So, I was able to withstand the temptation to get a Palm Pre over the weekend, but that did not stop me from harassing my friend, Bob, for every last detail of his experience in buying one. Bob shares my gadget obsession and he had been trying to decide which cell phone to get next. Of course, I had thrown the iPhone out there as an option for him, but he wanted to see how things would go with Sprint, his current carrier, which is understandable.
I hadn’t been aware of this until Friday, but apparently WalMart was also set to sell Pres at launch, and it appeared that they were willing to sell them at midnight on Friday based on what Bob heard from a local store manager. Unfortunately, this was turned out to be complete misinformation, so it was necessary for him to brave the lines on Saturday morning along with the rest of the world.
At a Sprint store in California, the line wasn’t too long. The first person had gotten there around 5:00 am, and they handed out numbers to everyone in line, so it was possible to actually leave the line to grab a coffee or something and come back a little later after you’d gotten your number. The store had 30 Pres, so most of the people in line were able to get one. The only negative parts were that they were saying that activation would take 45 minutes (!) for each person, and you could not leave the store without activating a Pre (Sprint was definitely taking a line out of AT&T’s iPhone play book with this one). Accessories were limited, with no Touchstones in stock.
The line at a local Sprint store at around 8:00 am
Bob ended up getting his Pre at the local WalMart. He went back there after he’d gotten his number ticket from the Sprint store and found only a couple of people waiting for the mobile phone department to open in order to buy a Pre. Because of the SNAFU from the night before when a manager had told him he could buy one at midnight, one of the 3 Pres in stock was on hold for him. He bought it and was done well before he would have even made it inside the Sprint store given his position in that line.
Bob thinks the Pre is nice, but he’s sorely missing syncing it with Outlook on his PC and may end up returning it, and I can’t blame him one bit. Intellectually, I understand why Palm wanted to make the move to avoid the standard sync-with-computer method (there’s an article on Ars Technica that explains it here), but I certainly don’t agree with it. While I don’t necessarily view the data on my Mac to be the single authoritative source of all of my PIM data, I don’t want to have to refer to my phone or some web-based service to find it when I’m sitting at my computer. I make changes to my data on both my computer and my iPhone, and I want them to stay in sync with each other, which they do remarkably well thanks to MobileMe. I think Palm is missing the point on this as computers become more and more portable in the form of netbooks where a cell phone won’t be the only computing device you might have with you at any given time.
The Pre’s packaging looking just like that of the Treo Pro
Unbelievably, I never even made it to a Sprint store over the weekend to try to see a working Pre demo unit (it was a busy weekend full of lawn mowing, shopping with a friend, and a BBQ) and I doubt I’ll get the chance until next weekend. This is probably going to be very good timing for me anyway since a new iPhone is expected to be announced today and I’ll be less tempted to get a Pre after that. There have even been rumors that the new iPhone model would be available today after it’s announced at WWDC – I highly doubt this, but I would surely exceed every speed limit on my way to my closest Apple store if that turns out to be true somehow.
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