Palm Pre Apps Hands On: Hardly Lightweight, Looking Great
We're nearing the still unknown release date for the Palm Pre, and new details are slowly surfacing. Sprint demoed the Pre's WebOS apps at CTIA, including PalmOS Emulator, Google Maps and Pandora. These look fantastic.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Pre's road to market has been bumpy in public: earlier this month Sprint's CEO said the device was still not ready for launch, and Palm has only committed to a vague first-half 2009 window with pricing plans confirmed but no firm date. That makes Sprint's CTIA demo of working WebOS apps — PalmOS Emulator, Google Maps, Pandora — the most concrete signal yet that the software story is real rather than vapor.
For Sprint, the demo lands on top of an unusually high-stakes bet: shares jumped nearly 20% to $3.25 when the Pre deal was announced, and rumors still circulate about a Sprint exclusivity period and Best Buy Mobile as an exclusive retail partner. The handset is carrying both Palm's comeback narrative and Sprint's turnaround pitch, which is why each hands-on impression matters disproportionately.
First-order effects
- Sprint gains a ready-made marketing asset at CTIA: demonstrable third-party apps let its sales teams counter the 'not ready' narrative from weeks earlier with live devices.
- Palm's developer outreach gets a credibility boost — showing Google Maps and Pandora running natively on WebOS signals to app makers that the platform can attract marquee titles before day one.
Second-order effects
- AT&T and Verizon face pressure to showcase comparable app lineups on their own flagship handsets at the same show, since carrier differentiation is increasingly judged by software catalogs rather than hardware alone.
- If the rumored Sprint exclusivity holds, rival carriers will need their own exclusive smartphones or aggressive pricing to blunt the Pre's pull on customers weighing a switch to Sprint's network.
Third-order effects
- The episode points toward smartphone launches being staged through incremental public software milestones — demos, emulator builds, developer previews — as platforms compete to prove viability before shipping.
- A successful Pre would validate the model of a carrier-exclusive relaunch vehicle for a struggling OS vendor, making exclusivity deals a standard lever in platform wars.
The trend: Smartphone platforms are shifting their launch playbooks from spec sheets to staged software demonstrations, with carrier exclusives amplifying each milestone's market impact.