The Palm announcement today is the start of a new era. Palm is BACK. They showed off their new operating system and a new smartphone, both look amazing, are full of great features, and take things to the next level.
I came into this announcement with very high hopes, because I had heard rumors like “Palm’s new-ness is amazing.” Then when the bloggers started saying things like “This is Palm’s Last Chance,” I really wanted this to be a wonderful day. This thinking is very dangerous and could have easily backfired and left me incredibly disappointed – but it didn’t, it just made this ridiculous announcement that much more epic.
The new operating system is called the Palm WebOS – which is a pretty lame name, but it really looks great. It’s called the WebOS because it’s all built on web standards such as Javascript, HTML, and CSS – this is exciting because it theoretically should be pretty easy to program apps for it. The OS itself is designed to flow easily, and be partially controlled via finger gestures. These gestures are performed on the plastic bezel under the screen, which is a very cool innovation that lets you save screen real estate for content, and not “next” buttons. The operating system seems to handle multitasking incredibly well, and has a sweet way to quickly switch between running programs (similar to an Alt-Tab style program switching, fast and convenient). Notifications of new calls, text messages, alerts and such pop up on the bottom of the screen so as to not interrupt what you’re doing, and if you don’t want to see the notification any longer you can flick it away with a simple gesture. The browser is based on the same Webkit browser that both the iPhone and G1 have, but it looks to be expertly optimized to render quickly, even when scrolling down long pages. Lots of powerful functionality.
Palm is also trying to handle the problem that many of us have – our connections with people are spread across many different places. Maybe you have all your email addresses in Gmail, and you have friends on facebook who have their contact info, and you have your friend’s IM addresses on AIM. Well they’re making a service called Synergy that will take your contacts across all these different services and combine them into your all mighty contact list. This is a great idea, and I hope it works well. Here’s a scenario for you – You get an email from your friend, and you see that there’s a green dot by their name saying that they’re actually online right now on some service, so you click on that and see that they’re on Gtalk right now and you send them off an instant message to answer their question with no delay. Very cool. Also, if someone text messages you you can reply to them through any type of IM / email service, so if you see that they’re actually on AIM at the time just reply to them there and the messaging program will keep all of these responses in one chat thread – excellent. This is pretty revolutionary, and I hope they get it to work smoothly.
The hardware they announced today was just as wonderful, and they called it the Palm Pre. At first glance it looks like a full touchscreen phone with a trackball, and rounded corners, and then a full qwerty keyboard slides out in the proper, portrait, orientation. It includes nearly every feature you would want in a modern phone (3.1” touchscreen, slideout portrait keyboard, WiFi, EVDO 3G connection, GPS, 3.5mm headphone jack, A2DP bluetooth, 3 Megapixel camera with LED flash, and 8GB of flash). This is a killer combination of features. They even announced an accessory called the Touchstone, which is a wireless, inductive, charging stand. The phone is held onto it with magnets and it begins charging, no plugging, no syncing, no hassle. Nice.
Palm has made an exclusive deal with Sprint for the phone. Not being a Sprint customer I’m saddened, but I’m really glad Palm has done this. It means they will get some of the revenue that they bring to the struggling wireless provider, and Sprint will get some much needed appeal. Also, it means the handset will be subsidized by Sprint, hopefully down to the sweetspot of 200 dollars to directly compete with the iPhone and G1. This is the only way it could start to compete with the already established smart phones available today.
The combination of the forward looking operating system, cutting edge hardware, and network deal is huge. I will be keeping a close eye on Palm as details unfold.
Here are some links with more pictures and details.
They inspired a lot of people today – hopefully they’ll be able to deliver the goods and remind people who started this whole industry.
Don’t forget to check out the live-blog blogging below, if you’re geeky enough.
- May Your Contacts Sync Seemlessly, and Your Notifications Not Obstruct Your Helicopter Game
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Here Begins My Blog of the Live Blog of the Announcement, experience the excitement with me :-D
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I was following this site -> gdgt live
and this site -> engadget live
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Ok, I’m really excited for this announcement – I hope palm blows everyone away.
Ooooo, first pictures of people standing in line – supposedly everyone there is super excited as well (I’d hope so), some people are calling this THE event of CES 2009 (gdgt = some people).
gdgt and engadget are up and rolling now – uploading pictures of the line, and the front doors…… wow that sounds really sad – I’m excited about “waiting in line” pictures…. I guess when they magically show up on my screen from a couple guys hundreds of miles away in real time it’s still pretty sweet.
ooOOO – they went inside and sat down, 30 minutes until showtime….. they’ll get setup and ready to go now.
