The Palm Pre

Rumors of Palm's death seem to have been greatly exaggerated. I was expecting very little out of their announcement, but this thing looks great.

The one potential problem I see is difficulty typing in landscape mode (keyboard doesn't swivel and no on-screen keyboard) but otherwise this could really be a player, especially for people who are already on Sprint and hate touchscreen keyboards (both apply here.)

Dumb name, though.

Okay, you want to develop some kewl phone app. Which platform(s) do you target? iPhone? Blackberry? Android? Windows Mobile? Palm Pre? Symbian? Am I forgetting anybody?

The iPhone certainly has a commanding lead in market share, leaving everybody else to duke it out over the #2 slot. Now if only Android and the Palm Pre's WebOS could just merge together and create one half-way decent platform with multiple vendors supporting it.

iPhoneOS is the one without copy-and-paste or background apps, and it's the "decent platform"? Or am I misinterpreting?

I was just having a conversation with cow orkers today about this, except for game consoles instead of phones. The fact is that commanding leads in market share (see the PS2 in 2005) can evaporate quickly when a hot new competitor comes along (see the XBox 360 in 06, and then the Wii now.)

Despite these shifts in market share dominance, they're all legitimate players, because tools and libraries exist to make ports easier, and because there are enough customers out there that you can be profitable even if you target a single platform.

Likewise, I can see room for 3-4 major players in the smartphone market. Blackberry has their own niche and loyal base in the enterprise, so they'll probably stick with that. Android doesn't have any gee-whiz hardware out there yet, but don't underestimate Google. Symbian will probably remain a minor player and maybe be squeezed out by the re-emergence of Palm.

I think Apple should take this seriously.

Even if it isn't "decent" due to lacking those features, it doesn't seem to be harming the amount of money developers are making on the iPhone.

If they'll let me use it on my SERO plan (and I can hack it to tether) I'll probably be in for one. The only program I'd miss leaving windows mobile is microsoft's live search mobile thing.

My father has been looking to replace his Treo 650p, I'm sure he'll be excited. I believe he's has a palm pilot longer than he's had a cell phone, and I've been encouraging him to move to an iPhone but told him he could wait til CES to see what Palm could pull out of their hat.

Among the younger people I know, there's some iPhone backlash brewing. It's admittedly a small sample size, but the wow features for those of us who don't have an iPhone are now taken for granted, and the Steve Knows Best problems are starting to be noticed more. Look at the excitement the mere speculation of an "iPhone pro" generated on gizmodo.

I've got the SERO plan as well. My guess is they'll make folks transition off of SERO (which was technically supposed to be for employees and close friends to begin with) to get the latest and greatest phone.

As for tethering, Sprint's been pretty liberal about it with current phones and plans, so it's certainly possible they'll continue that policy.

If the final version of this ends up being as good as it looks right now and it's under $300, I'm probably in.

Palm might as well start planning the Pre Post-Mortem. Seriously, the handset might do brisk low-volume business but Palm's days are still numbered. It's not a question of if but when.

Comparing a mobile platform to a console is somewhat irrelevant. If you were to make the comparison against groups of handsets I'd give you that, but we're talking about platforms here that have a life beyond a single product cycle.

I see two major platforms going forward. iPhone and Android. Three in the short term, but Windows Mobile is on its last legs and I don't think anything Microsoft does in 2009 will save it. Even if they threw every last penny at it they made in every other division of the company.

Oh, and in terms of support by third party developers? No one is going to support anything but the two platforms I mentioned above.

If you're developing for financial gain, you'd have to have rocks in your head to spend any time whatsoever developing anything for any platform other than iPhone right now.

There's probably big money developing business apps for the Blackberry, but I otherwise agree with you that the iPhone is where it's at, at least for now.

Remember when Symbian was supposed to be the grand, all-encompassing consortium operating system galore? Maybe that's where Android ends up. Maybe Palm's UI ends up riding on top of Android, under the hood. Maybe the future is Zune.

