Palm probably didn’t come up with the label ‘iPhone-killer’ – the media’s been looking for one of those for many moons now.  The Pre was just the latest to be labelled that way.  But rather than rise to the challenge, Palm was simply rather silent.  Certainly there was work going on between January’s announcement and the recent launch, but what were they doing?  They weren’t busy sponsoring devCamps – we know that.  Perhaps all the internal meetings wondering why a community would rally ’round one of their announced products took up too much time?  If they’d focused on building up a great community beforehand, this could have been a totally different launch day, but also a totally different build-up to the launch.

Here’s a few things I would have done differently.

1. Getting SDKs to developers earlier would have helped build early-stage apps, and had developers evangelizing the platform well in advance of the release. A directory of upcoming apps (from early-release SDK devs) with “I want this app” voting buttons would have given devs feedback early on, but also given Palm an idea of what people were interested in doing on the phone even before its launch.

2. Sponsoring ‘public user’ days by raffling off trips to Palm’s HQ for ‘average Joe’ testing, complete with videos and such. Total transparency. $10 tickets for a chance to win a tour of the Palm Pre HQ and meet with the team – all proceeds to go to a charity. Free flights and hotels for the winners. Candid feedback on user experience stuff. Blogged/videod/documented. Thousands of people would have applied.  News coverage of the contest, news coverage of the event, and news coverage of the aftermath.  No one’s ever done this before.  One might almost have called this ‘agile phone development’ – getting iterations of real feedback from real customers during the product development.  This generally works well in software, and software plays a big part in the smartphone experience.

3. Same experience for devs, based on which pre-release apps had best community feedback earlier on. Palm could have purchased the apps from the dev community as pre-installed apps. Fly top community devs out to meet with Pre team. What would that have done to your development resume and street cred, having one of your apps make it on to the Pre at launch?  Again, this sort of community embracing has not been done before, and would have made a precedent as to how to launch new phones.  I fear Apple may end up doing this at some point, staying that much ahead of the curve, and making anyone else who tries it look like a copycat.

Instead of new, innovative and community-embracing steps, what did we get? Standard CES announcement, then months of nothing, then some web ads, then low inventory, store experiences that are the exact same as every other phone on the market (plastic models that don’t work, unfriendly staff, etc.). *In spite* of all this, they still reportedly sold over 50,000 units.  Imagine what their numbers would have been had they actually engaged people for 6 months, gauged reactions and demand, and had adequate inventory levels (because they’d have known ahead of time what the demand was).

Apple has a culture of secrecy, and people almost expect it.  While Palm wasn’t totally secret about the Pre, they had almost the opposite approach which was just as damaging.  Announcing in January, but not shipping until June.  They had an opportunity to do six months of community engaging and expectation setting.  Instead, we got 5.5 months of no official word, rumors, and another 6 months of comparisons with Apple and iPhones.

Palm had a chance to really change how phones are developed and launched. They had a huge community of people *wanting* something new, and they blew it.