Previewing the Palm Pre

January 9, 2009

So, as most of the mobile-savvy world now knows, Palm introduced their submission for uber-smartphone at CES 2009 today. This is clearly a last gasp effort from a company that popularized the PDA genre, but lost the plot in the last few years. It’s always interesting how a capable company, knowing that it is on its last legs, always tends to post up something worthy of praise. Desperation ignites the best in minds.

The Pre (Pronounced like “Pree”):

So yeah, not the prettiest thing. Seems like the build quality is on par with the HTC boys which isn’t a bad thing. Unfortunately I am not a big fan of rounded edges and the bulbous look of the device in general. I do like that the rounded edges yield more space when the keyboard slides out, so there is some method to the madness there. But I have to say that the iPhone has it trumped in the aesthetics department.

Pluses:

- A physical QWERTY keyboard. Never hurts when you are up against the Storm & iPhone.

- EVDO Rev. A on Sprint should yield solid bandwidth performance, however I am not as sure about quality of coverage across the US since I am with AT&T.

- The WebOS, with the apparent fact that software development requires only knowledge of HTML, CSS & Javascript to build apps. That could be a huge factor ONLY if Palm manages to ship millions of units in 2009 without SNAFUs. I still struggle to understand how any developer will be able to work in a programming environment without some kind of local persistent store on the phone. I am assuming the WebOS will allow for access to resources such as the filesystem via JS. I can’t see how every application has to be designed to assume always-on connectivity over EVDO Rev. A / Wi-Fi.

- A 3MP Camera with Flash is a definite plus over the iPhone 3G.

- A mini-USB connector to access Mass Storage is another solid touch.

- Unified searching, messaging & email. Outlook Enterprise / IMAP / POP integration out of the box is a nice touch, along with the ability to move an IM conversation to SMS and vice-versa. I wonder if Palm’s fall-back strategy is to have Microsoft acquire it if the Pre fails? Hmm.

- The “gesture pad” is a nice touch if it works the way I hope it does. I am assuming that it allows a series of gestures (multi-touch?) to be made outside the context of the application running so that you can swap, close etc. and still have touch interactivity using those same gestures on the main screen/application to perform other use-cases without conflict.

- The WebOS can run multiple applications in the background. Sounds like a fairly obvious feature, but an iPhone developer cannot have this privilege and it definitely diminishes innovation and the user experience for some.

Minuses:

- It only is on Sprint for now. That’s not exactly a provider with a burgeoning subscriber base. They need the UMTS version out as soon as possible so that T-Mobile and other carriers can offer it.

- It is still atleast 3-4 months away from launch and the buzz could get killed by impending announcements from Apple, Nokia & Androidees.

- One thing conspicuously absent was the application support. Didn’t see any partnership announcements from Google or Yahoo, neither was their any explicit support from Microsoft. Should be interesting to see how that pans out. Yes, HTML/CSS/JS support should make Web 2.0 apps easier to port, but I still want to see how much effort is involved.

Since there is very little known about the device in terms of the user experience, there is very little to fault here. Palm generated great buzz, took advantage of a muted CES and met the expectations of the media. A stock that’s up 50% today validates it. Most importantly, they demonstrated a renewed understanding of the mobile market and executed a device worthy of consumer attention. I wish Palm the best of luck, but see little threat to Apple or Android’s momentum.

Filed under: Gadgets, Innovation | Comments (9)