Or, maybe AT&T just keeps getting worse and worse and people leave in droves for some great low-ball deal from Sprint, rescuing this Palm thing. Who knows? Every time I have to deal with AT&T customer service on the phone, I get one step closer to wanting to dump them.

I'll agree with "right now," but in the next month or two, Google will be rolling out the pay system for their app market, and that should be pretty appealing to developers. Sure, the base is far smaller right now, but I think the biggest reason I would imagine Android would be more appealing to developers is that there's no arbitrary approval process. As far as I've seen, that has been a horror story for many devs, and many of them don't want to sink a lot of money into an app that they seem to have a 50/50 shot of getting approved. That's how you end up with most of them making money on apps like that stupid iFart.

The big problem with Android is going to be lack of control over the hardware and the version of Android that gets shipped with any given phone. I foresee huge issues in the future with apps that "work on phone x, but not on y, works on z, but not feature q".

Plus the phone manufacturers won't be able to resist dicking around with the UI, the end result in a couple of years being a bunch of phones all with slightly different UIs with a bunch of apps that don't quite fit in with the UIs of any given phone.

Which is a shame, because I think Android has potential.

Much as I hate Apple's restrictions and their glacial approach to changes functionality, I love the end result on the iPhone.

The Apple approval horror stories are getting to be few and far between. They're getting to the point where they're approving almost anything now.

The last items I've seen denied which I thought somewhat of a travesty were books containing adult language/themes. I'm not sure if that situation has been remedied yet.

The iPhone has a better set of development tools at this stage. There's also no arguing about whether or not the potential money to be made from iPhone app sales is huge. (huuuuge) It would be one thing if there was a particular cinderella story, but we're seeing quite amazing news and results from a very large number of developers. I know a few personally (making decent coin) and they don't publish their details, like the majority of others out there.

I would only expect the situation to slide more in favor of the iPhone when Apple can loose the handset on other carriers in the US. Can't forget of course that the iPod also plays a significant role here. I don't see Android or anyone else catching the iPhone platform without a huge market upset. Anything's possible. Just not probable. One need look only as far as the iPod in the music player category for an example from Apple.

In the web world, look at eBay - an auction site is vastly more simple to create and promote than a product like the iPhone, but it hasn't looked like anyone could ever match or beat eBay for over 8 years now. You have a few other marketplaces carving out their own little niches, but eBay remains king with no signs of losing its crown. I expect it to be like this for the mobile platform landscape. Android will have a niche, maybe even a significant one, but the iPhone will continue to be the worldwide leader for the foreseeable future (like it or not).

This is an invalid comparison. An auction seller cannot sell his item on two sites at once, so it's stupid for him to not choose the one with the most potential buyers. A software developer can sell his product through an unlimited number of channels.

I'm sorry, but I don't think saying "approval horror stories are getting to be few and far between" proves your point. That doesn't tell me that Apple is doing anything differently at all. What it says to me is that developers have been scared out of creating unique, interesting apps and into creating to-do lists, games, and iFart apps (have I mentioned how stupid I think that app is?).

I do think that Andy's point is an excellent one, and one I've worried about myself. I have a G1 (which I adore), but I'm worried what will happen with the app market in the future as more devices are released. My hope is that programmers will be able to specify hardware compatibility when they put the app on the store, so that when you go to the market on your device it will only show apps available for your device. But that depends on the developer, and I've seen at least a half dozen apps show up on the store, for example, that were only written for use in various Asian countries.

Anyway, Bruno, I hope you know that I agree with you that the iPhone is a juggernaut in this space, and not much is going to be able to overthrow it. I'm just hoping Android does well because I'm invested in it now. I love my G1. I couldn't stand actually using the iPhone and it's (IMO) horrible keyboard. The iPhone isn't for everyone, and other phones are coming out to give people options.

