I'm an avid Palm fan since Palm IIIc, my very first Palm PDA. And now, Palm is coming back with a bang with their new Palm Pre smartphone. Congrats to the Palm Pre team for a very impressive launching last January 8, and we're glad to see that PALM IS BACK!
John Rubinstein, Executive Chairman takes to the stage and shares with how he ended up at Palm, filled with humorous snippets on his life. on touches next on the mobile market, its past, present and future. He says it needs more than just a great phone in addition to great applications, so he leads us on in building up the anticipation on what is possibly the Palm Nova.
With the right phone and right platform, combining power and flexibility to handle various types of data and moving between the data with a flick of a finger. Ed Colligan, President and CEO of Palm now takes the stage.
Ed goes on about how their design team thinks, placing fingers over buttons. It is a nice trip down memory lane on how they competed with pen and paper instead of the Apple Newton when they first rolled out the Palm Pilot. One of the main questions asked would be, "How do we simplify the lives of people?" and "How can we make the technology invisible?"
Palm's DNA is mobile - pure and simple. There will be cool stuff coming up today, but beforehand we have a little bit of history lesson in terms of design perspective. Ed takes us a trip down memory lane on how they helped people manage their lives more effectively by synchronizing their data with the Palm Pilot.
Unfortunately, the advent of other mobile devices like cell phones, MP3 players and Palm Pilots led to a whole bunch of devices, which ultimately resulted in a convergence device in the form of a smartphone - the Treo. The Treo was a watershed model at that point in time, and unfortunately, we do have a similar problem in a different form - all our stuff are on the Internet as we blog, Twitter and poke ;)
With different websites holding different information across all places. Smartphones of today browse information from place to place, but it is still not converged. Information is everywhere, and Palm aims to bring all those information in a seamless manner, integrated automatically into your pocket.
Palm will start with a brand new platform from the ground up that will redefine the center of our access point to the Internet. The default thinking of this platform is to connect to the cloud of every application designed for this platform. It is the new palm webOS!
The Palm webOS was built on industry standard Web tools, so if you know HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you can develop an application for this platform - it is that simple. As we've mentioned before, value is in the software so it will be interesting to see how it goes up against the Android marketplace and the Apple App store.
The Palm pre aims to help you stay ahead of the game, and it looks like an iPod touch in some manner, complete with a digital camera behind. The design is nature-inspired, but it looks a wee bit thicker compared to the iPod touch. You get EV-DO Rev. A, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS navigation, Stereo Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity, 8GB of internal storage with a fast processor to help you keep up to speed, relying on TI's latest OMAP processor. 3.1" SVGA display at 320 x 480 resolution with multi-touch capability, with a gesture area located around the center button.
The Palm Pre comes with a whole bunch of other sensors, external volume controls, a 3.0 megapixel camera with an LED flash, DSP software to help you take great looking photos and an external speakerphone. The back also features a removable battery - take that, iPhone! :P
A microUSB 2.0 connector is included for charging with a USB 2.0 port for data transfer. You also get a 3.5mm headphone jack, a ringer switch and power button on the outside.
The Palm Pre also comes with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and it comes in an ergonomic curve just like the Nokia 1006. It functions as a phone whether opened or closed, and it is smaller compared to the iPhone, BlackBerry or HTC device. It just weighs 4.8oz and the room erupts in laughter and applause as Jon takes a swipe at Apple.
Matias Duarte shows off the software that is running on the Palm Pre. The webOS UI takes on Palm's legacy of simplicity, where the main screen shows status items on top with your favorite programs located at the bottom. It takes a simple tap to open the application, and your contact list features a photo beside the name. Flicks with momentum are the way to go when you scroll through your contact list. Touch a contact and more details will be shown on the display at your fingertips.
Touching the gesture area will make it light up and open up a whole new world of gestures. For example, going back in the list will require you to flick back just like turning a page in the book. Basic navigation requires simple gestures, doing away with the need for buttons. Since gestures are used, southpaws don't need to be worried about its button placement and what not.
The four application buttons found on the original Palm Pilot and Treo are retained in webOS, albeit it requires more advanced gestures at the gesture area. You wil need to hold down at the gesture area and flick it up to the display without removing your finger, where the classic four virtual buttons are shown and you get to choose from one of them by letting go.
The calendar is also synergized with Google Calendar and others based on color codes. The calendar also compresses free time with accordion folds with the amount of time shown, so you won't be caught unawares by a future event later in the day.
Synergy in email also comes in just a single list, and you can view all your folders of a single account or your favorite folders at the top of the screen. There is also an All Inbox folder that lets you check all your mail, and email functions just like what you get on the desktop, supporting attachments, images, etc.
Synergy will help search through your contacts across all different accounts, bringing that information to your fingertips, making life much easier. If those contacts are not found it will look for email addresses in your corporate Exchange account and incorporate it.
As with your contacts, email and calendar, all your IM lists are also consolidated into a single account. Threaded SMS has been merged with the IM mode to make this one fluid experience. Not only that, Palm has gone the extra mile, allowing you to send messages via SMS instead of IM within the same conversation thread with a simple touch, so you don't have to worry about how to reach the person. We totally love this concept.
The web browser comes up just like how it looks like on the desktop, and it uses multi-gestures as used in the iPhone and iPod touch when it comes to zooming in and zooming out. Just like your contacts, you can open many web browser cards simultaneously.
Web browser cards are equal citizens with other cards in the "deck", the auto rotation works even when it is in card browsing mode. The webOS show has finally come to a close, and we're totally impressed.
If you're annoyed about receiving text messages from someone sticky, those alerts will appear at the bottom of the display in a ticker form while you're busy working on the main screen. The icons can be dismissed to a lower right hand corner if you want to. They can be dismissed by flicking outside the display on the dashboard.
Music controls are pretty intuitive as it runs in the background on the dashboard. The completely open design allows developer to write virtually anything, and the possibilities are endless!
Jon introduced the Touch Stone accessory. You plug it to a power outlet and place your Palm Pre on it for wireless charging, with magnets holding it in place. Cool!
Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint will be offering the Palm Pre with Sprint, making it the first US provider to make it available to customers in the US. Sprint is the EXCLUSIVE provider for the Palm Pre, so you will find Sprint's exclusive content on it.
Availability will in the first half of 2009 as they are still in the certification process.
Palm's CEO points out that Palm developers will use existing Web Dev. tools, so the developer base is be huge. The Palm Pre will rely heavily on connectivity.
I want my Palm Pre!
