As a loyal Palm user of many years, it pains me to write that WebOS and Palm may become the CP/M or Betamax of the current smartphone wars. For the youthful among the readers, back before the invention of the internet by Al Gore (Yes, he really claimed to be its inventor. He continues his delusional thinking in his current crusades) and when dinosaurs roamed the shopping malls, CP/M was the competing operating system to Microsoft DOS (MS-DOS) in the days before Windows, and Betamax was the competitor to VHS in the video tape world. In those days, CP/M and Betamax were considered the better systems in their respective fields, but the power of branding and the marketing of MS-DOS and VHS caused the “better” systems to fall by the wayside.
So what does Web OS and the Pre offer? Better interface? Certainly looks and feels better by most accounts. Better speed? Maybe. Less applications? Certainly. Less storage? Painfully, yes. No way to use the one feature that made Palm stand out above the rest all these years: its built-in PIM and desktop sync feature? Absolutely. And yet Palm is charging the same as their main competitor. (Sigh)
Apple has been pitch perfect in their marketing and brand creation. In fact, if some enterprising developer designed a way for the iPhone to sync with the Palm desktop, he’d make a bundle of cash and put the final nail in Palm’s coffin. Rubinstein can only hope that his former colleagues don’t take this easily accomplished route before he has a chance to work his magic at Palm. Even barring that, once WebIS (the company behind Pocket Informant) finishes providing a way to sync their well designed Pocket Informant PIM to Outlook, it could remove one of the last reasons for users to wait on Palm’s promised desktop sync without going through the cloud.
So, will Palm and its WebOS continue, or will it become the CP/M or Betamax of our day?
[John v. Hollande]