Palm Pré arrives in Blighty The Palm Pré has been available Stateside since June, but Blighty-based gadget fans can finally bag themselves the smartphone from today. Palm Pre O2 is selling the Palm Pré from today O2 is the Pré’s exclusive carrier in the UK and the smartphone can be bought either through the network operator’s online sales website or …
... from what I can read, and I do intend to pop into an O2 Store myself to have a play around on a Pre, its a iPhone 3G potential rival, but compared to the 3GS there's no competition.
Getting it on an 18 or 24 month contract would be annoying as there will surely be a “Palm Pre 2” in the pipeline already (which will probably be the 3GS competition). So at the very least, in 8 months the new iPhone 3GST (Supercharged Turbo?) will be out, and you'd be stuck with an equivalent of an iPhone 3G for another 10-16 months.
One of the great things about the iPhone is that it holds its value. I bought the original iPhone “2G” back in April 2008 for £160 and sold it last month for £200 on eBay, the iPhone 3G is still selling for £300+ on eBay too. No one has any idea how well the Palm Pre will hold its value over a 12-24 month period.
I am impressed with the potential of the Palm Pre but they just seem to be running too far behind Apple at the moment.
.... tells me that the lowest monthly cost is £34.26 which is the 24 month option, followed by £34.71, which is the cheapest 18 month option. So basically over £600 quid for the a device tied to a network for which you will pay over the odds for roaming, may not get an unlock code and will probably spend as much time shouting about the crappy data network, [See Reg passim] , so my advice is : head to a Nokia shop, buy your own SIM free device, then shove a SIM of choice in it : Three UK currently the cream of the crop with lots of free skype to boot.
02 should be embarrassed by these numbers....
18 or 24 month contracts only? On your bike O2. It seems they've realised all of their smartphone customers desert them the second their contract expires, so they're resorting to paying for exclusive contracts for phones and then whacking 2 year contracts on them to milk the most out of the poor souls who just wanted a nice phone.
I hope Orange have some good prices on the iPhone 3GS, my O2 contract expires soon...
(to paraphrase the Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe)...
"Customers willing to sign a 24-month contract costing £34.26 ($56.05/€37.97) per month can get the Pré for free". That is, £822.24 worth of "freeness".
There's no such thing as a free lunch and there's certainly no such thing as a free smartphone.
You get the phone for free if O2 send it to you without making any charge whatsoever - that's a free phone.
A phone that is tied in to a 24 month contract that costs over £800 is not free - the cost of the phone will be more than recovered by these charges (can you please provide the lowest price that is offered to distributors/resellers rather than the end-user price - then we can judge for ourselves).
...because this is last chance saloon for them. And for that reason, they shouldn't have left it so long to launch here. (Without comparing with the 3gs) it should have been launched before or at the same time as the iPhone. The Pré is a great phone, but I have a bad feeling that it's too late - non-techie consumers won't have heard of it (there's only one name on most o2 customers' minds), and that's a shame. Hope Palm can pull it off.
Looking forward to the review, Reg. I'm currently evaluating the replacement for my phone with the potential candidates being another Windows Mobile (unlikely), Android (current favourite) or a Pré (ludicrous pricing aside).
iPhone not an option, because real techies don't let other techies restrict what they can do with technology - no matter how pretty it is.
At a central London O2 there's been queues for all of the iPhones, and they've sold out before lunch on launch day.
No queue for the Pre, plenty in stock at lunch today. I had a play with one and whilst it's very good it's going to be second to the iPhone in the desirability stakes. Hopefully it'll encourage Apple to cut down on the lockdowns (contract and software) but this isn't a game changer.
I was looking forward to this thing appearing. However, Palm shot itself in the foot with snooping on usage and pissing about with other companies' software, trying to sell that as a feature and now I'm sick of hearing about the Pre. I doubt the Pixie is going to be any better as regards privacy and ethics. Well done, Palm, viral marketing at its best. As for provider exclusivity, what moron thought that was a good idea? Or are these things so expensive to produce that an exclusive contract with a heavy subsidy is the only way they can sell them?
Besides, I think I may be outgrowing the mobile voice service. A 'phone is just another way people have of asking me inane questions at times to suit them when I'm busy doing something else. I'm also one of these rare creatures that can a) walk somewhere without texting (indeed, I can send Morse faster than I can type on a numeric keypad and I'm so violently allergic to "TXT SPK" that I end up sending shit like "TNX FER MSG = WILL HELP YOU WITH THAT AROUND THE SAME TIME HELL'S BRIMSTONE BECOMES A SUPERCONDUCTOR = AR SK") or having the thing clamped to my ear and b) can actually ignore the thing when I'm driving if I've been foolish enough to take it with me or forgotten to switch it off for drive time. Gadget freakery is all well and good but, when the situation becomes me paying vast amounts for other people's ability to annoy the fuck out of me, I draw the line.
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