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

[hexonxonx]

It's a nice phone but two things will keep me using my iPhone:

1. Push email with push contacts and calendar
2. iTunes music and videos

 

[vvebsta]

Some of you think the recent CPU buzz is for the iTablet, but the iPhone desperately needs more horsepower to do iChat AV, copy+paste, iGPS, and MMS, etc. Who'd need a netbook if it could do all these things, really?

And going to the other extreme, I say WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT AN IPHONE NANO??? Less room = less hardware= slower, less battery life, smaller screen?!?!?!! Why? Why? Why?

 

[numbersyx]

I think Palm is pretty much a dead duck - they took far too long to correct the flaws in their products many of which were really frustrating and they took their audience for granted. Blackberry shoved them off the perch and iPhone is now shovellng dirt on their coffin. Think the aura of the iPhone is far too seductive...

 

[Sambo110]

Am I the only one that thought this was running OS X for a second? Seriously, that rock picture comes with OS X, and it even has a dock like the Tiger operating system.

 

[petvas]

I think that the Palm Pre is the first serious iPhone competitor. There are many things to like on this device but it has many things that make me say that the Iphone is still the better device:

• Web OS doesn't seem to allow for "real apps"
• No iTunes integration
• physical keyboard...I just dont think it belongs to a touch screen device
• the touch screen seems to be not that much responsive

 

[cv01]

[*]Web OS doesn't seem to allow for "real apps"
[/LIST]

Palm Mojo™ Application Framework will allow that: http://developer.palm.com/
More here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...o-a-developer-speaks-about-palms-new-sdk.html

 

[kornyboy]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

This thing looks really nice. I really like the wireless charging technology. I think that it will do fairly well in the market.

 

[petvas]

Palm Mojo™ Application Framework will allow that: http://developer.palm.com/
More here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/pos...o-a-developer-speaks-about-palms-new-sdk.html

Looks very interesting. Let's see how the device will perform. It's a godo thing to have a bit of competition. I hope that Apple improves the OS even more so that we won't have to switch to other devices...

 

[chaosconan]

Load it with all kinds of features. I won't buy it.
Why?
It's UGLY!!! Ugly outside and ugly user interface!!!
It's all ugly. It's surrounded by ugliness. I bet the engineers who designed it were Ugly. I don't even want to be near that Ugliness.
UGLYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!

They should rename it to Palm Oogly!!!

 

[MacbookSwitcher]

Several key iPhone developers left Apple to join Palm beginning in the summer of 2007. Even after that point, several individuals at Palm, including Ruby himself, but also lower-level individuals, aggressively attempted to recruit top iPhone developers to Palm. Most attempts failed but a few succeeded.

Steve Jobs was furious, but given California employment law, there was little he could do.

Thus, it is obvious that the Pre was influenced by top Apple recruited talent, including of course Mike Bell, Apple's former VP of hardware, with knowledge of Apple roadmaps years in advance, who took that knowledge and left for Palm. Fred Anderson, though not on the engineering side, after being made the scapegoat for the stock scandal, left Apple for Palm's board, also with knowledge of Apple plans.

 

[gnasher729]

It's my understanding that Palm has quite the list of apps for their phones and PDAs. Also, Apple has forced developers to use Macs and write in cocoa. Palm was smart enough to create a web dev environment. There are many, many times as many web developers as there are those who know cocoa. So Palm already has a much larger potential developer market than Apple could ever dream of.

Nonsense. 18 months ago, when the iPhone came out, the only way to write iPhone applications was to create web applications. We all know how well that worked. And that is exactly what Palm will have when their phone is released. Exactly the same development model that didn't work very well for the iPhone. And the guys who I know who are writing for the iPhone learnt Cocoa in less than a week (without even any Macintosh experience).

Why don't we just wait and see if Palm made the wrong decision to allow multitasking before we say it's "the wrong decision." However, Judging from the videos online the phone is much, much more responsive than the iPhone and the interface doesn't have all those awful "you scrolled too far, let me load" glitches.

Why not. That's exactly what I was saying. Apple made the opposite decision, and Apple devs are not stupid. Where they are different from other companies is that Apple developers often make decisions on merit instead of listening to the unwashed masses.

How is that at all relevant to the topic at hand?

I responded to someone who posted that PALM had gone up 40% since announcing their Phone, so the fact that PALM lost about 98% of its value since 2001, while AAPL increased its value more than tenfold, is quite relevant.

 

[SactoGuy18]

I don't see how not wanting to type SMS "shorthand" style messages has anything whatsoever to do with "needing" a physical keyboard. I use my iphone for business as well as personal use all the time and send plenty of email using the virtual keyboard. Just like millions of other people. There is no reason whatsoever (other than habit) to have a physical keyboard in a handheld, pocket sized device and plenty of reasons not too.

