I've owned quite a few Palm devices in my time, starting way back with the U.S. Robotics Pilot 5000. Back in the 90's they were great personal organizers that helped me manage my crazy schedule while I was frequently away from my desktop computer. (Back in those days I didn't always have a laptop; can you believe it?) My last Palm device was the Kyocera QCP 6035, one of the first devices to combine a mobile phone with a full-powered personal organizer.
The 6035 was also my last Palm device, as it was a little clunky and I wasn't that thrilled with anything else that Palm was coming out with. No, I was never a Treo fan; too expensive and too much like a Windows PC: futzy and overly complex, with nothing well thought-out and smoothly integrated. (No hate mail, please; that's just my perception.) Plus, by that time I usually had a laptop with me and could live with just synchronizing my calendar with my less-fancy Sony Ericsson mobile via Bluetooth. So, to me, Palm's been dead for ages (five years or so).
At this week's CES Palm introduced their new smartphone, called the Pre. Dan Lyons did an online write-up for Newsweek which tries to setup the Pre as a new iPhone killer from members of the same turn-around team that turned Apple around when Jobs returned in 1997. Given my history with Palm, I just had to post my thoughts.
One strikingly funny assertion Dan makes is that the new OS from Palm that drives the Pre, called Web OS, is made from the ground-up for mobile devices. He contrasts this with OS X running on the iPhone, which is a slimmed-down version of the desktop OS. Web OS, however, is based on Linux, which was never "created from the ground up to run only on mobile devices." Palm did the same thing Apple did: Take a full-sized, UNIX-like OS and strip out all the stuff a mobile device doesn't need, and then enhance where necessary to account for the unique constraints of a mobile environment like low power and memory. (Sounds a lot like Android, eh?)
Dan also claims the iPhone 3G has "abysmal" battery life, but at 5 hours of talk time and 300 hours of standby time, the iPhone is on par or better than all the other major 3G mobiles out there. Clearly, in the real world folks aren't turned-off by the battery life because sales of the iPhone are through the roof. Palm doesn't offer any estimates on the Pre's battery life, yet they expect people to keep 15-20 applications open simultaneously without sucking power like mad? Call me pretty skeptical, but I bet the Pre will get no where near the battery life of the iPhone if folks really do keep that many apps running at the same time. (Do most people even keep that many apps open on desktop computers? No.)
Also, Dan makes the classic mistake of comparing a device that won't even be shipping for six months (the Pre) to a device that's already been shipping for six months (the iPhone 3G). Apple has tended to make iPhone announcements in June, so by the time the Pre is ready to ship Apple is likely to be announcing the next major revision of the iPhone. This means that while the Pre seems to offer some advantages over today's iPhone, by the time it actually ships the iPhone will have been revised and will likely leapfrog the Pre.
Dan quotes one of Palm's investors as saying that they're "already four times faster than the iPhone, and we're still optimizing." Faster on what? The article doesn't say. The main bottleneck for the iPhone is the network speed, and Palm certainly doesn't magically make the cellular network any faster. More meaningless marketing happyspeak.
Another supposed plus to the Pre is that it runs Adobe Flash, but I'd rather not have to deal with "hit the monkey" pop-ups while browsing the web from my mobile, thanks. Maybe Palm's able to optimize the Flash engine so that it's not such a CPU hog, like it is currently on the Mac and on Linux, but seeing as their OS is based on Linux and they don't control the source code for Flash, I'm skeptical of this claim as well.
In summary, Dan's article is long on hype and short on hard facts. This isn't really a criticism since the facts aren't known yet and won't be known for another six months until the Pre ships, but as much as Palm would like to knock one out of the park it doesn't sound like they're introducing any revolutionary products. Incremental improvements on existing tech may keep your base coming back for more, but it isn't going to win you whole new legions of users.
Good luck, Palm.
The biggest problem with WebOS is that it's a WebOS. A cellphone should not require network access in order to run custom apps. This is the same mistake Apple made with the first gen iPhone, a mistake that took them until this last summer to get over. Hopefully Palm will be moving faster than that or I'll be looking around for a new technology vendor when my current contract is up in about 18 months.
Posted by: Steve Sarette | 2009.01.14 at 01:25 PM