Comments on: Palm Announces the Palm Pre Smartphone

And how much would this be per month vs the iPhone 3G?

Gekko, here's your cue!

It makes me wonder if it's actually Centro sized.

Has anyone seen pics of it next to a Treo or Centro yet?

that's my guess.

Now, if it can truly either support or replace Adarian Money, ThoughtManager, Docs2Go, and Warfare Inc., I'm in!

Pilot Pro, III, IIIe, Nino (yeah...oops!), IIIc, VIIx, m505, NR70V, NZ90, NX60, T3, Zire 72s, NX80V, Treo 90, Treo 650

Let me get right to what everyone wants to hear about from someone who CARES about Palm's activities today. The Pre is SMALL. It's like a bit thinner and narrower version of the original HTC Touch. I touched it. They wouldn't let me hold it but I was able to lay a wee fingertip or two on it. I would've stayed longer fondling and asking questions but Palm kicked us out so they could bring in their VIP visitors. The Pre is a little slick and could use a dab of rubberized paint. It looks as if it appears EXTREMELY comfortable with the HTC G1-esque "bend" on it. The keyboard looks solid but I am sad to report that the spacebar as well as a few other keys are not backlit. Also, some buttons have been remmapped, such as the @ having its own dedicated key. A Palm rep exlained that this was due to @ being a much more frequently used symbol than it was even a few years ago. Also, the keys have wider spacing and not as much of a vertical smile. Build quality in general seems exemplary and the slider makes the action of the old Zire 71 and the T|T series looks like totally shoddy stuff. The power button in the top right corner looks awfully weak and may suffer from the dreaded T|E/T|5/TX power button sag over time...but maybe I'm just being a Palm pessimist again.

Several aspects of the OS and UI were clearly not yet ready for prime time, such as the phone app/dialer and the web browser. As far as its browser goes, I'd rate it somewhere below the iPhone and maybe slightly above the latest BlackBerry browsers. It definitely renders faster than the BB Storm's browser but doesn't display a page such as palminfocenter.com quite as nicely. There's so much more to say about the OS and how...clever it is but i'm far too tired to try to formulate my thoughts on that now. So I think I'll turn on my bitch & moan mode and point out what I think are a couple of essentially show-stopping flaws on the device (in MY opinion as a long-time POS power user). Casual users and/or those upgrading from an iPhone or a Centro shouldn't have any reason to complain. I am absolutely blown away by the device's performance. Nearly no lag at all, and near-instantaneous screen transitions and redaws. I am impressed. This thing is honestly T3/T|C fast, folks. I expecting hideous BB Storm-like lag but even the accelerometer seems up to par. A++ to Palm for finally getting rid of the hideous Garnet-era NVFS lag.

A HUGE, HUGE drawback is the pitiful 1200mAh battery capacity. That is simply unacceptable and a total joke and an utter insult to the power users in the "fat middle of the market" Palm is trying to targete. I made my feelings on that clear to Palm. Another utterly unacceptable move is dropping the microSDHC slot entirely. Palm's getting greedy and trying to be too much like Apple, IMO. I detest seeing anyone going backwards and dropping features. I can live with no IR, I can live with no stylus and I can even make do without the hard app buttons and Palm Desktop. But 1200mAh (my suspicion is that it's actually even less) battery capacity and a pitiful 8gb of fixed internal memory with no microSD slot is a slap in the face, as is Palm's bizarre devotion to Sprint. I can tell you this much: the international blogger/press members in attendance were REALLY pissed/depressed at the lack of info on a GSM version. Palm should have told Sprint to fluff off and launched CDMA & GSM variants simultaneously.

Folks, Palm's engineering staff did the impossible. They've produced a fast, beautiful, intuitive OS with a fastastic synergy between various various types of data and media. But once again, Palm's beancounters managed to snatch what could have easily been far and away THE best handset on the market and reduced it to a "nice try but not quite" effort that falls somewhere in the 2nd-tier devices epitomized by the G1 and the BB Storm.

Look at the Sony Xperia X1. That's got EVERYTHING known to man in it and it's been in the wild for quite some time. There's no excuse for Palm not trying just a little bit harder to make a more compelling device hardware-wise. A fraction more thickness to the device would be forgiven by everyone if it could share the Treo Pro's 1500mAh battery and microSDHC slot. Sigh...

Well, I'm off to bed. I'm exhausted and we have an early morning interview session with Palm. Thanks for all of the feedback and kind words today. You guys make it worth it!

