Sprint today said it plans to begin selling its much-hyped Palm Pre on June 6. That’s two days before Apple’s new iPhone is scheduled to be announced — on June 8 — at its Worldwide Developer’s Conference.
If Apple does announce a new phone on June 8 (a matter of widespread speculation) then “Sprint at least will have center stage for a few days before they’re swamped,” said Charles Wolf, a telecommunications industry analyst with Needham & Co, referring to the attention Apple might receive.
Sprint and Palm have little choice but to move quickly to introduce the Sprint Pre phone. AT&T has the iPhone, Verizon has the Blackberry, and T-Mobile has the Android — but Sprint doesn’t have a blockbuster platform.
The Palm Pre will be available nationwide on June 6 in Sprint stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, select Wal-Mart stores and online at Sprint.com for $199.99 with a two-year service agreement and after a $100 mail-in rebate. Running on the new Palm webOS mobile platform is said to consolidate professional, social and personal applications into one device.
“The Palm Pre takes full advantage of Sprint’s Everything Data plans,” said Avi Greengart, research director for Consumer Devices at Current Analysis. “The Pre has been expressly designed for multitasking among multiple web pages and applications. It also builds on Palm’s heritage in PDAs by managing your digital information – whether that’s on a corporate server or on the web.”
The Pre features a Texas Instruments OMAP3430 microprocessor, a 600 MHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU, PowerVR SGX 530 GPU and 430 MHz C64x+ DSP + ISP (Image Signal Processor). It has 7.4 GB of internal user storage, according to Wikipedia, which is non-expandable as the Pre has no flash memory card slot.
Smartphone sales represented 13.5 per cent of all mobile device sales in the first quarter of 2009, compared with 11 per cent in the first quarter of 2008.
The newest data from Gartner shows that Apple’s share of worldwide smartphone sales grew from 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 10.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Research In Motion saw its BlackBerry market share rise from 13.3 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 19.9 percent in 2009, with unit sales growing from 4.3 million to 7.2 million over the same period.
The new iPhone will launch July 17. The rumored specifications include:
- 32GB and 16GB storage (up from the current 16GB and 8GB models)
- $199 and $299 price points to be maintained
- 3.2-megapixel camera (up from the current 2-megapixel camera)
- Video-recording and editing capabilities
- Ability to send a picture & video via MMS
- OLED screen
- 1.5 times the battery life of the current models
- Double the RAM and processing power
- Built-in FM transmitter
- Built-in compass
- The camera, GPS, compass and Google map combined will identify photo and inform about photo locations
- Turn-by-turn directions
In other smartphone/MID news:
- Archos will apparently be announcing something on June 11th in Paris and the general consensus is that it’ll probably be the Internet Media Tablet with voice support running Android that was announced back in early February, says TechCrunch.
- HTC’s first WiMAX-enabled handset is the T8290. Korean carrier SK Telecom has announced the release of Samsung’s SCH M830 WiMAX/HSDPA smartphone with Windows Mobile, a 3.3 inch 800×480 screen, 3-megapixel camera, 2GB internal memory, GPS and a large 1500mAh battery.
- Nokia’s next flagship smartphone, the Nokia N97, will debut in N. America this summer. It will feature a sliding QWERTY keyboard, 32 GB of internal memory, a 5 megapixel camera, a microSDHC slot, quad-band GSM, HSPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS w/A-GPS. Other features are going to include an electronic compass, TV-Out, a widget-based homescreen, and support for Nokia’s upcoming Ovi Store.
The iPhone App Store, Android Market, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Palm App Catalog and Nokia Ovi Store are opening new frontiers.
They provide a platform for marketing, selling and distributing software; all a developer needs to provide is a good idea and some working code. The Guardian explains how.
Nearly 162 million smartphones were sold last year, surpassing laptop sales for the first time, according to Informa. Gartner says there were 139.3 million smartphone sales in 2008, up 14% compared to 2007.
Informa predicts smartphone penetration of 13.5 percent this year, reaching 38 percent by 2013. Last year, just under half of smartphones sold were based on Symbian — a drop of 16 percentage points from the year before.
