After being written off by the tech media, smartphone pioneer Palm has got everybody buzzing excitedly as it redefines mobile communications in revolutionary ways with a new phone and a new OS.
WITH its rival having a lock on the hotness that is the Apple iPhone 3G, Smart Communications would be, well, smart to sign an exclusivity deal with Palm Inc. posthaste for the new handset that the Sunnyvale, California-based company will be unleashing on the world by mid-2009, perhaps even sooner. Because Palm is not releasing just another new, slimmer, sexier Tr eo packing Windows Mobile 6.1 or a totally tweaked-out Palm OS Garnet, but is redefining the mobile-communications space with an exciting new paradigm that has even one of its staunchest critics, the tech blog Engadget (www.engadget.com), singing that “it may be quite a bit more revolutionary than the iPhone.” Meanwhile, the equally influential tech blog Gizmodo (www.gizmodo.com), after enjoying a bit of face time and hands-on, has called Palm’s new wireless solution to be “simply amazing”—which, of course, was how Smart billed itself before the company settled on the utterly pedestrian “me na me.”
This “simply amazing” new solution is, of course, the Palm Pr e (pronounced “preee”) powered by its all-new, built-from-the-ground-up operating system called webOS. The twin offering was unveiled late last week at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, which just wrapped up in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Palm Pr e is a mobile phone that eschews the industrial aesthetic now favored by most tech companies, going instead for a shape and size that recall all things natural and organic, like a good-sized pebble whose rough edges have been smoothed out by the elements, making it feel exquisite against the skin. Wrapped in a hard glossy black plastic, the front of the phone is dominated by a 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen and a multifunctional “home” button that glows a soft white when in use. In the back is a 3-megapixel camera with LED flash, complemented by what Rubenstein called excellent DSP (digital signal processing) technology to produce excellent pictures; and a speaker thoughtfully placed on the upper corner where the back curves upward ever so slightly to yield better sound during hands-free calls or multimedia playback. On top are the ringer switch and power button—and, yes, a standard 3.5mm headset jack. On the sides are the volume controls and a MicroUSB connector for charging and data transfers. Beautifully integrated into the Palm Pre’s elegant body is a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, the kind that has made the Tr eo legendary among smartphone users for its incredible usability.
Of course, the Palm Pr e would be just another handsomely designed phone were it not powered by the webOS, an operating system with Linux underpinnings fueled by Texas Instrument’s all-new, cutting-edge OMAP3430 processor. The OS has been designed to be not only absolutely gorgeous to look at but, equally important, amazingly intuitive to use with multitasking capabilities once seen only in desktop and laptop PCs.
Instead of merely mimicking the iPhone, as many competitors have done and are doing, Palm has pushed the mobile lifestyle paradigm in thrilling new ways, with its webOS elegantly synchronizing all your data (addressbook, calendar, photos, etc.) residing in “the cloud” (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.) into a unified whole, allowing you to peruse these in ways that feel totally organic.
For example, if you are in the middle of browsing the web with the OS’s amazingly fluid browser and you get a calendar event alert, the alert discreetly pops up at the bottom of the screen without interrupting you from your surfing. You can either dismiss the alert or set it to snooze mode, or flick (yes, webOS is powered by flicks and swipes, and has an accelerometer for auto-orientation) the browser window on the side and attend to the alert. The web page remains live, refreshing as new data is added, and you can go back to it with another simple flick. To close a task—or an application, if you will—you just slide it upward. Elegant. Easy. Genius.
Palm PrE
Tags: apple, ces, consumer electronics show, engadget, gizmodo, handspring, iphone, palm os, palm os garnet, palm pre, palm treo, treo