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'Palm Pre' Smartphone Announced: WebOS, Wireless Charging, App Store

Pre vs. iPhone

I read this here http://www.appleinsider.com/article...es_with_pre_smartphone_running_new_webos.html

"Several former Apple employees are playing major roles in the evolution of Palm. Jon Rubinstein, who opened the announcement, is Palm's executive chairman of the board. Rubinstein was once a key engineer in the creation of the iPod and development of the iMac. He also worked at NeXT. Rubinstein's departure brought others over from Apple in his department, and some common ties exist between the two companies in Palm's PR department. Palm Director of Software Chris McKillop worked on the iPod and iPhone teams as well."

Watching Pre's presentation video it is clear that the UI is too close to iPhone's. We don't know how much "technology transfer" Palm got from this gurus migration, but it seems that not little. Also, I was wondering about those 200 patents around the iPhone that Steve mentioned Apple intended to protect. Is it the virtual keyboard one of them (that's why Pre/Android doesn't have one). Anything else from the UI? all pop-up and sliding menus are so iPhone's.

The best of Pre's is the multitasking, since all instant messaging like applications are useless without that. And that is where the real power of those devices lies. I guess we iPhone user will get it in June ;)
 
slapppy said:
LOL... Apple can't even get PUSH out the door. :p

When the Pre ships with all this nice hoopla, and Apple has done nothing but sit on their asses by then, goodbye iPhone.
Click to expand...

haha! exactly! apple better be glad because their name is prob going to save them. if the iphone was made by LG or someone like that then im not sure if the iphone would have sold as much.
 
Also:



LOL OMG FUGLY!
201018-palm.jpg





WOW SHINY ME WANTS!
palm-apple.jpg
 
FX120 said:
Also: LOL OMG FUGLY!
201018-palm.jpg


WOW SHINY ME WANTS!
palm-apple.jpg
Click to expand...

Okay... so first you judge it and say it's dumb, because it's, in your opinion, ugly. Then you say people only want it because it's shiny :confused::confused::confused:

Yeah, people aren't impressed with it because of its snappy OS and vastly superior user interface to the iPhone.
 
The Palm Pre is a VERY serious competitor to the iPhone for one reason: a built-in real keyboard, something that business users want.

If Apple were to offer a higher-end iPhone with a slide-out or fold-out real keyboard or an improved version of the haptic response touchscreen found on the Blackberry Storm, Apple would really take over the smart phone market almost overnight.
 
TuffLuffJimmy said:
Okay... so first you judge it and say it's dumb, because it's, in your opinion, ugly. Then you say people only want it because it's shiny :confused::confused::confused:

Yeah, people aren't impressed with it because of its snappy OS and vastly superior user interface to the iPhone.
Click to expand...

Look at the two pictures again, see if you notice the difference....
 
TuffLuffJimmy said:
Okay... so first you judge it and say it's dumb, because it's, in your opinion, ugly. Then you say people only want it because it's shiny :confused::confused::confused:

Yeah, people aren't impressed with it because of its snappy OS and vastly superior user interface to the iPhone.
Click to expand...

You seemed to have missed the joke here. Please reread.
 
The first thing I thought when I saw it has been mirrored in a lot of comments - this is the first phone that looks like an actual Iphone competitor. If it works reasonably well, I would definitely consider it. One of the sticking points for the Iphone for me (I haven't gotten one) is turn by turn directions. Issues I foresee (just speaking for myself) with the Palm

1. I would prefer a 'soft' keyboard to the pull-out
2. I would like Itunes integration for music/video syncing
3. I would like to see active Application development, including a kick-ass pda/scheduling/tasking app that syncs with Outlook (if its not included!)

Compared to the Instinct and all the other forgettable "Iphone killers" this one looks fantastic!
 
Very impressive so far

I just watched the 5 part demo in youtube...
Things I like:
•Multiple applications running (of course)
•Bigger speaker (quality?)
•3MP camera with flash
•Being able to compose an email and look at another email without having to send your composed email first.
•e-mails/calls/texts, etc. show up in the Dashboard at the bottom of screen without kicking you off what you're working on.
•Also with Dashboard you don't have to quit the program you're using to interact with the music player, though the iPod interface is WAY better from what I saw of the Pre player.

Other than those items it seems to me to be quite the carbon copy of the iPhone UI. There is a ton of things we don't know about the Pre but the iPhone sure could use some of those enhancements.

You never know, Apple could be doing this stuff and better as I type this. They hold their cards close.

