talkingDigital

iPhone can do anything... The Palm Pre has yet to show it's stuff.

Boy Genius Report and almost every other tech blog site are helping Apple with their big announcement that there have been over 1.5 billion iPhone apps downloaded.

Many of those are free, but a good portion of those apps are over $1. Is Palm noticing?

The Palm Pre has 30 apps available in their App Catalog. While several of those apps are labeled as trial versions, only the Classic app is actually limited to a 7 day trial.

PreCentral has reported that there are now more homebrew apps available to install through a hack than there are actual Palm-sponsored apps. Palm bet the farm on the Pre. What is keeping them from making some of that money back through their app store?

I will glady pay a few bucks for some good apps and games and I know that each of the other 300,000+ other Pre owners would do the same. maybe Palm is thinking that $300,000 won’t even scratch the surface.

I love the Pre, but it appears that my fears that Palm may pull another Palm move again may be coming true. They have a legacy of getting the best 90 percent right, but dropping the ball when it comes to giving their customers exactly what they want.

It is almost like they put so much effort into the research and development that they don’t have enough energy left for the follow-through.

App Store tops 1.5 billion downloads in first year : Boy Genius Report.

Today, I put the Palm Pre through its heaviest use yet. I downloaded more apps, surfed the web, added a few contacts, sent some texts, did some twitter, took some pictures, and played with the interface. I had several clients with computers that needed Norton Antivirus removed, so there was a lot of sitting and waiting.

Palm has done a wonderful job at offering some the the best aspects of the iPhone. A wonderful GPS, easy to install apps, and exciting user experience. It is simply fun to use and play with.

That said, there are a variety of practical aspects that I miss. I have been a heavy Palm user for nearly 10 years. I shortcuts and menu options to get around more than I use the actually icons and stylus. I am happy to say that the Pre keeps a lot of these aspects intact. There are shortcuts, for example, if you want to go to the web app, you just type “web” and the web app icon shows up on the screen. Press the return key and you are taken to the web app. That is very nice. It enables you to use the device with one hand and you don’t have to hunt through menu screens to find what you want.

That said, there are several traditional Palm features I would have liked to see.

Themed launcher screens –

The Palm Pre is modeled after the iPhone launcher, you can arrange the order of the icons, but you may have to gesture through several screens before you find the icon that you want. Searching for the app is easy, as long as you remember what it’s called.

It would have been nice, if Palm would have kept the old interface concept here. Rather than having page after page of apps in that must be dragged to a screen or location on the screen, it would have been nice, if Palm created screens with names such as games, entertainment, utilities, etc. In my opinion, Palm has taken a step backward with its launcher app. It works, but it is too much like the iPhone and ignores one of the slicker features of the Palm OS.

Keyboard shortcuts –

The traditional Palm OS supported them all, copy (C), paste (V), cut (X), undo (Z), all (A). Now WebOS only offers cut, copy and paste. The selection feature is so horrible. Selecting text on the Palm was easier than selecting text with a mouse on the computer, this is a giant step backwards for Palm as the OS goes.

Not enough customization –

The old Palm OS allowed you to customize almost everything. Fonts, colors, themes, keyboard shortcuts, default programs, etc. And that was just the OS. Nearly every program offered many customization options as well. The more time I spend with the Pre, the more I realize how amazing the original Palm OS was. It may have been simple and plain, but it really offered some amazing customization options. The pre much of that. There are certain theme elements and features that can be changed, such as the wallpaper, but Palm has gone to great lengths to make sure you don’t mess up the Pre look and feel. Palm is at least as protective of the Pre aesthetic as Apple is about the iPhone’s.

Get anywhere in 3 taps or less – Palm OS was simple. I could get nearly anywhere with less that three taps of the stylus. the Pre is a little more complex than that. While it isnot difficult to use by any stretch of the imagination, I do miss the uniform nature of the Palm OS. Compare the simplicity of Windows 3.1 (if you remember it) with the complexity of Windows 7. One is very pretty and powerful on features, but the other does what it needs to do quickly and efficiently.

In many ways, Windows 98 was my favorite version of Windows. The most recent version of the Palm OS (non-webOS) had this feel to it. It may hot have supported multimedia, pretty web pages, multi-touch or accelerometer and GPS, but it did a wonderful job at getting work done as a PDA/phone.

I have mentioned in almost all of the previous reviews that my complaints are almost all about the software. Not that WebOS isn’t amazing – it is. I am in love with the Pre, but I also am keenly aware of its faults as I have been a heavy smartphone user since 2001 I know what I expect in a smartphone. I hope that Palm will release at least a couple major OS updates over the next year that will add some of these features.

In the end, I still believe that the Pre leaps and bounds better than iPhone was at its launch. Its advertised features are also more ready for primetime than any version of the iPhone has been at its launch. Remember MobileMe? Remember that iPhone 1.0 didn’t even support third party apps? Remember how bad the GPS was? Considering that Apple had very little negative press between the original iPod launch and the release of the iPhone, some may consider the iPhone to not only be one of Apples greatest successes, but also one of its biggest black marks.

The Pre is not an iPhone killer, I am glad it’s not because I don’t want an iPhone. I want a Palm that will work in the modern age of cloud computing, multimedia, social networking, GPS, digital photography and Google. I am hoping that the Pre will be the Blackberry killer or the Windows Mobile killer. Keep the iPhone out there and doing all the things it does best. Competition is healthy.

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.