"Why the Palm Pre will fail" -- what do you think?

Have a read of this post by CrunchGear’s John Biggs.

He reckons the Palm Pre will fail:

Why? Because we hyped it too much. Because the software is untested in real-life situations and we, as neophiles, are delightfully impatient when it comes to wonky design. Because the hardware is “plasticky,” according to Boy Genius and “you often hit multiple keys at the same time while typing.” Because, to paraphrase the old saying, no matter how much you obsess and how many Apple engineers you hire the last opinion always falls to the consumer

It’ll do fine.

It’ll have an array of niggling annoying things. The keyboard, as John mentioned, is an absolute nightmare if you’re used to nice quality Nokia E71/Blackberry designs. That was the first thing I thought when I initially saw the device in the flesh back a few months ago.

There’s a huge amount of Palm fans ‘in them thar hills’. You only have to chat to anyone whose eyes light up at the mere mention of Palm to see there’s a lot of love for the brand. You have to be quick — and run fast — if you want to avoid listening to tales of yearning desire for the Pre from many. They’re harking back to a time when their original Palm was their best friend.

Update it and make it look sexy and woosh, there’s a ton of people out there still heavily attracted to it.

I don’t think it’ll be an also-ran. I think it’ll do pretty well — and if they continue the momentum with the likes of the Palm Eos and so on, we’ll be rocking.

What do you think?