Looking forward to the next major revision of the iPhone.
 
mashkina said:
Watching Pre's presentation video it is clear that the UI is too close to iPhone's. We don't know how much "technology transfer" Palm got from this gurus migration, but it seems that not little. Also, I was wondering about those 200 patents around the iPhone that Steve mentioned Apple intended to protect. Is it the virtual keyboard one of them (that's why Pre/Android doesn't have one). Anything else from the UI? all pop-up and sliding menus are so iPhone's.
Click to expand...

Oh good grief :)

I saw a ignorant blog today talking about how the Palm icon grid was obviously taken from the iPhone. Clearly too young to know about 1980s technology or even Palm's history.

Clue: I (and other touch programmers) were using popup and sliding menus, onscreen keyboards and flick scrolling, long before the iPhone was even a vague thought in someone's head. After a while, many touch methods are just obvious.

Here. A boring presentation video of a field application I did months before the iPhone was announced. It's actually running under Windows CE IE6 on a simulator. Scrolling, swipes to go backwards. Good grief, Apple even copied my wait indicator! (Yeah, like the whole world wasn't already using it. So much for Apple inventiveness.)

As for the 200 patents, first off, they're 99% applications, not granted patents. A lot are no doubt design patents which protect looks. My guess is 180 of them are not even Apple's, but from part makers. And Jobs never said anything about protecting what he didn't have. That came from fan blogs.

You can't patent the gestures or effects. You can only patent how you do them, and there's tons of ways to do that.
 
So....
AT&T has the iPhone (right now the reigning king)
Verizon has the Blackberry Storm (a good competitor if it's gets a much needed software update)
T-Mobile has the G1 (The most open platform, the geeky favorite)
aaaaand Sprint has the Pre (the seemingly superior phone)

This is quite the interesting battle.
 
Let me just say this: Palm is back, and ready to compete.

This is a brilliant phone, from the OS to the design it self.

Apple fan boys calling this ugly, slap yourself in the face please. Thanks.

You have to give Palm credit for looking ahead of the future and developing the phone that all companies were thinking about - a phone with the best of both worlds: haptic type, and the best of touch screen capabilities.

I think the phones design does this flawlessly. It has all the benefits of touch screen UI and a nice full QWERTY keyboard, and lets be honest, I bet a lot of you would rather have haptic feedback as compared to iPhone's narrow qwerty keyboard.

Now you can't give Palm ALL the credit. Take a look at 'cards.' Very similar to multiple-window safari browsing, all they did was adapt this concept, and it is a great way to multi-task.

One of the best things about this phone is Synergies in my opinion. Pulling multiple calendar, contact, and email information is brilliant. I know personally I use 2-3 different sources for each of these, and although mobile me does this decently, why not pull straight from the sources themselves? It will always be up to date, awesome for services that do not incorporate push technology yet... i.e. someone in your Google group updating a calendar, this is awesome. Needless to say, this wouldn't be hard to develop for any other device.

All in all, I think Palm has created a winner. Only time will tell though, once people physically get their hands on the device and give it a good thorough hands on.

It's great to see a comeback for Palm, and bring some awesome new creativity to the smart phone market. Cannot way to see what the competition has in store in the coming years!
 
Any phone with a physical keyboard is just going to be another looser to the iphone. Why is is so hard to understand that those stupid chiclet keyboards for handheld devices are a dead end? Apple got it absolutely right with the all touch screen approach. The only possible improvement would be addition of handwriting recognition, which should be nothing more than a software upgrade.
The only thing that a physical keyboard adds is unwanted thickness and more opportunities for something to break. Apple is exactly right that getting rid of the keyboard to keep the phone thin enough to comfortably fit in ones pockets is the right choice. Having an on-screen touch keyboard instead of a slide out also makes the device much more practical to use for short, casual tasks, which is the whole point of a handheld device. On top of that, all the extra mechanical parts are really just more things to have break.
Given that my first smartphone is an iphone, I have to call nonsense on anybody who thinks a chiclet keyboard is easier to use than Apple's virtual keyboard. They aren't. I find them harder to use. It's just that all the Crackberry addicts are accustomed to chiclet keys and too set in their ways to understand the superiority of the virtual keyboard.
Finally, it's not just that I don't want a chiclet keyboard myself, I don't want anybody else to have them either. Where I work, there are countless people in countless meetings clattering away on their stupid little keyboards on company provided Crackberries. The faint but constant 'click-click-click' is very irritating and distracting. The iphone with it's totally silent operation has been a breath of fresh air.
All these junk smartphones like the Crackberry, the G-1, and now the Pre make as much sense as hanging onto a teletype terminal in the age of GUI's.

