Apple iPhone has been launched for more than a year and half since the first generation. Many clones come and go, so far no mobile makers manage to provide a good challenge to Apple iPhone.
I remembered last December 2008 that Palm make an announcement that they will have a press conference about a new product launch on early January 2009. I thought that Palm might be launching some kind of a new Treo touch phone. The Palm share was trading at USD1.88 at that time. I was contemplating of buying a lot of that share and sought some advice but all were against it with a remark that Palm is as good as dead.
January 2009 comes and they announced Palm Pre with a good presentation of the working unit. This is an exciting product which many might have thought that it is the next generation of iPhone had it not been a Palm engraved behind the phone. There is nothing wrong to think about that as the next generation iPhone because the design has some kind of Apple's characteristic of clean, neat and quality feel and look. It comes with an optional induction charger where it charges the phone by magnetic induction.
The phone's OS runs on linux and the UI has that iPhone feel and look. It is a competent competitor to iPhone because it employs multi-touch, desktop quality web browsing with support for flash and java applets. The phone supports multi-tasking; i.e. you can run multiple windows. For example, you can be writing an SMS then realize that you need to refer to an email. Open that email, read it and switch back to that SMS and continues from there without losing it. It also supports SMS forwarding, MMS and instant messaging.
Now, it will probably provide a stronger challenge to iPhone if the Palm Pre supports enterprise messaging such as MS Exchange Email or RIM Blackberry Client. Best of all, it comes with a proper QWERTY keypad.
Now with all that wonderful design, features and OS, all it needs is an AppStore and Music Store plus a good desktop syncing client.
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