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Palm’s Pre: Praying for Success
By Jim Romano
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Palm announced its new competitor to the iPhone, the ‘Pre™,’ written wherever possible with a bar over the “e” to elongate it.
Presumably that will help English speakers to keep from ‘pray’-ing it, and harks to its predecessor, the Treo (also with a bar over the ‘e’), which rhymes with the Kingston Trio, not the Belafonte Day-o.
The concept seems to be that the Palm Pre is ‘always thinking ahead to make your life easier,’ a connection that speaks to a benefit in short supply these days. After all, who has time to think ahead or plan? If we do, then it’s a given that we need a device of some kind to help us do it.
Other benefits of the Pre seem to be built around the user experience: notifications that don’t interrupt your train of thought, applications that serve you information without having to work for it, and the ability to start a new conversation in just one touch.
What does all this have to do with the ‘pre-’ prefix? Will this blip of a name really suggest thinking ahead? Pre’s carrier is Sprint, which is also trying to get a leg up on the competition by rebranding their own service from the Now Network™ to Sprint Ahead™.
This migratory trend—from the present to the future, from the now to the next, from thinking to intuiting—does indeed bode well for users who are increasingly reliant on technology to do the heavy lifting of keeping us organized and ahead of the curve.
Will the Pre resonate as a moniker for such a task? With Palm’s sales slipping and the iPhone carrying the standard for usercentric technology, Palm is certainly pre-ing the answer is yes.
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