Palm's CEO, Jon Rubinstein, recently explained the difference between Android and WebOS smartphones in a NYT interview. Despite new contenders like the Motorola Droid and HTC Droid Eris being promoted heavily by Verizon Wireless this holiday season, the Palm CEO doesn't believe it'll hurt the WebOS platform.
According to Job Rubinstein, developers will likely write for Palm devices, in part because WebOS is based largely on the same languages used to design Web sites, while Android uses a Java framework for their applications.
If you ask us, that was perhaps true when the Palm Pre was released, but Android now also supports those languages.
The Palm CEO further says that "the companies that will deliver the best products are the ones that integrate the whole experience - the hardware, the software and the services - and aren't getting one piece from here and one piece from there and trying to bolt it all together".
If you ask us, Android can be both. If the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 delivers the goods, it'll be a good example of how a manufacturer can use its own niche skills to come up with a consumer smartphone of great overall quality.
But as Jon Rubinstein notes, the success of any platform comes down to carriers willing to support it. And the Palm CEO assumes that more U.S. carriers will follow Sprint in offering the WebOS smartphones. Verizon Wireless has said the Palm Pre will be coming next year, and then we'll to some extent agree with the Palm CEO: If Verizon Wireless picks up the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, it will give phones like the Motorola Droid and BlackBerry Curve serious competition on paper.
That said, at the end of the day it's the buyer loyalty out there that decides, and with so many platforms seeing improvements nowadays, it's a rough market to enter. Some has said that the expansion of the smartphone market will make room for more platforms though, while others say that some platforms will simply have to die.
We tend to agree with the former, and that's what Palm is betting on too. The more feature phone users that end up getting a Palm Pixi next (as well as current Centro owners), the better for WebOS and the carriers. The key here is of course what Pixi users pay per month for services, and no matter how you look at it, they'll end up spending more than the average feature phone user.
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