“With the launch of Apple’s $99 iPhone 3G and the iPhone 3GS now less than two weeks away, owners Palm Pre — as well as prospective iPhone buyers — may be asking how the two devices compare. Electronista has taken a close look at the two and can say that both Palm and Sprint should be very concerned; the new iPhone mix is likely to create severe pressure on Sprint to lower the price of the Pre,” Electronista reports.
“To put it bluntly, the original iPhone 3G at $99 is a near-direct match for the Pre most of the at half the up-front price. Both have 3G, GPS and Wi-Fi as well as 8GB of built-in memory. Their screens are also the same at 480×320 with multi-touch, so in many respects visuals are at a draw,” Electoronista reports.
“Either has certain trade-offs: while the Pre has a hardware QWERTY keyboard, a replaceable battery and a higher-resolution 3-megapixel camera, it also has a smaller screen [physical size], a thicker body (17mm versus 12mm) and reduced build quality. These drawbacks won’t necessarily matter to some users but, combined with the added price, mean that customers are paying $100 extra for features that don’t automatically matter; those who find the hardware keys uncomfortable won’t consider the Pre an advantage at any price,” Electronista reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Daring Fireballs’ John Gruber said it best: My theory that a hardware keyboard is a significant selling point for only one group of customers: those who already own a phone with a hardware keyboard, and that group is a niche. A nice niche, but a niche nonetheless.
Here’s why. Most normal people have yet to buy their first smartphone. That’s why the stakes are so high — it’s a wide open market frontier, but it won’t remain that way for long. Normal people aren’t planning to do much typing on their new smartphones, and they’re probably right. Any smartphone QWERTY keyboard, software or hardware, is going to be better than what most people are used to, which is pecking things out on a phone with a 0-9 numeric keypad.
I type far better on my iPhone than I expected I’d be able to, and that seems to be true for everyone I know who owns one. The only people who struggle with the iPhone keyboard are those who are already accustomed to a hardware smartphone keyboard. Read more in Gruber’s full article here.
Electronista reports, “Also, the situation is just as difficult at the same $199 price interval with the [new] iPhone 3G S now in place. For the same amount, Apple’s hardware has twice the internal storage, faster 3G (on those networks that support it) and a camera that supports video capture where the Pre only allows still photos. Only one Pre model with no expansion leaves buyers with little choice if they need more than 8GB of space. And Apple has… a bottom dock connector (useful for speaker systems [and much, much more on the way with the new iPhone 3.0 APIs]) as well as Nike+ support for runners.”
MacDailyNews Take: Not to mention iPhone’s 50,000+ apps vs. Pre’s paltry and laughable 18. Yes, 18.
Full article here.