The platform IS fantastic and has tremendous potential on so many levels. Had this thing hit the market 6 months earlier, the industry would be falling over themselves to copy WebOS. They still might, in fact. But Android has no doubt stolen a lot of crucial attention, sales, media attention and developer support. IMO, WebOS is what I had hoped Android would be. And Palm's hardware IS still better than the G1 and the iPhone, but the higher-end WM handsets like the X1 and the BB Storm still have Palm beat as far as hardware. Palm's new hardware, while a solid leap forward in some ways, is a sad step backwards in many others. It's going to need more tweaks and feature improvements in the 2nd generation to really make it shine. But good Asian ODMs are a dime a dozen nowadays. It wouldn't be too hard at all to quickly and cheaply improve on the Pre's hardware.

With the huge stumbling block of an antiquated OS out of the way, the sky appears to be the limit for Palm...IF THEY WANT IT BADLY ENOUGH. Right now, I am VERY, VERY tenatively awarding a grade of "C+" to the Pre hardware and an "A-" to the OS. Off to bed now! More tomorrow!

Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->?

It looks bright and clear and never washed out in every single live picture of it. No flash glare, no reflections. Is it a render?!

There is NO Windows Mobile phone that looks that good right now, and I'm not sure the iPhone looks that good either.

If it looks just as good in sunlight, that's a smashing success for the screen, even if it's not WVGA.

Palm III -> Sony NR610C -> Sony NR70 -> Sony NX80 -> Palm T|X -> HTC Kaiser -> HTC Fuze

After using the iphone for a few months and, I admit, being largely happy with it (the iphone kicks the Treo line's butt up and down the block on hardware and web browsing), there are nonetheless many things about Palm OS that I miss. Palm OS apps were tools, and for the most part iphone apps are toys. The iphone PIM apps in particular are shockingly primitive, especially to anyone used to Palm OS. So I'm thrilled to finally see a shining new Palm product with compelling features, and I can't wait to check out the Pre.

What truly stood out in Palm OS was the PIM's. I was hoping for a great new device with modern hardware and a modern OS, with equally shining new brilliant PIM apps. A device to use every day and help me be more efficient. I haven't read the entire coverage about the new Pre, and maybe the PIM apps are everything I've been hoping for.

BUT and this is a deal-breaking BUT:

The apparent reliance on "the cloud" and the statement from the liveblog that desktop PC sync is "being phased out" is a HUGE, HUGE turnoff to me. I don't want ALL my most private and personal data in "the cloud" for any reason, at any time. Period.

I know there is a huge buzz about "the cloud" in computer geek land but nothing will ever replace the security and individual control over one's own personal data that desktop/flash card sync provides.

If "the cloud" is truly the only way to sync a Pre, I will never use one.

will it be three tiers available?

1. Centro Garnet
2. Treo WinMob
3. Pre WebOS

????????????

this pre and webos is fancy, but i'm far away from being a beta tester. i like my tried and true centro with garnet and palm desktop. i wanted an upgrade, but this Pre WebOS is a total radical change from what i'm used to for the last 10+ years. and i don't like too much change! who moved my cheese?

http://bub.blicio.us/palm-pre-up-close-and-personal/

This is a deep, fundamental break with both the iPhone and previous, repository-based smartphone usage models, and it's important enough that other smartphones are bound to follow.

Ultimately, the exact mechanism for moving changes of state between the device and the online information services to which it connects (cloud, IMAP e-mail, IM, Twitter etc.) will depend on the particular service. Some services ask the device to poll, while others push out updates—it all depends on the transport. But the user will never see any of that, since it all goes on behind the scenes under the heading of "Synergy."

Note that I should have asked about Synergy's impact on battery life, because from a power savings perspective, it's probably better to have a single, shared model for handling state changes (like batch updates) than to have the kind of free-for-all that Crowley seemed to be describing.

Ultimately, webOS acts much like what Daniels described in his interview; that is, it moves away from a repository datasource model to a federated query service model, where the device queries multiple services for state that it then caches locally, before invisibly propagating any changes back out to the cloud.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090111-of-clouds-palms-webos-and-cutting-the-cord.html

Having been a loyal user of many Palm devices from the first PDA though my current Treo, I am completely disappointed that the Pre has no support for my existing Palm apps. Also one carrier. Sprint. Give me a break.

Remind me why exactly I should stay loyal to Palm? If I wanted something that doesn't run my Palm apps and doesn't work in the USA and Europe - I have a huge choice. I'd have moved to a modern phone ages ago. But I waited patiently, I had faith Palm would be back with a perfect Palm OS smartphone and wouldn't let me down. I feel like an idiot now.

When it can run my existing apps and there is a GSM version, maybe I'll look at it.

Given how slow Palm have been, I'm not holding my breath.

Oh and it's shiny. So it shows every smudge and fingerprint and will be slippery. The slide out keyboard is nice, but how do you skin the Pre?

Also, has it an SD slot? I don't see it mentioned.

I was beyond excited about Pre, but having found out what it's missing, I'm looking at alternatives. Thank goodness for StyleTap & Garnet. Perhaps if Palm work with them, so they can support their apps for them, Palm might lose fewer customers.