Mobile Wars 2009: Hairy Hands vs. The Fruit Fellas

The game is on, kind readers. Palm has finally released their hotly anticipated Pre with the slick new webOS. Palm isn’t out of the woods yet, though, as Apple Inc. has WWDC 2009 up their sleeves this coming Monday where the 3rd Gen iPhone is slated to be announced. There’s even a rumor that Steve Jobs may pop up and deliver the keynote personally, and that rumor is being mongered by no less a valid news outlet than the WSJ (check Friday the 5th’s rag). He is, after all, slated to be returning to the helm of the USS Cupertino later this month.

Palm, then, is clearly a shortimer on shaky ground as Apple has managed to several up their opponents at every turn, and I’m having doubts that they will show up to this party with 80’s grade wine coolers. The iPhone is, after all, Apple’s flagship product already in its short life, besting even the powerful and battle-ready iPod (yeah, the iPod Touch is an iPhone without the phone, so you do the math). This new iPhone is just in time to sate the upgrade needs of the original iPhone owners whose precious non-3G gizmos 2 year contracts are coming up.

Interestingly enough, it appears that Palm is struggling right out of the gate by releasing webOS 1.0.2 today! Reports on PreThinking.com are already saying that the update makes the phone faster and adds a clock widget. Wow. I’m not surprised, since its a very Palm-like thing to do, but its not the kind of message that Palm should want to put out there. Regardless, there has been a great deal of buzz about the Pre and people appear to be loving it, with thousands of tweets hitting the nano-blogging nano-sphere as people pick up their new handsets at a local Sprint store.

The excitement is clear and many of the reports being posted about new Pres is very positive, which is a good sign. The other question is, “Who will win, Apple or Palm?” Fortunately, I’ll break out the old saw and say that neither, its the consumer who wins. Apple set out to completely revamp the mobile market and it did so in less than a year with the first iPhone. It has taken less than three years now for the competition to start catching up, and (this is my opinion) the Palm Pre and the new webOS is the first to offer a valid challenge to Apple. Apple wins, Palm wins, and we all win.

We get a pair of kick ass pocket computers for cheap! Nice work, fighters!