."

The biggest gripe from Gizmodo seems to be that when you slide open the Pre to use the keyboard, the plastic edges of the phone's body are too sharp—in fact the Gizmodo reviewer, Jason Chen, calls the plastic "irresponsibly sharp" and warns you: "prepare to get sliced." I can only tell you that I've been using the Pre for nearly a week and have yet to suffer any blood loss or severe slashes on my fingertips. Conclusion: Jason Chen is a whiny, girly handed wussboy. Sorry, dude. But it's true.

One thing everybody likes is that the Pre can sync up with iTunes running on a PC. The Pre does this by tricking iTunes into thinking the Pre is an iPod. I'm pretty sure Apple will find a way to mess this up by putting some Pre-breaker code into the next version of iTunes. (These two companies hate each other.) But still, it's a neat feature, and if Palm can keep it alive, it will be a big selling point. One of the biggest hassles of using anything other than an iPhone is that it's a real pain to get music onto the device.

Another cool thing is that the Pre comes with Sprint TV, which lets you watch live and on-demand television on your phone. It's fantastic. There are even premium channels, which you pay for, and which include soft-core porn. Yes, I looked. Why not? It's a review unit, so the premium channels were paid for. And it's all in the name of research. Sadly, the porn was not so great. But the video quality is stunning.

So in some ways Palm has leapt ahead of Apple. Bad news is, Apple is just about to introduce a new iPhone device plus an upgrade to its iPhone operating-system software. That could come as early as next week. And today's little hype explosion about the Pre will get buried beneath the Apple publicity steamroller. Which is too bad, because if this thing had been introduced two years ago, it would have been huge.

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