Unfortunately, Blackberry is finding out (much to their concern) that a touchscreen for a keyboard can be problematic--especially for anyone with long fingernails. That's why I'd like to see Apple adopt two things for their third-generation iPhone:

1. Put in an improved, haptic response touchscreen (one even better than the touchscreen used on the Blackberry Storm) that works correctly even with fingers that have longer fingernails.

2. Allow typing in of messages when the iPhone is turned on its side (landscape mode). This allows for bigger typing "keys" on-screen.

Just these two changes would make make the iPhone THE perfect replacement for all those Blackberrys and Palm Treos out there. 🙂

 

[swagi]

I agree. MMS is just a cheap substitute for phones with interfaces incapable of sending email. Why would you pay more and send an MMS when you can send an email with no text limit? This is especially true since the iPhone makes it very easy to send an email right after you take a picture.

Back to the story, this phone is actually the first phone to impress me since the iPhone. Ironically, just yesterday, I told a friend that Palm was dead haha.

Yes! Especially when I'm on vacation, have popped in a prepaid local SIM and want to send some pictures to my family.

OH...WAIT...The iPhone can do that via eMail much more convenient. And it's so damn cheap to use international roaming data!

 

[spydr]

I wish I saw this device a couple of days back - I would have bought some dirt cheap Palm shares and doubled it overnight and made a tidy profit and bought some more Apple stuff with it 🙂

I mean the device is definitely looking promising enough, feature set full enough and UI crisp enought that it might accomplish at least two important things — reviving the almost dead Palm and bringing some serious competition/alternative to iPhone.

 

[RichP]

Its good to see a real possible iPhone contender out there. Hopefully it will stir Apple a bit with its own products. 3 months ago, I would have thought the Blackberry Storm would have been the iPhone's nemesis, but Palm has come out and surprised us all with this thing.

I wish the iPhone UI and browser were as snappy as the Pre... This thing must be packing some decent horsepower!

 

[hob]

If iPhone can't forward SMS's, get push email from GMail and have a decent IM app that integrates SMS in 14 months time, I'll be getting whatever Palm has out at the time to replace my iPhone 3G.

Apple are clearly supressing things like push IMAP stuff so you have to subscribe to Mobile Me. You know what? I like GMail very much and it's FREE!

 

[hob]

Several key iPhone developers left Apple to join Palm beginning in the summer of 2007. Even after that point, several individuals at Palm, including Ruby himself, but also lower-level individuals, aggressively attempted to recruit top iPhone developers to Palm. Most attempts failed but a few succeeded.

Steve Jobs was furious, but given California employment law, there was little he could do.

Thus, it is obvious that the Pre was influenced by top Apple recruited talent, including of course Mike Bell, Apple's former VP of hardware, with knowledge of Apple roadmaps years in advance, who took that knowledge and left for Palm. Fred Anderson, though not on the engineering side, after being made the scapegoat for the stock scandal, left Apple for Palm's board, also with knowledge of Apple plans.

That's really interesting. What's your source on that?

 

[vinay427]

i kinda like it. Best feature: no AT&T. Copy-and-paste, MMS messaging, and the ability to allow applications to run in the background is huge.

Best iPhone feature: No Sprint....I can't begin to relate the horrible experiences me and my family have had with Sprint. Charging us for things we didn't use, spam text messages advertising their services almost every day, etc.

But I have got to admit that MMS and copy & paste would be great because dumbphones owners usually don't get data plans so e-mail doesn't work out so well. And c&p? Well. . . that's pretty obvious.

 

[hob]

It's a nice phone but two things will keep me using my iPhone:

1. Push email with push contacts and calendar
2. iTunes music and videos

Push email being mobileme? Apple have got you by the balls my friend 🙁

 

[0098386]

I rather like that! Well, I'd still get an iPhone but out of all the iPhone clones I'd opt for this.

 

[Sweetfeld28]

I think its a very good looking phone and the OS doesn't look bad either. I just wish Verizon would get some good phones comparable to this, if they did i would buy it today.

 

[ITGuy]

What the iPhone is missing and the Pre will have...

- gps navigation
- multitasking
- open sdk
- notifications
- wireless charger
- copy & paste
- bt tethering/ad2p
- usb mass storage
- microusb2
- mms
- 3mp cam with led flash
- nice cases/accessories available @ releasedate
- exchangable battery
- keyboard
- adobe flash

Crazy, they need to hurry up releasing that thing, looks like Palm is back!

