Palm Pre launched in Germany with O2

The Palm Pre with revolutionary web OS was launched in Germany by O2 on October 13, 2009.

Has anyone gotten their hands on this beautiful gadget yet? Any experiences to share?

From Wikipedia, Palm Pre:

In my opinion, this phone is dead before it's even had time to live. The future of smart phones is apps, and no one is going to program any special app for this phone because the pay off is just not going to be big enough.

The future is the iPhone and Google's Android OS, followed a long way behind by Blackberry (which is truly aweful), Nokia's Symbian (which is old and outdated, and Nokia continue to bring out absolutely inferior phones) and Microsoft (Windows 6.5 is like a bad version of Android/the iPhone). To keep up, RIM, Nokia and Microsoft are going to have to invest serious money because they all dropped the ball (RIM hasn't really had the ball at all for the last few years).

But Palm is screwed either way as far as I'm concerned. Maybe they could bring out a phone with Android and forget their whole OS development side. That might save them.

Palm Pre has 100 apps!! Whoopy Doo :-)

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_gaming/article6863818.ece

(iPhone has 85,000+ to compare)

Then they are just a hardware mfg. having to rely on another Co. for their O/S that is a big gamble (they just become another bubble wrap commodity item on the store shelf) given how fast the market is moving the Co. would just shrivel up and be abandoned by the consumer.

But Nokia itself isn't touting Symbian as the future of it's phones. All it's high end phones are being migrated to the Linux-based Maemo. As far as whether their phones are inferior, I guess that's just a matter of opinion. I don't think the N900 is somehow decidedly inferior to its competition

Moving away from Symbian to Maemo is a good idea, but they are starting from scratch, so they are a long way behind the competition. As I understand it, the OS is not backward compatible so you can't run Symbian apps.

It looks good though and maybe they will have some success with it, but again, if they can't get developers making a profit on their platform, then apps will not come and it will die.

I'm not sure exactly though. Even this idea that Symbian is somehow "outdated" seems a bit odd. It has a lot of more features still than Apple's iPhone OS. For an end user to be able to sit down currently and say that one phone OS is somehow "more advanced" or "outdated" than another... I'd wager is pretty much impossible.

I think this is correct too, although Nokia is doing a lot to make it extremely easy to cross compile apps for a whole host of OSes, desktop included.

That's the nail on the head right there. It's exactly what Apple bulls-eyed with the Apps store and tight controls. All other OSes have the single massive problem of connecting developers easily to their customers. Those that solve that will flourish, regardless of the nerdy technical merits of the OS itself.

The tight controls however are something that makes developers not want to program for Apple devices. Not to mention Objective-C which is just plain nasty.

Android with its open system and Java SDK are much more appealing to devs. Doesn't have the numbers behind it yet though.

Nokia has ported var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));