Palm Pre TV Commercial Series Continues

You'd think they'd have to be, given the generally negative reactions this has gotten from us in the online nerd crowd.

I guess they figure that women have never been properly targeted by smartphone marketing. McNamee certainly goes out of his way to mention that the Pre is meant to have a special appeal to women, with the rounded design, mirror etc. (Although McNamee says a lot of things...)

According to the NYT, women are...

...the path to the entire household. According to Verizon Wireless, 71 percent of women make the decision about their family's wireless choices, including phones and service plans. (Smartphones require data plans that can cost $30 or more a month.)

So are these ads successful in reaching Jane Average? Who knows? We'll have to wait for Sprint or Palm to bust out sales figures and demographics. Still, you gotta figure that Palm does have market researchers and focus groups and all that gumph, and somewhere along the line they've decided that traditional tech ad campaigns are not particularly effective.

Personally, I think the ad sucks. But then, I hate most ads.

But it's worth saying that the iPhone ads *emphasize* the phone's abilities. They de-emphasize its specs, but they emphasize its capabilities.

That's a really good point. One senses that Palm was going for a similar vibe here, where they try and convey what the experience of using the Pre is like rather than the bullet points on the spec sheet. Pity they've done such a terrible job of it.
Tim
Apologies in advance for all emoticons, LOLs, ROFLs, and any other form of depressingly annoying Internet shorthand that appears in my posts.
Treo 270 -> Treo 650 -> Treo 680 -> Centro

what is a single competitive advantage the Pre has?

Synergy PIM. Synergy messaging. Third-party multitasking. Third-party PIM access. Removable battery. Physical keyboard. Camera flash. Palm OS emulation. Cheaper plans.

But most importantly, they're not a bunch of control-freak douchebags:
http://gizmodo.com/5325539/apples-chickenshit-approval-process-has-gone-too-far
http://gizmodo.com/5327889/apple-expects-google-voice-app-developers-to-pay-refunds-out-of-pocket
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/27/apple-is-growing-rotten-to-the-core-and-its-likely-atts-fault/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/31/i-quit-the-iphone/
http://carpeaqua.com/2009/07/28/where-do-i-sign-up/

I look forward to completely ignoring your seven-hundred-page point-for-point reply!

Tim
Apologies in advance for all emoticons, LOLs, ROFLs, and any other form of depressingly annoying Internet shorthand that appears in my posts.
Treo 270 -> Treo 650 -> Treo 680 -> Centro

What competitive advantage does the Pre have, THAT CAN BE EASILY DEMONSTRATED IN A 30 SECOND COMMERCIAL?

Any of the above. Use your imagination. (Y'know, the same one you use to invent other people's comments.)

No idea if they are control freak douchebags (yet), since there isn't a native SDK.

Palm's developers have been in regular conversation with the hackers over at webos-internals on IRC, happily sharing information and communicating with the hacking community. Then there's the fact that webOS itself has been praised by all as very open and easy to modify. Finally, there's Precentral's ever-growing list of homebrew apps, for which no jailbreak is needed and no approval required from Palm.

So, while you may have no idea (what else is new?), those of us with brains can be fairly confident Palm are not going the Apple route when it comes to third-party development.

(And Mojo is a native SDK, you twit. Javascript + HTML are the native languages of webOS. Hence the name...)

What the Pre has that the iPhone doesn't have (and neither do the other iPhone wannabes) is that UI. It's very photogenic and smooth, and while people can talk about multi-tasking, it's not until you see it work that you get a sense of what the iPhone is missing. Put that into a commercial and there will be an audience I'd think.

I have an iPhone and won't be getting a Pre (not available in Japan anyway), but still I get a twinge of gadget envy with all that card flipping. It's cool.

When Javascript and HTML get directly executed by the hardware - and ONLY under that condition - will they be "native" to anything.

Javascript and HTML are the native languages of the browser. webOS is pretty much a WebKit shell, with some Java stuff in the background (Luna, i think) running on top of a fairly normal Linux. The Mojo APIs allow developers to use Javascript to access the hardware already.

