Palm tried to take one giant step toward regaining its position in the mobile phone industry with the introduction of the Palm Pre at CES this week.
Palm's new Pre, running its
WebOS mobile operating system.
(Credit: Corrine Schulze/CNET)
The Palm Pre is a touchscreen phone with a slide-out keyboard than runs WebOS, Palm's long-awaited new operating system, formerly code-named Nova. Sprint will be the exclusive US launch carrier for the Pre, which comes with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a 3.1-inch display, GPS, and 8GB of storage, among other things. Palm did not announce a price for the Pre, but said it should be available in the US some time in the first half of 2009.
Like the Apple's iPhone, Palm's Pre has a single button when the slide-out keyboard is shut. Everything on the screen can be controlled by gestures similar to the ones used on the iPhone, and the homescreen has four icons at the bottom for the most frequently used tasks, such as the phone, e-mail, and calendar.
Unlike the iPhone, it has the aforementioned hardware keyboard, and what appears to be a background notification system for applications. Apple has promised to roll out some sort of background notification system that lets applications send notifications to the user when they are running a different application, but they are well past their deadline of September 2008 for doing so.
We're awaiting many more details on the Pre, such as what it will cost, how application distribution will work, battery life, and multimedia support.
"Pre's introduction, website, technology packaging, industrial design, UI, product naming and positioning...down to the flow of its CES presentation were pointedly, but perhaps not surprisingly, Apple-like. Of all the current iPhone competitors, Pre clearly captures the "soul" of the iPhone as much as any product not-from-Cupertino can. Whatever Pre "borrows" from the iPhone, it does so not with the brazen indifference of recent iPhone-killers, but with care and purpose."
However:
"Palm is clearly late to iPhone's party. By the time the first Pre is sold, the iPhone will likely have 30 million users in 70+ countries, 15,000 apps, a huge developer and peripherals ecosystem, perhaps a third of the market share and 40% of smartphone revenues. And that's before the next generation iPhone device and OS are introduced."
I explored Pre's chances in:
"Strategic shortcomings of Pre in the post-iPhone era"
http://counternotions.com/2009/01/12/pre/