Thoughts on the Palm Pre

January 26th, 2009

It seems odd to say this since the device has not even been launched, but the Palm Pre is old news. Just after its unveiling at CES, the super-phone received an explosion of coverage. In my estimation, there is good reason for it.

My iPhone 3G has been by my side since I purchased it this past July. As far as I can tell, it is as close as you can get to perfection in a phone. In spite of how this statement may sound, I am far from a fanboy and my devotion to the iPhone is not the kind of religious devotion that allows me to forgive all its faults. There are problems with the iPhone. Apps can’t run in the background. I can’t copy and paste, I can’t do Flash. There is no real keyboard. These are issues that I would love for Apple to solve, but I’m not at all above switching to another device that can fix them so long as that device also does all the things that my iPhone does so well. In the wake of the original iPhone and the 3G, tons of devices hit the market playing catch-up. These devices seemed to market themselves by touting their similarities to the so-called Jesus-phone. Some of them bested the iPhone in one way or another, but they often came up short most everywhere else. The Pre is the first device that seems to share most of the strengths of the iPhone and refine them by adding some of the little things iPhone users have been clamoring for.

First, of the complaints I levelled at the iPhone above, the Pre solves all but one: Flash. Sure, it is disappointing considering all the new features they have included, but the new features will still be compelling to iPhone malcontents. The Pre can multitask and programs can send out system notifications as they run in the background. The lack of any means for an app that is not running to notify the user of new events has all but killed the functionality of twitter and instant messaging apps on the iPhone. It has copy and paste. This is surely one of the loudest complaints of the iPhone user base. It has a hard keyboard. I personally don’t have a huge problem with the iPhone’s soft keyboard; I think it is an excellent implementation, but, given a choice, I would probably take anything more than a couple of sentences to a hard keyboard rather than fumbling it out on-screen.

It seems like a no-brainer. Ditch the iPhone for the Pre and you will get much of what you have been begging for from Apple for months. Unfortunately, every Achilles has his heel. In designing the Pre and its WebOS, Palm has committed two sins so terrible, they more than negate all this goodwill they have built up with Apple’s fanbase by granting many of their collective wishes. First, the Pre is (initially, at least) a Sprint-exclusive phone. Sprint has customer service that makes holy men swear vengeance. I have suffered it first-hand, and I will never go back regardless of the fact that they are generally cheaper than some of the other providers. The second sin will have gamers everywhere crossing the Pre off their wish list: no native apps. That’s right. Palm has taken a few small steps forward but one large step back. WebOS apps are—as you might expect—web pages consisting of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’re not going to milk any smooth 3D graphics out of your Pre in the foreseeable future.

Even though this sounds like the Pre has come so close to besting the iPhone but just didn’t get there, not all is lost. Both of these issues are relatively minor and could certainly be worked out in time. Once the Sprint exclusivity deal is up, the Pre may be available under any carrier you like. Palm would be better served by a broader potential customer base especially only having sidestepped oblivion with the announcement of the Pre at CES. Palm may also choose to add support for native apps as a software update just as Apple did just six months ago. If these two issues can be resolved, the Pre appears to be the only phone on the horizon that will be capable of competing toe-to-toe with the iPhone on nearly every front. Unfortunately, you’re not looking at an iPhone killer out of the gate unless you can handle a couple of major shortcomings.

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Tags: iPhone, mobile gaming, Palm Pre, WebOS

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