A GThing Science Project

A couple people have asked me to review Palm's newest entry into the smartphone market, the Pre. Not only has Palm introduced a new an innovative hardware form factor, but they have also given the world an entirely new mobile operating system called WebOS. It's a pretty big deal. Bigger-than-Ron-Burgundy big.

When talking about the Palm's new phone, it's impossible not to talk about the current reigning champion in the smartphone space: iPhone. The best way to start out my review would be to tell you why I chose the Pre over Apple's more mature offering.

There are a few reasons, but the biggest sticking point for me about iPhone (this is how Apple refers to it - "iPhone" rather than "the iPhone") is their attitude towards developers. For a very interesting insight into the issue, I highly recommend reading The Future of The Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain. It's available for free download here. If nothing else, just read the introduction.

In the book, Zittrain compares iPhone to the original Apple II computer. When you bought an Apple II and turned it on, you got a prompt. The machine was waiting for you to tell it what to do. If you could imagine it, you could make the computer do it (within reason, of course). One enterprising company came up with the World's first spreadsheet software VisiCalc. Not only was the software revolutionary, but it started selling a lot of computers.

Here's the important thing: Apple didn't know that VisiCalc even existed until they started noticing a lot more computers going out the door. It was software that was beyond the scope of their vision. The Apple II became great because developers made it so, and this relationship between developers and computer makers is what is responsible for the current state of computers now. Give someone a sandbox, and they will create something great.

So bringing this all back to iPhone, the problem is that the platform can never fully become something beyond Apple's narrow vision for it. Evidence of this turns up every day when you hear about yet another app being rejected from the app store. You are so restricted in what you can do - no messing with the core OS, no interpreted code (that means no flash, no emulators, etc.), and nothing outside of Apple's as-of-yet undefined arbitrary moral code. iPhone is an appliance. It's a really nice typerwriter with lots of gee-whiz applications, but it's stagnant in that Apple choose a window of past technology and said "Here, you can make things within these limits and within these limits only." I don't see how the groundbreaking mobile technologies of the future can be born on such a platform.

So why is Apple winning? Why is iPhone the leading smartphone? I'm not ashamed to say it: it has been the best. Despite it's very fundamental flaws, it introduced a new generation of mobile computing. Until very recently there has been nothing like it on the market. With iPhone, Apple spurred the entire industry into a whole new generation. If it wasn't for them, I might now be reviewing a boring Palm OS phone or a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone.

So my argument would be that Apple is now winning not because they have the best phone NOW, but that they've had it for the last couple years. They have a head start - and the deserve it for the innovation that they've introduced and the bar they've raised in the industry. But, like the line of early Apple computers, a more open, more approachable, and more innovation friendly competitor has shown up. Unless Apple changes its ways (and quick), the same thing will happen to their phone that happened to their computers - they'll become second place.

There are two promising competitors on the market: Android and Palm's WebOS. I'm not going to talk about Android here, but I think it's awesome and am excited to see what will be done with it.

WebOS is a breath of fresh air. I'll say it right now: it's the best mobile operating system there is. Yes, it has its flaws but it's young and has a bright future ahead of it. Although their developer ecosystem is not in full swing, all indications show that it will be much more open (and innovation-friendly) than Apple.

The greatness of WebOS was really driven home for me a few days after I got the Pre. I was sitting there talking to my little brother over IM, as well as another friend who likes to send me lots of links to things he finds humorous or entertaining. The WebOS built-in IM program is more than adequate at keeping up with multiple conversations. My little brother was sending me links to mockups he had created for a website he was working on. I would click on the links and a new "card" would open within WebOS. I could view, rotate, zoom in and out on his mockups, then flip right back to the conversation and give him my feedback. When I was done viewing a mockup, I could simply flick it off the top of the screen.

The whole experience was exactly what I've wanted from a mobile device. I don't just want to be able to make calls - I want to be able to communicate - and the phone abilities are only a small portion of how I communicate with people. The conversation with my brother, and how it integrated with the mobile web experience, and how the whole thing was wrapped into the WebOS multi-tasking "cards" philosophy was so seamless and awesome that I was sold right there on WebOS. It's exactly what I've been wanting. Exactly.

Contrast that experience with the other leading mobile platform, and such an experience would have been a lot more frustrating. With every link I would have to sign out of IM, close the program, open up the web browser, manually type in the URL (having written it down on a piece of paper or something due to lack of copy and paste), look at the image, close out of the browser, re-open the IM program, sign in, and give my feedback. At that point, the experience is so cumbersome that it's not even worth it. The experience is outweighed by the amount of work involved and you just say "I'll have to check it later when I get to a computer."

My main fear with the Pre was that it would not be stable. Palm OS was always notoriously buggy and crashy. From my original Palm Pilot, the my Palm II, to my Palm V, to my Visor to my Treo, I never had a Palm device that didn't crash often and a lot of time take ALL OF MY DATA with it. I am happy to say that after a few weeks with the Pre, it has not crashed once, frozen, or become overly sluggish. It's solid as a rock and fast enough that I don't find myself sitting around waiting for programs to open or webpages to load.

Launching apps does take some time. It's comparable with Windows Mobile, and a lot slower than Palm OS and iPhone OS. But the benefit is that once it's loaded, it's loaded. You can keep it running for as long as you want and with as many other applications as you want. I'd rather open a WebOS app once at 5 seconds then 5 times at 2 seconds each on a platform that isn't capable of multi-tasking. Plus, once the app is loaded, it runs at full speed, regardless of how many other apps you have open in the background (I've had about 20 at the most).

With Synergy, all of my contacts are sync'd automagically from the cloud. Both Google contacts and Facebook are used as sources. Overall, the concept and execution are awesome, but it does leave a bit to be desired. Most of this is due to the fact that Google's contact application is in its infancy and advanced contact management is just not possible. The Pre also does not yet give you the ability to choose which groups from Google contacts to sync with, so you get EVERYTHING. If you're going to use this feature, expect taking some time to clean up your Google contacts address book.

Once everything it up and running, though, it's great. If someone changes their Facebook picture I see the update in my very own address book. If someone updates their contact info with a new phone number or email address, I have it without ever having to do anything. I think THIS is the future. Everyone manages their own contact information and what you have is never out of date.

There are a few other shortcomings with WebOS (lack of applications, for example), but most - if not all - are due to the platform's infancy. There are some features missing and a lot of things I'd like to see improved, but as is Palm has delivered a very impressive experience for a first generation operating system, and the updates are coming fast (4 revisions to date). I think it will take 6 months or a year for things to get really, really good to the point where people used to the number of applications on iPhone OS will start seeing WebOS as an alternative. The fact that WebOS will be available on multiple devices in a variety of form factors and on multiple carriers will only help things.

Will the Pre dethrone the iPhone? As I said, it's a better platform, but more important than the platform is what is done with it. WebOS opens a lot more possibilities than iPhone. However, a three generation head start is hard to catch up to. Then again, Apple did it. They went up against industry leaders like Palm, Microsoft, and Blackberry and destroyed them all within two years. It's not impossible that WebOS could do the same. My guess is that it will take a bit longer (given that the jump between previous generation smartphones and the iPhone was a lot bigger than the iPhone to the Palm Pre) and that both platforms will enjoy success for the next several years. That said, had iPhone and the Pre launched on the same day, I am confident that the Pre would have the larger market share today. Hopefully Apple ups their game and relaxes a little bit with their developers. Then things are really going to get interesting.