Ha – Engadget just said “This is by far the most comfortable and appealing presser we’ve been to yet.” Cool
gdgt just replaced their line waiting picture with a very prophetic statement “This is it for Palm. Today’s launch will either mark the beginning of the company’s second coming — or the beginning of the end. So yeah, you might say expectations are high for Nova and their next-gen hardware — or whatever it is they’re showing off today. Read on!”
Wow – Engadget is describing the state of the press event – supposedly there are tables for people, with water and chocolate. Ridiculous TTMAB.
Engadget thinks there’s a coconut on the podium…. lol
The slideshow Palm is showing on the big projection screen is supposedly showing very modern, minimalistic designs (in the form of a train station, a house, and a bar). Engadget wants to believe it has something to do with the announcement.
We want to believe, we want to love this….. LET US. sorry – I’m going a little crazy.
LOL – Engadget warns that Scoble’s on the floor and we should prepare for tweeting – thanks.
Engadget got a picture of the coconut….. it is very bizarre, maybe the new device is a small sphere….. that you control with your mind!
gdgt says “pretty much every old school Palm and mobile blogger I know is present for the occasion. I have to admit, I’m kind of nervous for Palm.” This is their big chance, do us proud.
lol, I just realized that both live blogs I’m watching are limited to columns, but I had them stacked vertically – that has been swapped, now I can see a couple pictures down on both – problem solving!
I wish the twitter feed would auto update…
Engadget spoke to someone close to Palm and they said that this is “the whole thing” – ok, ok….. OK.
ooOOO no – gdgt is reporting that sprint’s network is choking – and he’s not sure if the live blog will survive. NOO
slashgear has a live feed as well – I turned it on.
It’s STARTING, they’re telling the audience to silence cell phones, but not to stop live blogging – good for me.
the slashgear coverage doesn’t seem to be doing anything
woohoo – scoble is live streaming the event, waaay choppy video but good audio… until it crashed… I’ll keep trying it – or not, everyone says the 3G is sucking there.
NOW it’s starting – chairman of palm is on stage.
gdgt seems to be frozen, slashgear and engadget are updating,
hmm, the last new post on gdgt disappeared for me – gdgt is live blogging backwards in time. I’m givin up on them for now
gdgt is back up
They’re talking about how all our information on the internet is all over the place, and on the projector it says “Can’t Keep it All Synced” – I agree, please fix this palm,
Work / Home contact / calendar syncing – it seems like a simple idea, but they want to make it better, invisible,
Palm WebOS…….. o that’s a scary name – no desktop sync – all from the cloud…. ahhhh, excellent.
ooO, they say if you know web development you could program for this.
The Palm Pre – that’s the device name.
Ok, it’s rounded, full touch screen front, trackball – evDO, evdo, 8GB storage, super fast processor, A2DP (o I wish I had that), wifi, GPS, bluetooth, everything.
3.1in screen, 320 x 480…… extends down below to the “gesture area” ooOOOO, that sounds exciting.
microUSB connector, 3.5mm jack – win
please have a keyboard, pleeeeease – WOOHOOO – I need a picture of the keyboard…… bring it.
ooO LED flash, 3 megapixel camera, huge speaker for speakerphone / music.
demo time – flick scrolling, very iPhone like – I love that feature, wow – you can swipe your finger on the gesture area to move around
wooohooo – keyboard pictures – it looks like a sweet, full sized treo keyboard that slides out from underneath – portrait style.
ooOO, they’re doing navigation all in gestures – trying to stay away with buttons – NICE
sweet – a drag up from the gesture area gets you a quick launch dock thing – instantly can switch to another program – excellent stuff
OOOOO, the different programs that are running are like a deck of cards, and you can switch between them super quickly. – it looks like the tabs in iPhone safari, and you can switch between programs that way – wow, this is really impressive.
their syncing service is called Synergy… lol, buzzwords
OMG – it will pull contacts from Google, Outlook, and Facebook and then intelligently look for duplicate entries and show you one conglomerate contact – AWESOME.
Scoble got told to stop streaming the event – fail
gdgt is calling it – PALM IS BACK, I whole heartedly agree
it has built in Exchange support – this is going to.
conversations flow between IM and SMS – nice.
O – you can navigate via the keyboard too – with instant global search through the phone. They started typing and it found things, but as they typed the phone realized it couldn’t find it on the phone – so it searched the internet for it!!!
pop ups from other programs like the G1 – wow
wireless charger – wowzers…. LOL
it will exclusively be on Sprint – with their huge 3G network, cool…
Amazing!
gdgt sums it up really well -> “Wow. Well, that was kind of amazing, and I don’t say that very often. Yes, we are lacking a LOT of really important details, but there’s little doubt that Palm is back in a big way, and that this OS and device has the potential to make up for all their missteps over the last five years. Can’t wait.”
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