Smartphone competition - at last Wed, Oct 21, 2009 9:44 AM
The iPhone is a great product in many respects, but its closed architecture, Apple's draconian sole-source app distribution, and lack of a physical keyboard with real feedback have kept me, and a few others, waiting for some real competition.
With a strong competitor we might see Apple push the boundaries a bit more, and perhaps open their closed system to a wider range of development and distribution options.
Until recently, those of us waiting for competiton have been disappointed.
Sorely disappointed.
First, T-Mobile teamed with Google to produce what may be the least interesting ad ever created for a technology product:
Metamessage conveyed: "This phone has custom wallpaper."
I can't recall a phone that didn't. If there's anything else going on with that product it would have been good to let us know. It seems others are underimpressed as well.
So when I heard about the Palm Pre I was very excited. I bought one of the first editions of the Palm, and upgraded a few years later. While the file format for the Palm OS was needlessly cumbersome to work with (is plain text really too complicated to support?), at least it was open with widely available tools to write all sorts of fun stuff.
Since Palm had pretty much validated, if not invented, the whole handheld market once upon a time, I had high hopes they'd pull off a great comeback with a solid entry and a marketing campaign to match.
Well, not so much.
The Pre may be a fine phone, but with a marketing campaign based around a vacuous-looking alien girl who eventually waxes philosophical but never quite gets around to telling us what the Pre actually does, no one cares.
Here's one of the many disturbing examples from this campaign:
Metamessage conveyed: "Buy our phone and you'll become an alien spirit being."
I was just about to give up on the dream of ever seeing a competitive market for handhelds....
...but then I saw this:
Metamessage conveyed: "We're about to kick some serious butt."
No THERE'S a game-changer.
Confident, brash, tells us exactly how the product differentiates, fully acknowledges that it enters an iPhone-dominated world and approaches that task head-on. Bravo.
After an ad like that I can't wait to see the Droid in action. Good specifics offered with a touch of mystery. No wonder it's the talk of the town.
Too bad no other competitor could pull that off, but I'm grateful at least one vendor gets it.
