CES 2009: The Second Coming of Palm--Palm Pre Phone Announced
At last, after a long wait, the Palm faithful were rewarded when Palm announced their newest smartphone at CES, the Palm Pre, and showed off their WebOS mobile development platform.
Palm defined the PDA market in the 90's, but a long stretch of lack of innovation and the rise of smartphones put them on the backburner at the turn of the century. After the announcement of the Palm Foleo in 2007 was met with round indifference, many thought that Palm was finally out of the race.
But the Pre is a phone worth getting excited about. It may or may not be an iPhone-killer, but it's definitely killer. The basics are covered, with hardware features on par with many current smartphones: a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a multitouch LCD screen, support for EvDO, WiFi, and Bluetooth, a camera, and 8GB of onboard storage. But the Pre differentiates itself from near competitors like the iPhone and Android-based phones in a couple of key ways.
The Pre's operating system, WebOS, runs on a closed-source Linux core but implements many web standards such as HTML, CSS, and Java. The browser is based on WebKit and supports streaming audio and video in RTSP, H.263 and H.264 formats. (There's no Flash support at the moment, but Palm and Adobe are already working on a plugin and it's reasonable to expect it will support Flash at launch.) WebOS supports multitouch gestures, and comes with some sweet inbuilt software features. The OS operates on a "deck of cards" metaphor, with applications existing in windows that can be sorted and stacked dynamically. Contact information is aggregated using a method deemed "Synergy sync system", meaning that your contact list will scrape social networking sites, online directories, and more to collect information. Pull up someone in your contact list and you'll see not just their phone number and email, but links to their Flickr and Facebook accounts, their Twitter feeds, and more. There's also an app launcher (think Launchy on your desktop PC) that allows you to type a few letters and it will immediately bring up matching information from your apps, contacts, and more. If it finds nothing, the launcher defaults to showing a choice of several search engines to look up your word or phrase.
It seems like a small thing on the surface of it, but the most exciting thing for me was the fact that the Pre seems to handle multitasking very well--something the iPhone absolutely cannot do. Hardware limitations mean that any time you switch apps on the iPhone, it has to freeze the current app in a "save state" to close out and launch a new app. The user experience does a great job of making this process fluid and not particularly annoying, but it would be nice to, say, load a web page in the background while I look up a phone number in my contacts. With WebOS the application menu can be called up as an overlay on the currently running application, and if you zoom out to your "deck of cards", the programs continue to run. During the live demonstration at the CES press announcement the OS seemed to perform snappily with multiple applications running, which brought more than one round of applause.
There will be an app store, with an SDK called Mojo made available to develop retail software for WebOS. Palm will vet all built applications--not completely open like Android, yet with a lighter hand than the Apple teams have used in their own certification processes.
The Palm Pre will be available sometime during the first half of this year--maybe as early as March--and pricing is still up in the air but the word on the street is it'll go for between $199-$249 with a two-year Sprint contract.
If you want to see the Pre in action, Palm has made their press announcement available as an online video. You can watch the entire announcement here, or see below for a condensed 10-minute version culled from YouTube that hits all the key points. (Video credit goes to Holger Eilhard)
--Aric A.
Holger Eilhard on January 11, 2009 at 04:51 PM
Thanks for mentioning my video. Appreciate it!
Aric A. on January 11, 2009 at 10:07 PM
@Holger: Thanks for creating the video. I've edited in your real name for the credit.
on February 07, 2009 at 04:13 PM
has the month been released for when it is coming out?
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