The Palm Pre: Final thoughts (for now)

It could be here in five months; it could be here sooner. But even before the Palm Pre has a firm release date, there are a few datapoints and checkpoints you need to keep an eye on.

Dollars and demand. In the wake of CES, the pricing and supply picture is becoming clearer. At this point it's believed that the Pre will be priced at under $200 with a two-year Sprint contract and at either $399 or $499 without it. That's steep, sure, but not at all out of line for a high-end handset from Sprint (or anyone else).

The bigger question for some is whether the production will meet the insane hyp-...um, expected demand. Early reports put the initial production run at 200,000 handsets, all intended for the US market. To give you some point of comparison, Apple famously sold 1 million iPhones in the first 74 days of availability. It's hard for our tiny minds to conceive of fanboys queuing up for days in front of a Sprint store, but one wonders nonetheless if the manufacturing will be able to keep up with the demand.

App-y slappy? The jury's out on whether the anyone-can-play apps-development strategy is a winner -- and to whom it's directed. Some consumers profoundly loathe closed-garden apps stores such as those for the iPhone and the Sidekick; in particular, users of Symbian systems seem to have a gift for free-range software gathering. Palm's splitting the difference, offering a branded and curated apps store while ensuring that developers wise in the ways of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are also able to build and offer apps separately.

But AR Communications senior vice president (and frequent Betanews contributor) Carmi Levy says that Palm can't afford to dilute its efforts out of the gate. "Palm's app store will have to be branded just as strongly as Apple has branded its offering. It's all well and good to allow third parties sufficient leeway to build their own offerings as they deem appropriate, but consumers don't have the capacity to remember the six different ways of getting apps onto their device. They want to remember one brand, one URL, on easily installable application."

Enter the enterprise buyers. Not that it hurt Apple to give the high hand to would-be corporate iPhone users for so many months, but it's not likely Palm has that kind of time, or that kind of brewing social capital, on its side. Friday's CES presentation didn't go into much detail on security, and no representative had news to give on VPN support -- two must-know issues for your hardworking IT department.

If Palm wants to open a two-front war -- Apple's iPhone on one side, RIM's BlackBerry on the other -- there's an entire marketing conversation that needs to happen between now and launch. Levy, however, isn't worrying: "For now, they've got a bit of time to put together a business-specific marketing strategy, so we'll wait and see how that evolves."

Gee, GSM. Palm representatives told Betanews that the company's already talking to potential partners on the GSM side. Levy's glad to hear it: "It's encouraging to see that they've developed a roadmap for broader network capabilities."

But, he says, "The key lies in how quickly Palm will be able to ramp production of multiple versions of the device, and how quickly they'll be able to lock in different vendors in different markets around the world to ensure seamless availability of subsequent generations. The game is no longer based on the near-term success of any one device. Rather, it's based on the evolution of the platform over time, and Palm needs to be planting the seeds for that evolution -- and getting that message out -- now."

Our hands, they itch. To the person who e-mailed me demanding that I not leave Vegas without a Pre in tow: Yeah, right. Not only are review units not yet available, even the demo units reporters were allowed to see and touch aren't falling into our hands for any serious playtime. (One very high-profile journalist -- he writes a weekly column for that well-respected daily paper back East -- started to walk away from the Palm reps with the Pre in his hand and was immediately surrounded by Palm staffers, who in the nicest way possible made sure he walked no farther.)

In other words, we can now twitch and speculate all we like, but what reviewers will really be doing for the time being is scheming to get access ASAP. That footloose reporter is doubtless one of the 2-3 folks who'll have early access; the rest of us will agree to sign over our firstborn for hands-on time at Palm's earliest convenience. Such is the life of a gadget reviewer. (Pity poor me, yes.)

Investors will take stock. Just six weeks ago, Palm's stock price hit a new 52-week (and all-time low of $1.14; that was a couple of weeks after the previous new low ($1.65), which hit four days after the previous new low ($2.07). On Monday, the stock was trading at $5.91 and analysts at Citigroup were using terms like "potential to be iconic" and -- more to the point -- "hold" (not "sell"). Between now and launch, Palm has one earnings call in late March and, if they're delayed until late June, possibly a second.

Announcing months ahead of time also means that the company's committed to enduring a period of low sales for its current Treo and Centro lines, which will be a bite in the shorts for revenues. And no one needs to tell tech folk that the current economy holds no promises.

But Citigroup's not alone in thinking that it's all likely to work out for Palm -- Morgan Joseph on Friday upgraded its recommendation from "hold" to "buy," and Global Crown Capital moved its marker to the upgrade column as well, shifting its (curiously worded) rating from "underweight" to "overweight" after changing that recommendation on November 24 from "neutral" down to "underweight."