For the first time, there is a phone on my carrier that genuinely interests me: The Palm Pre, a brand new smartphone that has, at least at first glance, a winning combination of features.
It’s a touchscreen phone, and it offers all the fun gesture support of the iPhone. While some press members noted that the touchscreen functionality wasn’t quite as responsive, that doesn’t really matter because…
It has a full slide-out keyboard.
Perhaps most significantly, it has a brand new operating system, “WebOS.” Hands-on impressions have been uniformly positive, and there a few aspects that make me a little more than curious to see the final pricing when the Pre comes to market:
- Its programs are based on a combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript—the same technologies that make up most of the web (Flash being the major exception). Remember the widgets that made OS X cool a few years back and then popped up everywhere? Same idea. It means that developing applications will be fast and straightforward. It also means that the internet will look and feel like the internet, something that cannot be said for browsing just about anything on Windows Mobile.
- Like Android, Google’s new open-source venture, webOS can multitask (unlike the iPhone)–meaning you can open more than one program at a time. The task-switching mechanism in webOS is called the “Card System,” and it’s apparently quick and awesome.
- It’s going to have a more open and tolerant app store. Unlike Apple, which has iron-fisted control over what you can and cannot run on the iPhone, Palm plans to be permissive: anything that can run on webOS eventually will, without the need to “jailbreak” the handset or anything else dramatic. They won’t block Flash just because it will cannibalize their own software sales. This is also a perk of the Android Market.
- Palm plans to unveil a way to convert old PalmOS programs to webOS. How? I don’t know, maybe an emulator (which could be pretty slow). But, if the method works well, the Pre will instantly have a back catalog of useful software. One of the big perks of Palm products has always been the software and development community—incidentally, two of the things recent Palm phones have lacked. If you see a correlation between those two attributes, the iPhone’s success, and Palm’s downward spiral, so do I.
WebOS just looks slick and the UI looks effortless—which is exactly how a phone should be. Two notable shortcomings: there’s no video capture (which could potentially come as a software update), and Adobe has yet to definitively confirm that it will be Flash capable. Flash has already been demoed on Android, and if it comes out on both competitors, it’d be a distinction that would really speak against Apple’s for-us-by-us attitude about critical software.
Now, if an Android phone finds its way to Sprint around the same time, it might be a harder choice. Of course, if my contract runs out first, then I may just switch to get the G1 on Verizon anyway—it has a lot of things going right, and the software perks are only going to get better. Still, I always had a fondness for the PalmPilot I had sometime around my Bar Mitzvah…if Palm can wrangle up some of the old cadre of PalmOS devotees and get them excited about devleoping software for webOS, we could see an interesting battle in the smartphone market this year. I think there’s a good shot: I haven’t coded outside of CS50, and even I want to develop for this thing.