January 14th, 2009
Early Palm Pre and iPhone comparisons give advantage to the Pre
After Palm announced the Pre at CES you just knew the comparisons with existing devices was going to come out. Gizmodo posted a comparison between the Pre, iPhone, and G1 which is a pretty fair comparison given that these all run fairly new operating systems, use touch capacitive displays, and are the hottest devices in the mobile space at the moment. Gizmodo’s bottom line is that the Pre gets the advantage in most all categories with the G1 only getting a partial kudos for copy and paste. Keep in mind that the Pre hasn’t been released yet or even used by anyone, but Palm employees so some of the details on the Pre may not be fully flushed out.
Mobility Site then took that comparison structure and added in Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. It looks like S60 was left out by all, primarily due to their lack of presence in the US market. Again, the Pre won this head-to-head, but Mobility Site put a very heavy Windows Mobile spin on it and gave WM a tie with the Palm Pre. It doesn’t seem like the writer has used the G1 because 0.333 points were all that was given to the device/OS. Category number 7 was development platform and I would think the G1 should have gotten points for this. Then Category 10 was about the application store/development community and again the Android scored 0 points with the iPhone getting 1. Both the Pre and Android/G1 are Linux-based operating systems that developers seem to want to embrace. Hello, the iPhone and G1 are the only two devices with real onboard app stores and have developers quite excited. The G1 also has a physical keyboard and web browser. The rating system was very strange and it seemed to be cumulative, but from category 6 to 7 the iPhone went down a point so I think it is flawed. Overall, it was quite a lame comparison IMHO.
In another interesting type of comparison, The iPhone Blog posted an article on what the Pre stole from the iPhone and what the iPhone should steal from the Pre. The article takes a good look at two devices that are quite similar and offers some good analysis. The Pre is still months away from release so there may be a few differences at launch and we haven’t actually gotten any hands-on time with the device yet. There is definitely some room for Apple to improve on the iPhone and I am hoping we see some good stuff when the WWDC takes place in June.
Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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