You also forgot to add Universal Search, something that I miss on the iPhone from my BlackBerry days. The Pre has implemented a Spotlight-esqe search capabilty, and it is very slick. I am over Steve Jobs/Apple telling me I don't need certain features, like being able to perform a holistic search for items on the iPhone (Email, Calendar, Contacts, Phone Call Log, Notes, SMS, iPod Media, Photo metadata etc.). Some of these omitted features can be found on basic phones and smartphones, but Apple isn't rushing to add them. I guess Street View is something Apple can show off in an Ad whereas adding productivity enhancing Universal Search or Copy/Paste won't impress anyone, as these features have been available on other platforms such as BlackBerry and Palm OS for years and years.

I watched the videos of the Pre online, and I have to say that I am very impressed with what I have seen. The navigation and multitasking cards are bang on, and quickly highlight areas for improvement on the iPhone.

I can say that I have now put plans to upgrade my 1st generation iPhone on hold until I can get my hands on a Pre to evaluate, post launch. Hopefully the Pre will motivate Apple to raise their game and provide multitasking, improved UI navigation, a better camera with flash, improved Phone log with call duration, GPS turn-by-turn, Remote Wipe from MobileMe, AD2P, MMS, Spotlight search, Notes and To-do Task item synchronization with Outlook/iPhone/MobileMe/Leopard, Copy/Paste, and other BASIC features that have been missing from day one. Quit being Nanny-like and a control freak with iPhone features, and with the ridiculous and inconsistent developer/App Store approval policies.

Finally some competition to the iPhone OS, and the buzz will only increase.

 

[lftrghtparadigm]

Copy and Paste & MMS are what we call "Joke Features".

They are features which, for some reason, very whiny people have clung too and insisted are "missing" from the iphone. Fact is, they are so incredibly useless that when you think about it for long enough, you realize it must be joke that people can't live without these things. I mean after all there are 20 ways to send a picture to someone with the iPhone, and....copy and paste....seriously? what novel are you typing...and then suddenly realizing you're in notes instead of mail?

I've thought it over and over and you'd have to be a total moron to "need" either of these features on the iPhone. If these are the "features" of this new Palm that set it apart from the iPhone, that make it better than the iPhone, then that is a hilarious joke.

 

[kdarling]

iPhone developers leaving Apple

Several key iPhone developers left Apple to join Palm beginning in the summer of 2007.

The lead product designer for the touchscreen has also left and formed his own company making touchscreen devices based on Android:

Touch Revolution company

Sounds like the iPhone developers needed more freedom. And Apple is infamous for overworking people... relying on the "coolness" factor to keep employees even after Jobs has subjected them to one of his temper tantrums.

 

[swagi]

Again on the MMS thing...

Could you apologist please explain me, what your f'ing problem is with MMS?

I want it with my next phone and I'm in the market. I won't use a phone without MMS, as, you know, basically the world around me all of a sudden doesn't have eMail-compliant phones.

You think MMS is obsolete? O.K., your view.

You think I'm stupid to pay for a MMS, when my eMail is free with the data flat? O.K., again your view.

You don't have to be so bloody rude to people using MMS. You know, sometimes I feel like a complete moron, just because I use MMS. So I'll give you my view, and I'm gonna be rude in the end.

I personally send about 10 MMS per month and receive them. Receiving MMS on the iPhone via Safari Mobile is a PITA as I can check on my wife's iPhone. That's the main reason, my wife doesn't get any nice spontaneous pix from friends. And it's also the main reason, why I am not considering an iPhone to be my next mobile.

You know, it may be an unneccessary and totally stupid luxury for you, to take a pic and send it instantly to your friends on their mobile...

...but I think the same about most parts of the iPhone.

Mobile Safari - You know, when your outside, enjoy outside. You don't log into the internet when lying on a beach, do you?
Mobile Video - You really watch flix outside? You should get some perspective.
Mobile Music - well, my good old 20 GB iPod 4G does that job extremely well.

Oh, I forgot, you got all these fun Apps like 'Ocarina', 'iFart', 'iPint' or these great games like 'Super Monkey Ball'. Maybe it's time to take an advice:

If you want mobile gaming, get a Nintendo DS or a PSP. They were tailored for the job, you know. They blow your precious phone out of the water. Sure, no accelerometer, but don't you really think you look stupid on the bus, when whirling around your phone? Trust me, you look bloody stupid.

So back on MMS: Every, and I really mean it that way, EVERY other phone on the market has MMS. So basically I can take EVERY other phone to have a feature I request.

I want some more features, and maybe you can tell by the list with the handsets I will chose from this year, which features these are:
Nokia N97
Samsung Omnia
SE C905
SE Xperia X1
Samsung Innov8

Palm Pre has to be added to the list now, if it's available in Germany by then and they maybe manage to put in a better camera.