talkingDigital

Palm as a company may be a punchline, but their devices are a force to be reckoned with.

By next Saturday it will be written that the cell phone/smartphone industry hasn’t seen release buzz like this since the iPhone. Before the iPhone it was the Treo. The Blackberry was great, but never caused any significant buzz over any particular model. Android caused a buzz until people saw it in the G1.

The Palm Pre release is significant. Of course there will be shortages. There will be problems with Gen 1 models. There may be patches or even a recall as there often is with devices manufactured quickly and rushed to market to meet demand.

Before the Pre is even released, it is already an historic device. Palm has a legacy of changing the handheld market. Whether it was with the original PalmPilot or the spin-off Handspring, or the Treo or the Centro, Palm knows how to make a reliable product that does everything it is supposed to – but little more.

There have been a few lemons along them way, but with each model, they have addressed the complaints and shortcomings of the last. The original Treo 300 did not offer expansion, the Treo 600 did but did not offer a user replaceable battery, the Treo 650 did. With each new model only a few things continued to remain unaddressed, WiFi, GPS, and background processes – at least in the Palm OS versions. To bring these features to the device, Palm had to allow Windows Mobile on the device.

Palm has dropped the ball so many times the company has become an industry joke – yet they remain. While the company has become a laughing stock to the business world for its horrible decisions to split, merge, sell, buy back and change its name a few times, the Palm products have remained serious competitors.

If Palm has done anything along the way it’s been to introduce new concepts, products and platforms that give everyone else and idea on how to take those ideas and improve upon them.

Take a look at your iPhone home screen – can you see anything but an original Palm home screen? The iPhone’s ability to add applications galore… yep, Palm started that too. How about the concept of a converged device? You will have to look to someone different for that… Handspring’s VisorPhone. Of course the Handspring Visor ran on the Palm OS and was developed by the Palm inventor.

There are two ways to approach a converged device. You can fill it full of features and impress everyone at the Swiss Army Knife qualities. Or you can look at what people need a converged device to do and create a device that meets those needs.

The iPhone is the Swiss Army Knife of converged devices. It does so many wonderful things – but it does them in such limited ways. Email is great, but what if you want to email a URL? It only took Apple 2 years to introduce copy and paste into the iPhone – Apple invented copy and paste. Apple provided GPS as long as you don’t want a GPS that shows you turn-by-turn directions.

Apple provided the ability for developers to build any application they saw need and market for, as long as that application didn’t play SouthPark cartoons, run background processes, add copy and paste functions and didn’t contain any references to Kama Sutra.

Palm took a little different approach with the Pre. In the end, the Pre will not be remembered for everything it did, but for the way it went about doing what it did.

To realize the advantages of the Pre over Blackberry, iPhone, G1 and others, you have to look past the phone and analyze how such a device could be helpful.

How many email addresses do you have? How many social networks are you a part of? Do you ever want to check your messages, friend’s status, tweets, etc. from your phone? You can with many converged devices. If you want to check Facebook, you either go to m.facebook.com or you use a Facebook application. If you want to use twitter, you do something similar.

Sites like Friendfeed are finding ways to merge all of the ways we communicate into one area. However, these sites only address the desktop method of communications. Cell phones, IM, tweets, voice mail, text messaging, SMS, email, etc. This concept is where the success of the Pre begins.

Just as the Treo converged communication gadgets, the Pre aims to converge communication platforms. Rather than jump from one app to another or one site to another to communicate over various platforms, the Pre aims to bring all contacts together.

Currently there is some debate as to whether it is a good idea to merge your email, Twitter and Facebook contacts into one area – but why not? The people who conceive a massive number of contacts as overwheming and bulky are probably iPhone users. Palm OS users haven’t ever looked up a contact by scrolling through a list.

The Pre’s secret weapon is its universal search abilities made possible by two things that the iPhone does not have – background processes and a tactile keyboard.

Navigating the Pre is simple, there are few menus to scroll through. In the home screen, start typing what you are looking for. That’s it. It can be a name, an application, and appointment, an IM handle…

All you need to know is what you are looking for.

A nice platform, background processes, user replaceable battery, tactile keyboard and universal search aren’t enough to break the market barriers – that takes the one thing that only Android offers – an open platform.

While it is proprietary and the core will be locked down, the Pre will be no iPhone when it comes to the OS. WebOS has been described by Palm as an open platform developed on Linux. This means that the true threat to the Pre will not be the iPhone – it will more likely be Android.

Already the responces from Palm’s competitors have been along the lines of, “Our devices will be able to do that stuff soon too.” No one is debating the concept of the Palm Pre, the current naysayers are addressing issues like the cramped keyboard or the feminine design.

Whether the Pre itself is a wild success bringing Palm back from the brink of extinction, or whether it is Palm’s final breath before dying – the Pre will set new trends in how smartphones are used marking the next step in the converged device evolution.

Just as the Treo converged devices, the Pre will likely show the world how much demand there is for converging all forms of modern communication.