Hasta La Gadget!

Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

In a recent interview with Elevation Partners’ Roger McNamee, the Palm investor explained that Palm knew it had to step up its game after RIM launched the BlackBerry Pearl, which he described as “the first real consumer electronics product in the smartphone category.” The Pearl launch served as the coming out party for the BlackBerry brand among consumers as RIM began stepping up its advertising, and the product’s narrower hardware design was a noticeable break with the staid stylings of previous BlackBerry devices.

Indeed, back in November of 2006 as Palm rolled out the somewhat consumer-focused Treo 680, I wrote a Switched On column noting that the Pearl broke with the evolutionary path that RIM had been on and served as an example for the kind of hardware shift Palm needed to make.

Palm finally answered the Pearl with the Centro, a compact, inexpensive, and successful smartphone that has apparently served as the final resting place of the original Palm OS architecture. However, between the release of those two devices, the entry and subsequent SDK of Apple’s iPhone proved a far more significant turning point in the evolution of consumer smartphones. The iPhone’s resonance and popularity have provoked responses from many competitors, but there is a particular contrast in the flagship CDMA touchscreen handsets released by RIM and Palm — the other two smartphone developers that grow their own operating systems — since then.

Continue reading Switched On: With Pre, Palm breaks from the Storm

Filed under: Cellphones

Switched On: With Pre, Palm breaks from the Storm originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 31 Jan 2009 19:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last year, my girlfriend bought me a nifty cable that enabled me to play music through my car stereo while charging my iPhone. It worked as advertised–music sounded great and I never had to worry about the iPhone’s battery dying while I was in the car. When it came time to upgrade to the iPhone 3G, the cable continued to play music from my phone, but the iPhone 3G did not recognize the cable as a power source, so charging was no longer an option.

I gave up for a while, until I came across the $25 Scosche passPORT. The 1.5-inch-high device fits between an otherwise incompatible charging accessory and the dock connector on your iPhone 3G or 2G iPod Touch, restoring the accessory’s original functionality. I’ve been using the passPORT with the cable in my car for a few weeks now, and it works flawlessly. The device is slightly thicker than a standard dock connector cable, so if you keep your iPhone in a case, you may have to remove it before using the passPORT.

The Scosche passPORT is available from the Apple Store for $24.95, and is compatible with iPhone 3G, second-generation iPod Touch, and fourth-generation iPod Nano devices.

Looking for the best price on a new iPhone? You might want to swing by your local Wal-Mart starting December 28th, when they’ll begin to offer Apple’s hot phone at $2 less than Apple’s own price: $197 for an 8GB model or $297 for a 16GB model.

Hopefully this will put to rest all of the “$99 iPhone” rumors, but it’s still a big deal from Apple’s perspective. For one thing, Apple doesn’t usually let retailers offer products at less than their own prices; Wal-Mart is probably kicking in the extra $2 on their own. Apple also tries to make sure their products are only sold by folks trained to sell Apple products, something Wal-Mart senior VP Gary Severson said the retail chain was glad to do. “Our electronics associates have been preparing for many weeks for the arrival of iPhone 3G,” he said in a press release.

Hopefully they still got some time off for the holidays!