Should I get a Palm Pre?

I was looking at the Palm Pre and the sales girl told me it was called the “iPhone killer”. It was way to expensive for me and I’d have to switch to a different phone company, so I said no thanks.

i wouldn’t call the pre an iphone killer. i would say the 3G is still better than the pre. faster sooooo mmmmaaaaaaannnnyyyy more apps available.. apple 50,000+ – Sprint 30–40. i mean, to get the pre you have to switch to sprint since its a CDMA and not an EDGE/HSPDA signal. and you can’t just pop in a sim card either. They dont work off of them. Nor do verizon phones. or maybe they do, but its built into the phone.

I bought a Pre on launch day and don’t regret it at all. It runs a bit hot sometimes, but the multi-tasking is really, really useful and so much better than the G1 (which I tried and returned after a week) and the iPhone.

I follow this site: Palm Pre Apps to get app info. It has most of the apps but not all (missing at least a couple). That should give you an idea of what apps are available. Don’t go by what’s available now, since Palm has yet to release its SDK – once that’s out, there should be many more apps.

Oh, and the Pre syncs very well with my Mac Book Pro, so I don’t expect a difference in that respect with the iPhone.

RIM’s Blackberry already had hundreds (thousands?) of apps available before there ever was an iPhone.

Then came the iPhone, followed a while later by the App Store. And the game was changed. The paradigm shifted. It’s blown all previous concepts away.

Now RIM offers Blackberry App World, and Palm and Google have their analogs to the iPhone App Store, too.

But, you see, the competitors are all following. They’re not offering anything new. And they’re certainly not offering anything as rich, complete, mature, and simply fun to develop in as Apple’s iPhone SDK.

My opinion is that the iPhone has already achieved critical mass in terms of App Store offerings. The others won’t be able to catch up for a long, long time. And not until someone else comes up with a game changer.

Of the competitors, I’d put my long money on Google as having the best chance.

Palm, I think, offers the best alternative to iPhone with its webOS… but they’re simply not selling phones. Last estimate I heard was that they’d sold around 50,000 Pres in June so far. Apple sold over 1 million iPhone 3GS’s (at $199 and $299) in the first weekend… and there’s been no word on how many iPhone 3G’s (at $99 now!) they sold yet since the intro of the 3GS.

@robmandu Also you should look at the target market for each phone. To me, the pre looks more like a business/corporate type phone. The iPhone was marketed to any teenager, college, wannabe hipster parent demo that it could have been.

After traveling with the Pre, Ars wants their iPhone back.

Thanks everybody! I ended up going with a myTouch. Very happy with it so far.