Review: Palm Pre
Review Palm’s Pre
I’m not going to bore you with all the technical specs of Palm new phone the Pre. Instead I’m going to offer my opinion of Palm’s new flagship phone and new their new OS WebOS. Palm has needed a new phone that could bring them back to their glory days of making the best mobile products in the world.
So has Palm hit a home run is the first question I am regularly asked? So let’s get to it, of the smartphone’s on the market today the Palm Pre is definitely one of the 2 best and this is an achievement considering this is a first generation phone design and a new OS to boot.
So why would I make such a bold statement about a phone I’ve owned less than a week. Well, look at the hardware design it’s the most elegant phone design on the market today hands down. While I admit I don’t have large hands for a man but it fit nicely in my hand. The smaller size will allow it to carried in your pocket or in the case of a woman purse, easier than it’s biggest competitor the iPhone.
The only area’s I would say could have used some additional thought is the syncing/charging port on the side. Like many other consumer electronics companies Palm choose to include a plastic cover, that I full expect to break off within the first month. These are always a bad idea in my opinion. Another reason I believe this could have been thought through more thoroughly is that this phone is designed to also be a music and video player. If they had moved the syncing/charging port to the bottom allowing it to be docked would have been a better solution in my opinion. The reason why is again thinking this phone can also serve as a music/video platform. The lack of a bottom port reduces the ability for third party developers to develop external speaker systems. This is key for Palm’s head to head battle with Apple and the iPhone, although Palm’s Pre designers may have a bit different plan in mind. Their thought might be to go with strictly a wireless solution maybe using the phone’s built-in Bluetooth radio.
Continuing on with the hardware Palm has introduced an inductive charging accessory called the Touchstone. This is brilliant design and idea to bring to the new initiative new phone, this helps to set this phone apart of the others on the market. Going back to my point on the charging/syncing port this accessory can eliminate this negative point from a charging standpoint.
As I mentioned before Palm released it’s WebOS new operating systems on this device. This much anticipated successor to the Palm OS is from a user interface standpoint one of the 2 best on the market today. One of the biggest features and really the one that sets this OS apart of the competition is called Synergy. The OS has the ability to sync cloud based databases of information into your device and even better the OS will display the information merged together as if it is one contact on your phone. The best example of this is my wife. I have her as a contact syncing from my address book. She has limited information on Facebook. Once the device syncs up with both data sources the OS along with some magic on the Palm service side merges the 2 records for my wife together. So all of her information shows up as one contact on my phone. This again was a brilliant decision on Palm’s standpoint to be in front of the all the other mobile OS companies by embracing cloud computing.
Another aspect of the OS that makes it standout from the others on the market is its touch interface. Again in my opinion this is the way all phone UI should be done. Moving around the interface via finger swipes is just the easiest way to navigate such a device. Palm has kept an important aspect of the old Palm OS by including the gesture area.
The new WebOS means a new development environment for develops to write new and initiative apps for. As of today there are 30 third party applications released with more and more being released daily, all this without a released version of the software development kit or SDK. Once Palm releases the SDK it should see a dramatic increase in the number of third party apps available. If Palm can get 25% of the old Palm OS developers to start development of applications for the new WebOS we should see lots of applications in a very short period of time. Palm is touting that WebOS will be the easiest mobile platform to develop for thus allowing move people and or companies to develop for it. By using standards like HTML, CSS and JavaScript Palm expects the developer’s learning curve to be dramatically reduced.
I have to take exception to Palm’s decision on the next part. In the follow I have outlined some area’s Palm need to address. Palm has chosen a path with desktop syncing I do not agree with, as it takes the control over the customer experience out of their hands and puts it in the hands of third party developers. In my case I have a MAC, so today MarkSpace released a beta version of it’s Palm Pre syncing software for the OS X. Allowing users to sync using either the USB cable or a WIFI sync. I love the ability to sync wirelessly including syncing media from iTunes. But you need to understand that Palm believes that cloud based syncing is were things are headed. I can’t say I disagree however in the case of music you still need to sync information to your desktop. When you look at the fact this phone is a multimedia powerhouse the lack of desktop syncing and management software for music and video is another concern of mine. However, to be fair really Amazon needs to step up here and deliver this software, as it should serve both the Palm Pre and Android devices since both device platforms use the Amazon MP3 store. I mention this only as it will difficult to unseat Apple’s iPhone without a complete end-to-end solution.
The bottom line is this is a great phone and truly could be looked at as a version 1.5 not 1.0 considering where Palm came from and where they are today. The coming 6 months will be telling for Palm and it’s Palm Pre. But make no mistake this device is a contender and others will be trying to play catch up and this includes Apple.
June 13th, 2009, posted by coreymcl