On a different note, will somebody please explain all the crying about AT&T? I don't see how there is enough difference between any of the cell providers for consumers to care about at all. I had been a Verizon customer since they were GTE, but when the iphone came out I switched to AT&T without hesitation. I have no regrets. They cost the same or less than I would pay for the closest equivalent from Verizon, they are polite to deal with, they don't have a bunch of stupid hidden charges like Verizon did for some of the smartphone models I looked at, and their coverage is just fine. I live and work far out in the suburbs of a secondary urban market and often travel to a wide variety of semi-remote and remote locations. I rarely ever have trouble getting either a phone or data signal, except when I am inside some metal lined rooms in the interior of some buildings. I can understand loyalty to a particular brand of phone, but I just don't get all the loyalty or hostility towards certain signal provider brands. I can think of few things that are more fully commoditized than cell phone service. The only thing I can figure is that all the AT&T haters are really just trolls who work for Verizon, Sprint, T-mobile, etc. who are worried about their jobs due to all the customers AT&T is poaching because of the iphone.:confused:
 
Wow. First impressions.

Phone is ugly. At least the pictures are. Didn't look too bad in the demo though.

The calendar app looks great, better than the iCal not to mention the one on the iPhone. Just great. Love the searching. Love the searching. Love the searching. The dashboard is okay, looks like desktop window management madness. I actually prefer the iPhone in that respect. I didn't see a demonstration of copying text or an image from one window to the next.

Don't like the swiping to go back, gimme a button. Don't like the new browser window with all the mini bookmark windows. Hope there is an option to open the window with a blank browser window. I'm done with hardware keyboards.

The question is how does it sync. I had a Treo and had to buy the Missing Sync, one of the reasons I got an iPhone. I'm not going to say its an iPhone killer, if it were anymore like an iPhone, it would be an iPhone.

I'm hoping Apple's next update steals some of these features particularly that Spotlight-like search.

Looks promising, can't wait to see what's wrong with it.
 
kdarling said:
Oh good grief :)

As for the 200 patents, first off, they're 99% applications, not granted patents. A lot are no doubt design patents which protect looks. My guess is 180 of them are not even Apple's, but from part makers. And Jobs never said anything about protecting what he didn't have. That came from fan blogs.

You can't patent the gestures or effects. You can only patent how you do them, and there's tons of ways to do that.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the explanation on patents. What I meant is that behind Pre there is close know-how coming from Apple. You don't come to that UI and that hardware integration just by watching how iPhone works. Android is one example: it came one year later and the thing is far off different.

On the other hand, I don't see how the Pre is going to harm the iPhone (the thing is still to be released, and by then Apple will offer for sure the iPhone with all those extra features + much more). Could it be that Apple is somehow behind Pre in the shadow, supporting other type of iPhone (with real keyboard and other fancy stuff) to make life harder to Nokia, RIM, Android?
 
kdarling said:
As for the 200 patents, first off, they're 99% applications, not granted patents. A lot are no doubt design patents which protect looks. My guess is 180 of them are not even Apple's, but from part makers. And Jobs never said anything about protecting what he didn't have. That came from fan blogs.

You can't patent the gestures or effects. You can only patent how you do them, and there's tons of ways to do that.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the explanation on patents. What I meant is that behind Pre there is close know-how coming from Apple. You don't come to that UI and that hardware integration just by watching how iPhone works. Android is one example: it came one year later and the thing is far off different.

On the other hand, I don't see how the Pre is going to harm the iPhone (the thing is still to be released, and by then Apple will offer for sure the iPhone with all those extra features + much more). Could it be that Apple is somehow behind Pre in the shadow, supporting other type of iPhone (with real keyboard and other fancy stuff) to make life harder to Nokia, RIM, Android?
 
WTF. Wireless charging?
And that thing is ugly. Although, I'm gonna have to see this in person to see if it's as bad as I think.
 
I love the UI on this that is multitasking capable, the gestures are also innovative. I like the idea of apps as 'cards', where you can shuffle through them and look at them in an 'Expose' type style, and move them around like you can in 'Spaces'. It even has an osx like Dock that can be activated with a gesture. Honestly, the OS on this seems better than the iPhone.

I would prefer the Palm Pre over the iPhone, however I'd miss the apps and iTunes integration. We'll see in the next 6 months how Apps are handled on this phone, Palm have a great history of apps though and a big community behind it so it should be good.

This is the first phone to challenge the iphone in terms of combining a fantastic OS experience and great hardware. The first real iphone competitor IMO.
 
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