Palm Pre
Palm has been known for developing some of the most cutting edge handheld products in history. Like many others I had thought their best days were behind them. What little did I know, during CES 2009 Palm announced their newest phone the Palm Pre and the next generation OS called WebOS respectively.
It’s almost impossible to not compare this phone and OS to Apple’s iPhone as many aspects of what has made the iPhone a groundbreaking product are also included in Palm’s new Pre phone and the WebOS. In my opinion this is the first true competitor to the iPhone. I believe competition is a good thing both Palm and Apple need to be pushed so they develop better solutions for us the consumers.
As was announced earlier this week the Palm Pre will be released on June 6, 2009 running exclusively on the Sprint wireless network here in the US. After rebates and signing a 2 year service contract the phone is $199.
So why am I so excited about this device, well it will offer several key integrations I find very appealing. Palm seems to be the only company who is taking an intelligent proactive approach to working with cloud based services. One of the key technologies in WebOS is Synergy, which allows users to connect to web based services like online address books and calendars. One of the launch partners with Palm and Sprint for this device is Facebook. The Facebook Synergy integration allows for friends contact information like, profile photo, name, address, phone numbers, email address(es) all to be integrated and accessed via the built-in address book and calendar applications while connected to the wireless network.
To understand why is this so important you first have to understand how I use Facebook, then you’ll see the value this integration brings. My wife and I use Facebook to communicate with old friends, and we regularly attend social events with some of them. At times you need to reach out to some of these people while trying to find one another at these events so having contact information for people without have to go through the steps of pulling up someone’s profile, viewing this information and adding it to our phone prior to attending the event is where the true power of such integrations shines through. This feature does require you to be connected to the Sprint network in order for this information about them to show up in your address list.
So let’s examine another example of the usefully of such an integration and why is feature is going to be a key aspect to the Palm WebOS success. For years now I have written about the lack of solutions when handling common family calendars. Say you have kids as we do, how do you create events with all the information like locations and time only once and share this easily? If I’ve already added this information to my database why should my wife or other family members need to create these same events again? Think about this for a second, a child’s baseball or basketball season may have 15 to 20 games and the dates and time of these events change from time to time. Using a Google’s calendar we can create this information once and share it with only the people we want to open it up too. In my case what has made the problem of sharing calendar events more complicated is the fact my wife uses Outlook and I use Apple’s iCal which don’t always play nice together. So using Google and Synergy again I can create these events and share with the people who need this information to be up to date all the time.
From the coverage so far the Synergy feature is what sets the Palm Pre apart from the rest of the pack including Apple’s iPhone. Whether you younger or not so young like me this one feature is the reason this phone should be seriously considered as your next device.
More more is available at http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/index.html
