.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT WATCH
.TITLE Should die-hard Palm users consider a Pre?
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY On January 6th, Palm announced its new operating system, webOS, and the first phone based on it, the Palm Pre. Will the Pre get Palm back into the game? Read on to find out.
.FEATURE
On January 6th, Palm announced its new operating system, webOS, and the first phone based on it, the Palm Pre. Will the Pre get Palm back into the game? Read on to find out.
Figure A shows the Palm Pre. Designed with a "pebble in the stream" shape, the phone has a slide-out keyboard, which actually extends in a curve to make the unit fit more comfortably in your hand. If you’re making calls or listening to music, the keyboard can be left closed. For emails and text messages, having a physical keyboard makes typing easy.
.FIGPAIR A Here’s a preliminary photo of the Palm Pre. (Photo credit: Palm)
The Pre weighs about 4.75 ounces, and it’s approximately 2.5 inches wide, 4 inches long, and less than 1 inch thick. It is a 3G phone, and has built-in GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Like the iPhone, the Pre has an accelerometer motion sensor, so the screen will change automatically from portrait to landscape mode when you turn the phone.
Other than the slide-out keyboard, the Pre doesn’t immediately appear that different from my Palm Treo. But another look at the picture above shows the "deck of cards" metaphor that Palm has used in developing the Pre and its underlying operating system.
.TEASER Is this a phone for you? Tap here for all the details.
.H1 Interface
Multiple applications can be running at the same time (Palm says most users will have fifteen to twenty open at once–seriously?), and the user can flip between them using a gesture-based navigation system. Push your Web browser off to one side when you want to make a phone call, then pull the browser back to the forefront without losing the page you were reading before the call. The Pre’s ability truly have multiple applications open at once will be a huge advantage over the iPhone.
Rather than sounding alarms and interrupting what you’re doing, the Pre has a Dashboard area at the bottom of the screen where such information will be displayed. It will show you the first line of an incoming text message or instant message, or give you the details of a calendar event and let you dismiss or snooze the alarm. You can continue what you were doing without being forced to respond to the alert at once.
.H1 Synergy
The Pre is different beyond the interface, of course. With webOS, Palm has introduced a concept called Palm Synergy, which will allow the Pre to access the Internet to keep its information up to date. For example, if you have the same contact in your Facebook and email accounts, the Pre will link up the information and show it as a single listing. Updating the Pre’s information will automatically update the various accounts as well.
During the announcement, the presenter began a search for "Blue Man Group". The Pre, recognizing that it didn’t have any such information in the device, automatically initiated an Internet search. It’s this behavior that earned the phone the name "Pre": it’s always a step ahead of you.
Continuing with the "make your life easier" theme, the Pre allows you to create multiple calendars to show various facets of your life. If other people give you access to their online calendars, you can have those included as well. You can then look at these calendars individually ("When does my husband not have hockey games?") or in a combined format ("What day could the whole family go out for dinner?").
.H1 Coverage
It’s probably obvious that the Pre will rely heavily on Internet access; while Palm hasn’t clearly indicated this, most reviewers assume that the device will simply revert to an "airplane mode" when not in a coverage area, using only its own information and not attempting to access the Internet.
Speaking of coverage, the Pre will first be available only through Sprint, and only in the U.S. Palm has said that other carriers will get the Pre, but not sooner than ninety days after its mid-2009 release and possibly as much as six months later. No information about foreign availability has been released at this time.
The other interesting piece of information missing is the price point, both for the handheld and for the service plans. I would guess that both will be somewhat in line with the iPhone ($199 for the iPhone on a two-year contract and approximately $150 a month for an unlimited data access/phone minutes/text messaging plan) since Palm is clearly positioning the Pre as a competitor to the iPhone and to the various Blackberry handhelds as well.
.H1 Concerns
While overall I am impressed with the Pre, I do find several design decisions surprising. The Pre has only 8 GB of memory, and does not appear to accept additional memory cards. (Palm’s specifications say it can use "USB mass storage", which gives me the image of a flash drive sticking out of the Pre.) While 8 GB is decent built-in memory for a handheld (my Treo has 70 MB), once you start loading it up with music, pictures, and videos it will fill quickly.
You won’t be recording your own videos, though. While the Pre does have a 3 megapixel camera with LED flash, it has no voice recorder and apparently cannot record videos. For an always-connected device in the YouTube era, this seems like an odd choice.
One last thing the Pre will NOT do: run old Palm applications. The current Palm operating system has been desperately in need of revamp for years, and Palm has, wisely in my opinion, decided to leave it and its existing applications behind and move forward with the new webOS.
Since the new operating system is based on standard Internet languages and technologies, Palm says that rewriting applications will be easy. They also plan to provide tools for developers to help their users get their information out of their old applications, and there will also be some method to transfer data from the old built-in Palm applications.
[There also doesn’t appear to be a Palm Desktop anymore. While the Palm Desktop has certainly gotten long-in-the-tooth, excellent synchronization with PCs has long been one of the characteristics that defined a Palm device. Given how annoying (personal opinion) it is to use an iPhone without any real desktop synchronization (and iTunes doesn’t count–you can’t synchronize notes, for example), we would have hoped that the Pre kept up this fine Palm tradition. Oh, well. – Ed.]
.H1 Choices
Since the Pre will not run old Palm applications, in some ways it’s not "a Palm" any more. I’ve been using Palm handhelds since 1997, and some of the software currently installed on my Treo was on my first handheld. None of that will carry over, directly, to the Pre. So the question isn’t so much "should I upgrade to the Pre?" as "is this new phone something I want to use?"
I think a lot of people will answer that last question with a resounding yes. The pricing will make a difference, of course, but the Pre promises to be an exciting way to stay connected to the Internet and keep your life in order.
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.H1 Product availability and resources
Visit http://www.Palm.com.
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.BIO
