Comment by unwiredben

I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing. When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an astonishing degree.

The river of money from Macs, iPods and iTunes gave Steve Jobs a completely different kind of leverage in those carrier negotiations. Device only companies like Palm and RIM couldn't have broken that carrier strangle even if they did have the technology.

The Pre was absolutely rad - and to this day the only phone I miss from a UI perspective, and the only UX and hardware that I thought had a chance of "out Apple'ing Apple".

The hardware was very well done, and I could type faster on my Pre than I still can today on any screen. I was never a Blackberry person, but I expect it was a simlar experience.

Even at launch, WebOS was a pleasure to use, and the architecture of essentially easy-to-make installable web apps was revolutionary at the time. It's a damn shame it never made it further than it did.

I read that as a failure of Palm's management, notably the ones that were negotiating with phone carriers. Jobs isn't the only guy who could have negotiated that kind of deal. Apple was a second run computer company that had almost no previous phone experience. They were not exactly negotiating from a position of strength, and the fact that only one carrier took them up on the offer shows just how tough it was.

It sounds like they really needed to say "Stop. We are the ones building the phone, you are the ones providing the service. We don't tell you how to build towers, you don't tell us how to build the handset, at least not the user facing part of the handset."

> At that time, the carriers controlled so much of the cell phone experience.

In English-speaking countries, maybe. But I remember at least Windows Mobile PDAs that had both a cellular radio and wifi before the iPhone launched. At least Russian carriers never cared at all what kind of phone or other device you were using on their network. You bought it unlocked for the full price from somewhere else anyway. There were various attempts to do US-style carrier-locked phones with 2-year commitment with no or little upfront payment, but none of that really stuck. The only exception to that was SkyLink, Russia's only CDMA carrier. They sold their own branded phones but even those, iirc, were for the full price upfront.

> Palm OS didn't have a unified app store at that time, just sideloading and some third-party methods, and some carriers had started making their own stores where you could buy apps billed through your cell phone bill. They hated the idea of a platform owning that, and I expect that was part of the reason Apple originally released it with no app store. They needed the phone to be a massive hit in order to gain the power to also bypass that wall that the cell companies put up.

This might actually be a partial explanation why some of Apple’s Executives held back on trying to convince Jobs until after they shipped, but initially, Steve Jobs was truly against the idea of running third-party apps on iPhones and had to be convinced.

I love sharing this trivia with people because really, can you imagine an iPhone without apps? It’s crazy to me to even think about, and back then during that first year and for many subsequent years after until this became public knowledge, I thought the only reason there wasn’t an SDK was because the first iPhone as a minimum-viable product for Apple’s vision of a cell phone and an SDK was always in the cards from before the start. Because why wouldn’t it? They had Cocoa! And a small but enthusiastic base of indie Mac devs that knew how to use it.

Though I never used a Pre, I got to use webOS on an HP Touchpad. In many ways, I still think it’s better than what we currently have and wish it had won out instead of the iOS and Android.

The Pre and WebOS were hands down the best non iPhone experience at the time. The mistake Palm made was going exclusive instead of pushing it everywhere. I don't think the Pre ever recovered from that in the USA.

The BlackBerry Z10 was also a great device but by that point there was no way BlackBerry to deploy a competing ecosystem to iPhone and Android for it to matter.

As an outsider very interested in Palm devices, this was always my impression/suspicion. Thanks for confirming what I’ve long thought was going on.

Exactly this. Also why I bought Apple stock the day the iPhone was announced (I had never seen an iPhone and knew nothing about how cool it was, but I took notice that Jobs had been able to blast through the carrier moat concerning data service).