So, Best Buy is dropping the price to $99 for a Palm Pre with a 2 year contract. As much as I want to get one, I still don’t want to get tied in to a contract – I may buy a used Pre from someone later (I want GSM if possible, not CDMA).
I wonder if anyone wonders why the Palms aren’t selling as well as expected, and why iPhones keep continuing to gain marketshare. Might it have anything to do with the fact that you can’t find a working demo model anywhere? I’ve been to three Best Buys around here, as well as a Radio Shack, and none have *any* working models of the Pre. Actually, none of them have working models of *any* phone – except the iPhone. Hell – even WalMart – notoriously cost-cutting cheapskates Walmart – have *working* *pluggedin* iPhones for people to mess around with. And people still wonder why iPhones are selling more than most other phones?
The Pre was supposed to be the second coming of smartphones. Yet even at a Sprint store, I could not find a working model. I’ve been to two area Sprint stores. One had a plastic handshell case, but it wasn’t a working model. The other had *2* units that were *on* – screens were on and you could touch them and interact – for about 5 seconds. Every 5-8 seconds, the screen would go in to a 3 second movie of flying through an open field – then cut back to where you were. It was horrible, because it took me about a minute to realize I was not in control of the thing at all.
Why why why is the state of cell phone marketing and sales so abysmal? Stores are asking people to part with *thousands* of dollars per year, yet can not be bothered with giving us an actual ‘test drive’ of the product before we use it? What other industries get away with treating their customers so poorly? I’m not even talking about the generally lousy customer service once you’ve purchased, but this it the pre-purchase courtship phase, where they should be wooing us. Instead, we (consumers) tend to act like sheep and just blindly take whatever’s shovelled our way.
It’s a pretty sad state we’re in when a company can come to dominate a market *simply* by sucking less than other competitors. I’ve had dealings with Apple for over 5 years now, with mixed feelings. Generally overpriced equipment, generally middle of the road service (with the exception of my laptop keyboard), computers that still lockup and crash (sorry, I need to multitask on a ‘lowly’ white macbook with ‘only’ 2.5 gig – what am I thinking?!) and yet this company will end up dominating many markets they get in to, simply because everyone else is so much worse.
Truly depressing…
Hear hear!
I get sick of the lame test models that you find the fancy shops just stuffed with. Let me test-drive the damn phone!
I cannot make up my mind with mockup test models. That’s like stuffing a showroom full of Bburago model supercars and hoping that a sportstar will walk in and buy one. It’s rediculous!
Better pre-sales and customer service is just one of many reasons why Apple has done so well with the iPhone. The SDK and App Store, which build on foundation technologies (Objective-C, NeXTSTEP, Interface Builder, AppKit, etc.) and the iTunes Music Store infrastructure, were also brilliant and show long term vision and investment that is paying off big time for Apple. I think most companies think too short term; they assume that if they build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to their door. Clearly in today’s mobile device market, that’s not good enough.
Well, it’s not just the iphone. But, looking at just that one slice, there’s no other phone I know of where I’m virtually guaranteed to be able to touch and use a working model in any environment – best buy, walmart, apple stores *all* have working models.
I just do not understand why *no one else* thinks this is important. Clearly it probably costs a bit more to ensure that your product is presented properly (or not at all). By having your phone out there with the 50 other knock-off models all with crappy plastic fake screen layovers and no ability to use them, you’re reducing the perception of your device to “just like all the others”. Pre specifically had an opportunity to change the way they market, and they chose not to. Instead, they chose to piss off their developer enthusiasts with the ‘pre camp’ PR fiasco, then drag their feet shipping an SDK.
The SDK *is* out now, and I’m tempted to get a Pre just to use it, but I haven’t quite committed yet. Lack of GSM and lack of expandable memory also seemed to indicate “lack of forethought” to the extreme, and the Pre was done by an ex-Apple guy. Come on!
everything you said is wrong your a fool
I go so far as to say that I think webOS *could* be giving Apple a run for its money, or certainly could have a year ago or so. I’ve played with the SDK, and while it’s limiting in what you can do (all SDKs are!) it’s surprising how much you can do with JavaScript. Accelerometer, GPS coords, camera, phone dialing and more are all accessible directly from JS in HTML documents. The ease with which one could build a reasonably functional app knowing JavaScript and HTML compared to having to learn ObjectiveC/etc *could* be a real boon for developers, but devices don’t live by technical merits alone…