Emulator Videos

He just asked me to take them down. He said he liked them but they caused problems. I can out them back up on June 6th.

It kills the buzz whenever they show the device prior to release (like yesterday at D7), because most people already know the features they are demonstrating, and right now they are all about generating buzz.

Like, who was surprised when they "announced" webOS has Twitter on Universal Search? It was one of the "new features no one has ever seen" they were showing, but we all knew about it because of the videos and other leaks.

But I'm glad they decided to take the polite route here, and instead of going all guns blazing, as the always litigious-happy Apple we know, and send a proper and threatening Cease and Desist letter, they simply asked to remove the videos.

If that does show the difference between Apple and Palm, I don't know what does.

It doesn't have much to do with confidence, but with marketing, timing, and... well, quality of the message.

For the company, it's interesting to show their cards at the exact best time. Too soon and you let the buzz die, to late and you don't give it time enough to build.

And the fact is that when someone leaks critical features prior to what they were planning, it really screws up the work of all their marketing team, because now they have to do a showing on a important event (such as D7) that would get the right amount of buzz from the press, but no important features to show that would take people's breath away, because they are already expecting it.

Remember that people that read tech blogs and forums are very few among the intended public for the device, so most people get their idea of what the device can do from mainstream media. If these mainstream journalists are already jaded from getting too much information about the device, this is represented on their reports, and they fail to generate as much buzz as Palm would get otherwise.

Imagine how much people would have talked about if they weren't expecting Twitter universal search, or iTunes integration. Instead we got "so yeah, they confirmed these rumors".

Lastly, as I said before, there's the subject of quality of the message. Palm demo guys are very careful to avoid areas of the device which are still not ready for primetime. This same care (for obvious reasons) is not taken when people like us play around with it, so it's inevitable for us to find things they don't want us to report as faulty. That is why there is a NDA in place for everybody who got the SDK.

Trust me on this one, they are dieing to tell everybody all the device can do. They just want to make sure it CAN do before showing it to the world.