Gadget Maven Blog

Palm was showing off it’s new iPhone-matching Pre in Barcelona earlier this year, making waves at Mobile World Congress when all the focus was supposed to be on new Google Android phones.
In the short while I played with it, it was enough for me to know it’s the kind of cellphone that earns its right o be called an “iPhone killer”.
The sentiment is much the same now that it has been released in the United States, but sadly only on Sprint’s CDMA and not the GSM standard we use in South Africa. There is no release date for the rest of the world, so I doubt we’ll see it this year.
What makes the Palm Pre stand out are it’s clever integration of many must-have technologies. It has a touch screen, but it also has a slide-out Qwerty keypad.
It has an accelerometer, so it can be used sideways, and has uses a remarkable contact charger (ie no plugging in charging cables).
Perhaps it’s greatest asset though is it’s new operating system, webOS, which is a triumphant return to the kind of simple but solid foundation that made the original Palms so beloved by their users.
The new incarnation has a superb user experience, offering a clever integration of messaging, contacts and calendaring that at first glance is genius, at second glance sheer genius.
Palm calls this feature Synergy, pulling Outlook, Google and Facebook calendaring and contacts into one unified view. It does the same with messaging, combining all your conversations – be they email, IM, Facebook messages, or SMSs – into one grouped stream. Shades of Google Wave anyone? Months before Google announced it to boot.
You can run multiple applications at one time, accessing them by swiping sideways, and uses great touchscreen gestures. You can also search through it with universal search, only recently introduced on the iPhone in version 3.0 of its software.
A three megapixel camera, built-in GPS, WiFi and excellent multimedia use of video and photos on its 3,1-inch (7,8cm) touchscreen complete the package.
The 34-button Qwerty keypad has proved to be the most contentious feature, in early reviews, because they are quite small, but it does have a dedicated @ symbol.
So, the keypad may be made for midgets, but you get used to it. It’s certainly bigger than the miniscule one under the flap of the Sony Ericsson P910 that was the smartphone of choice in SA for a good while.
Then, of course, there is the Palm app store – where you can buy third-party apps and use them on the phone. This concept was originated by Palm back in the 1990s, but popularised by Apple, who have arguably made it easier (a few clicks) to use. Apple had all of the iTunes Store experience to do that but credit must go to Palm in the first place.
Palm has made some of the biggest, and dumbest, mistakes in business. It had a commanding lead in the nascent personal digital assistant (PDA) market, which is effectively created. But it fudged, and continued to fudge, it’s transition to what we now know as smartphones. It bought Treo from it’s own co-founders who’d left when corporate politics stopped them from innovating. It made a few good Treo smartphones, and then promptly rode all its good will into the ground with a series of calamitous decisions, from spinning off it’s operating system into a separate company, several re-branding exercises and even (god forbid) using Microsoft’s Windows Mobile.
But Jon Rubinstein, who led on the original iPod team, has turned the company around. Rubinstein, Palm’s chairman since October 2007, took over as chief executive from Palm-lifer Ed Colligan.
“With Palm webOS we have 10-plus years of innovation ahead of us, and the Palm Pre is already one of the year’s hottest new products,” he said. I certainly hope so.
I said it back when I was  a Palm V user: the secret to Palm was it’s operating system. It was light, robust, reliable and ideally designed for PDAs. Compared to the then recently released Windows CE (out of which Windows Mobile developed), it was like Apple to Microsoft.

Specs

• Camera: 3.2 megapixel, LED flash
• Display: 3,1in (7,8cm) touchscreen, 320×480 HVGA resolution
• Connectivity: 3G EVDO Rev A; Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g): Bluetooth 2.0 with Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) and A2DP (Bluetooth stereo)
• GPS
• Memory: 8GB, USB storage mode

More information

• All the specs on the Palm site

What the others are saying:
Walt Mossberg calls it “a beautiful, innovative and versatile hand-held computer that’s fully in the iPhone’s class”. Read his review here.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 9:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.