Hence, JS & HTML are the native languages of webOS. Linux on the other hand is different - but webOS can run Linux programs already: http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9834/more-pre-hacks-and-inner-details-revealed/

ANY programming language can be used with WebOS.

I look forward to your FORTRAN apps! :P

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/fiction/fools.html

*****************************************

"I get to see a lot, out in the real world," I volunteered. "That standard lecture piece you did, on the old reactor control system -- I've seen worse."

"Oh yes?" He showed a flicker of interest, so I continued.

"A big corporate accounting system. Used to run on a bundle of mainframes at six different national headquarters, talking via leased line. Want to hear about it?"

"Pray continue." I had his attention.

"They downsized everything they could, but there were about fifty million lines of PL/I on the accounts system. Nobody could be bothered to bring it up to date -- it had taken about two hundred programmers twenty years to put it all together. Besides which, they were scared of the security implications of reverse-engineering the whole thing and sticking it on modern networked machines. In the end, they hit a compromise: there was this old VM/CMS emulator for DOS PC's floating around. They bought six stupidly powerful workstations running something a bit more modern. Stuck a DOS emulator on each workstation, and ran their accounting suite under the VM/CMS emulator under the DOS emulator --"

I waited while his spluttering subsided into a chuckle. "I think that deserves another drink: don't you?"

I took a big gulp from my G&T and nodded. "Yeah." More fizzy water for the Prof. "Anyway. These six, uh, mainframes, had to talk to each other at something ridiculous like 1200 baud. So the droids who implemented this piece of nonsense hired a hacker, who crufted them up something that looked like a 1200 baud serial line to the VM/CMS emulator, but which actually tunneled packets through the internet, from one workstation to another. Only it ran under DOS, `cause of the extra level of emulation. Then they figured they ought to let the data entry clerks log in through virtual terminals so they could hire teleworkers from India instead of paying guys in suits from Berkhampstead, so they wrote a tty driver just for the weird virtual punched-card reader or whatever the bloody accounting system thought it was working with."

Someone tapped me on my shoulder. I glanced round.

"Yo, dude! Gimme five!"

"Six," I said. Clive beamed at me. "Been here long?"

"Just arrived," he said. "I knew I'd find you propping up the bar. Hey, did the guys on the gangway give you any aggro?"

"Not much." I put my hand over my watch's face. The whole thing disturbed me more than I wanted to think about, and Rita's silent presence (reading a book in a deep leather-lined chair at the far side of the room) didn't contribute anything good to my peace of mind. "I was just telling the professor about --"

"The mainframes." The professor nodded. "Most interesting. Can I trouble you to tell me what happened in the end? I hate an interrupted tale."

I shrugged. "Drink for my man here," I said.

"Make mine a pint," said Clive.

"In a nutshell," said the professor.

"In a nutshell: they'd put it all in an emulator, and handled all the logins via the net, so some bright spark suggested they run six emulators in parallel on one box and use local domain sockets to emulate the serial lines. It looked like it would save about fifty thousand bucks, and they'd already spent a quarter million on the port -- as opposed to eighty, ninety million for a proper re-write -- so they did it. Put everything in one box."

"And what happened?" asked Clive.

"Well, they stuffed the old corporate accounting system into a single workstation. You've got to understand, it was about fifty times as powerful as all six mainframes put together. The old mainframes were laid off about two months after the emulator went live, to save on the maintenance bill. So they moved office six months after that, and they managed to lose the box in the process. The inventory tag just went missing; it was so unobtrusive it looked like every other high-end server in the place. By the time they found it again, some droid from the marketing department who though Christmas had come early had reformatted its root partition and installed a multi-user game server on it ..."

"Man, that's bad," said Clive. He looked improperly cheerful.

*************************************

Yes, that was spammy, but hey. I like it.

She presses a button and a screen pops up. She presses another button and another screen pops up. Snore.

-Bosco
m105 -> NX70v -> NX80v -> iPhone -> iPhone 3G

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