The new Palm phone is coming, and it’s another in a long line of “iPhone Killers”.
It goes without saying that Palm has a tremendous amount of work to do to try and unseat the iPhone as king of smart phones. They are not only launching a new hardware platform, but a new OS as well. Ambitious.
After reading a few articles about it, I was thinking back to my recent vacation to DC and New York. Of course I used the normal Google maps to get around and check the web. Something that pretty much any phone can do nowadays. But while in DC, someone was talking about finding a restaurant on Yelp. I pulled out my phone and immediately downloaded Yelp, and we used it for the rest of the trip to find where to eat.
While in DC, I downloaded a map of the metro. When we got to New York, I downloaded a $5 app that would ask where you wanted to go and route out your whole subway trip including arrival times and transfers.
As all this was going on, my friend Dayne (who is a hardcore linux guy) mentioned that he really needed to get an iPhone. It’s not because it’s an awesome phone. It’s because the iPhone is a mature mobile computing platform with a solid distribution channel, and a ton of apps.
That’s an overwhelming amount of momentum for Palm to try and catch up with, but I wish them a lot of luck.