“Palm’s Pre smartphone, feature-rich though it may be, appears doomed,” Tim Beyers writes for The Motley Fool.
“A recent survey of 4,292 adult smartphone buyers by ChangeWave Research found that only 4% of respondents planned to buy the Pre in the next six months. By contrast, 37% planned to buy Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, and 30% planned to buy Apple’s iPhone,” Beyers writes.
“‘No way. I love my iPhone and the way it’s integrated with my [MacBook] Pro makes it easier,’ reader John Cummings wrote in response to my Twitter poll asking iPhoners if they’d switch to a Pre,” Beyers writes. “Where are you now, Roger McNamee?”
Beyers writes, “Today’s Pre isn’t as buzzworthy as yesterday’s iPhone. Few users are willing to switch.”
Beyers reports, “ChangeWave reports that only 1% of respondents to its surveys would switch to Sprint Nextel, Palm’s exclusive carrier for the Pre… Therein lies the difference. The iPhone was bigger than AT&T; the Pre is apparently smaller than Sprint.”
“Even more troubling is the math,” Beyers writes. “If 37% of surveyed smartphone buyers want a BlackBerry and 30% want an iPhone, Palm gets to slug it out with Nokia, the global smartphone market leader, and Google’s Android partners for the remaining third.”
Full article here.
