Friday, July 22, 2011

Palm Pre Makes Yahoo's List of Phones Doomed to be Collectibles

The most interesting thing about this piece is that it lays the blame for the Pre's demise squarely at HP's feet. And I think they're right. Palm was putting out a new update every month, slowly but surely improving the Pre by improving webOS. And then Palm sold itself to HP and nothing. There was a lot of talk and a lot of promises but ultimately those promises were broken as HP made webOS the centerpiece of their mobile strategy but showed little interest in actually making new phones. And the frequent updates which Palm had been so proud of dried up.

The Pre's immediate successor, the Pre 2 is only available on Verizon and sales people tend to steer people away from it. The Veer, a tiny little phone which combines the best features of the Pre and Pixi phones with some nice, fast hardware is only available on AT&T and is similarly neglected. The Pre 3 which was announced in January has yet to debut anywhere.

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