Palm Pré

As opposed to my predictions CES didn’t end in tears for Palm and the Palm Pré is actually decent and webOS can actually be a fitting successor to PalmOS. Their success will be down to two things (after they make the Pré relevant to the world with GSM of course).
First is the Pré price point. This is a very bad time to release a new interesting gadget, there’s the global recession, there’s the iPhone and there’s Nokia felling threatened and flooring the smartphone prices so unless you get your price point really right your shinny new gadget becomes a footnote.
Second, and hopefully there’s still someone at Palm that remembers that, you got to treat your developer community really really well. Palm seems to have started well with standards based UI and they mention “an eclipse based IDE” which may turn out really well or really bad. But the tipping point is the community, Palm knew how to foster it, Handspring didn’t. At some point Palm was able to swallow Handspring.