Jay Goldman

The interwebs and twitterspheres are abuzz today with news of the Palm Pre, launched with much fanfare (but few hard facts) at the orgy of consumer electronics mayhem that is CES. Sing it with me: what the world needs now, is love sweet love (and another smartphone OS). I don’t envy Palm’s timing, what with the global economic meltdown taking much of the disposable wanton gadgetlust satisfying disposable income with it, but I have to say that the early reports point to this being a solid device. No pricing or international availability information was disclosed, though it sounds like it’s not going to be cheap:

My assumption is that Palm (PALM) would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

– Peter Kafka, Media Memo, allthingsD.com

I’d say it’s a little early for Ed and crew to be counting their hatched iPhone killers. These are, of course, the same people who tried to foist the Foleo onto an unsuspecting public (and showed the wisdom to cancel it a few months later when no one appeared interested in being foisted upon). Video and music capabilities or corporate email support also weren’t disclosed, leaving the iPhone and Blackberry with at least two potential raison d’êtres (worth noting that the screenshots of the Launcher show “Music” and “Videos” apps). At least we can watch pretty videos of touch screens and gestural input until we know more about what’s in or out and how many precious golden angels will need to be sacrificed:

I’m curious about the gesture area below the screen. The device is fairly small as it is and it looks like they’ve dedicated the bottom strip to being for gestures when it could have been available for more screen real estate. I do like the way it lights up when you touch it, but would it have been more useful if the whole screen was for gestures and display? Guess we’ll find out.

I spent a little while going through the gallery of screenshots on the graphic-heavy but info-light (and slightly odd) Pre website. I can’t give you a link to it directly due to the way it was built, so go to the main Pre page, scroll down past the fold where it doesn’t look like there will be anything, then click on “See gallery” in the Connected calendars and contacts section to get started. You can then keep clicking the faint and hard to see right arrow at the extreme right edge of the page to move to the next set of screenshots. (Also weird? Scroll your browser window up or down after you open the gallery).

A few things I like the look of:

Palm Pre Calendar

I like the crunched up free time indicator that lets the calendar show more info on the screen while still giving you an at-a-glance call on whether you have time to hit Starbucks.

Palm Pre Card View

Being able to ‘background’ an application and do other things while it keeps running is one of the things sorely missing from the iPhone. The Pre has a notion of ‘cards’ which contain running apps and supports a few different gestural mechanisms to get into ‘card view’ where you can swipe left/right to move through the deck. You obviously can’t see it here, but the cards are live views in to the app and will continue to show animation or (presumably) playing video when you move into card view. It’s a clever way to support multitasking with minimal input and maintains that at-a-glance intuitive understanding that’s so key in mobile devices.

Palm Pre Integrated Calendars and Email

These are the best screenshots I could find to illustrate the “web” in “Palm WebOS”. Everything the device does is about connectivity, shown here in the form of Google and Palm calendars (top) and Gmail and regular mail (bottom) automatically integrated into a single view.

As with all things of this nature, I’ll only know how well it works when I’ve had a chance to play with it. The devil is in the details of the interactions, not in the pretty icons and design (nice as it may be). I’m going to try to get one in for Mr. Mobile, so stay tuned for a more in-depth look.

Likely-related posts:

• Mr. Mobile – #36 – A look at the Palm Pre software Several years in the making, the latest from Palm,...
• Mr. Mobile – #35 – A hardware tour of the Palm Pre In the first part of Mr. Mobile's in-depth video...
• Mr. Mobile – #37 – Apps on the Palm Pre The refrain "there's an app for that" is an...
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