Palm's Pre May Finally Be Legitimate Competition

I remember it very clearly.  It was January 2007, and I was sitting in my office furiously refreshing the page on my work computer reading the liveblogging that was going on.  It was finally here; Steve Jobs was announcing the iPhone.  It was a device thousands upon thousands of loyal Apple customers were dying for.  A phone designed to work with their platform, not hacked to "function" with it.  Out of the box, it was designed to sync our contacts and calendar, give us e-mail that was better than anything else on the market, and a web experience that no one on the market could match.  I'll never forget how my mind boggled that day, and I haven't felt that way about a product announcement since then.  Today, however, I think another company has finally done something that I never thought I would see: developed a competitor to the iPhone that could take a bite out of the iPhone, and surprise of surprises, it's Palm.Let's face it.  For the past few years, Palm has been nothing short of a joke.  Treo after Treo waddled to market exciting pretty much no one.  For the most part they were incremental upgrades to existing models.  Their first new model came two years ago in the form of the Palm Centro, a model decidedly targeted at the low-end "wants a PDA that's cheap" customer.  Palm has languished in mediocrity with their line of PDA's, bungled an announcement of the Foleo only to later revoke it, and left its much hyped Palm OS 6.0 buried in corporate headquarters never to be seen in public view.

Palm also has been losing money hand over fist, making it a buyout target and the subject of constant rumors about its future.  Management has been called incompetent and ineffective and has been changed too many times to count over the past three to four years.  In a word, the company appeared to be falling apart and an icon of what ushered in the era of PDAs looked to be dead in the water.

It was with that in mind that many tech journalists said, before Palm's announcement at CES last week, that the announcement was going to make or break the company.  Luckily for them, it may just have been the shot in the arm they needed.

If you've read anything I've written over the past few months, you'll know how I feel about "iPhone killers."  I'm tired of the moniker being slapped on every new phone that shows some kind of gimmicky new feature set and usually these "killers" end up being roadkill under the wheels of the iPhone.  The Verizon Voyager?  Sold great at the beginning, but by Christmas, a mere two months after its release, no one cared anymore.  The BlackBerry Storm?  How many have you seen in public?  The HTC Touch Diamond Special Super X1 Mobile Monster Mega Edition HD VGA?  Never seen one on the NYC subway, arguably a melting pot of mobile devices.

Yet, with all those flops and over statements, I truly think Palm has a winner on its hands with the Pre.

Oh sure, it doesn't run "real" applications.  And yes, it's completely incompatible with every prior iteration of the Palm OS.  Even with those two major dings, the amount of thought put into the device is evident from the very first time you see the video demonstration.  The UI is meant to be touched, glided, and slid across.  Transitions from app to app are smooth.  Multitasking, something Apple essentially decided to forego in the iPhone, is painless and natural.  The deck of cards metaphor works as you shuffle through running applications.  Gestures are employed naturally and in a separate part of the phone (a Godsend if you're tired of wiping the screen of your phone on your pants).  Start typing and the phone figures out what you're trying to do (a la Quicksilver).  I could go on and on, but you're starting to get the picture.

While many manufacturers have taken their existing phones and slapped a touch screen on them and bragged about having a touch screen device, Palm has rethought the touch screen in much the same way Apple did, and I think the Pre might very well be the first smart phone released post iPhone whose creators can say they've learned the lessons of the iPhone.  UI is primary above all else.  Not the screen.  Not the network the phone is on.  Not the stupid tangential features thrown in.  If the phone isn't usable, people will notice.

Palm has learned the lesson of the iPhone, and it'll be interesting to see how well it demonstrates what it learned when it's released in April.

Vincent Ferrari is an Apple fan, videoblogger, blogger, writer, and all-around geek from the Bronx. He works in the IT Department of a cellular phone company that shall not be named, and lives in a very comfortable apartment with his lovely wife, two lovely cats, three Macs, two iPhones, and God-knows-how-many iPods of varying age.

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