The folks at Engadget’s have received information stating that Palm recently provided hands-on demos of the Palm Pre to a variety of musicians and actors at a recent event in the USA:
We already knew that stars attending the Independent Spirit Awards
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and based on the coverage we’re seeing from the event (held on the 21st), they at least got to handle them.
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, but what it does make clear is that the Pre can’t be too far from launch if the company felt comfortable enough to throw them into such an uncontrolled setting.
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Unfortunately, their conclusion is not right: the device probably crashed all the time. But: nobody was there to see it crashing…
Events such as the one mentioned above are not visited by tech journalists – the so-called culture journalists who cover these usually have no idea of technology. For them, all that counts is that Rappa X used the Pre…
On the other hand, assume that the Pre died in my hands: the story would probably be all over the internet within 15 minutes.
Thus, Palm has nothing to loose by giving out the Pre “in a controlled environment”. If journalists photograph the device in use, they win. If it crashed, nobody cares…
What do you think?
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Didn’t tech writers get a reasonably good go on the Pre recently – and video the results for all to see?
No tech journalist has ‘driven’ a Pre with their own fingers to date. All demos have had a Palm employee firmly in control.
I doubt this is because the device is crashing all the time, I think that with the Linux backend it is extremely stable. However the responsiveness of the multi-touch and GUI in general might not be as polished as they might hope so they are delaying proper demos. You can hardly blame them!