Are you really trying to compare Ebay's stranglehold on the auction market to iPhone's growing, but by no means dominant share of the smartphone market? Nokia is still king worldwide, Blackberry is king of the U.S. enterprise market, and Palm still has over a 10% world market share despite ancient hardware and virtually no OS development in years.

The iPhone's meteoric rise is certainly impressive, but it's a very fickle market, with a lot of incentives for people to jump from carrier to carrier (and often platform to platform) when contract expiration rolls around. iPod/iTunes will provide a bit of vendor lock-in, but I can't imagine EBay-like market dominance is possible in the next five years.

Also, the iPhone followed a long period of complacence in the smartphone market, where there was no real innovation at all for years. As such, it was perceived as revolutionary. But it pushed other smartphone makers to actually improve their products, and we're just now starting to see the results of that.

I think Tony's comparison to game consoles is quite valid. We'd been at the tail of the previous generation for a long time. It's not terribly surprising that the first in the new generation sells well (especially considering Apple's marketing prowess). We'll have to wait and see if it can retain its smartphone market share once other units of the same generation really start reaching market.

(Remember how dominant the Dreamcast was until the PS2 his the market? Remember how quickly Sega completely left the market after that? I'm not saying that Apple will do the same thing, but, rather, that we don't know what will happen with the competition until the competition actually appears.)

I'm not sure whether or not I like the comparison between game machines and smartphones. Certainly, that comparison works great when talking about game machines and old-school phones. When the only thing in your phone that you can really customize is your contact list, the friction to changing phones is very low. On the other hand, when you've had an iPhone for a while, you've built your life around it. Changing to a different phone is non-trivial. How will you sync? What about the apps that you've bought? There's clearly more friction holding you in place, and that translates to a first-mover advantage for Apple. Still, if I ask myself how I actually use my iPhone, I mostly just make phone calls, read email, and surf the net. I occasionally use the calculator. I sometimes use the mapping app. I rarely run the 3rd party apps I've installed.

Of course, I've got a Mac, and an iPhone was the obvious choice since it syncs painlessly. Still, I'm migrating more and more of my life into Google. The Android phone is all about Google integration, and it looks like the Palm Pre is similarly aimed at supporting that, as well as more traditional Microsoft Exchange integration.

Meanwhile, I'll hand it to the Palm Pre for having serious eye candy to rival the iPhone. None of the other smartphone vendors have eye candy as good. An interesting question is whether Apple's going to flex its patent muscles and go after Palm. A patent lawsuit like that, with countersuits and everything else, would be a battle to behold.

Actually, I think you meant the opposite of what you wrote there.

There's no arguing that the iPhone doesn't have a better set of development tools at this stage.

Cheers

Oddly enough, it is that iTunes lock in that is preventing the iPhone from being an option with my company because some IP lawyer thinks that might be a way for information to leak out from the company. ATT is now the exclusive provider of anything telephony related (to include web-based stuff) but the iPhone isn't being offered as a replacement for the Blackberry.

Are you serious? Do you think people buy a game console and that's the end of the commitment? People dump huge amounts of money into software and accessories for their game consoles, too. Yeah, okay, there's not as much downside to having two consoles as there is to two phones, but think about the market share that Sony kept when the PS2 was able to play PSone games, despite the fact that those people apparently were interested in playing games they already owned, which would mean that they already owned a PSone.


Well, the thing about the iPhone, in addition to being a generational improvement on smartphones, is that it has brought smartphones to the masses. You never used to see a mass of people on the streets with a PalmOS or WinCE or Blackberry phone, but now folks working at the Arby's have an iPhone. There will certainly always be a segment of the market that is uninterested in paying a premium for smartphones, but that market is shrinking.

My point being that people may start thinking of smartphones as the default phone choice. Of course, you do have a point that people might start basing decisions about new phones on their investment in their old phones, but my point is that I think that the smartphone market is still expanding dramatically, and there will continue to be a lot of new users for many years to come.

That wasn't the comparison I was trying to make. I should have been more specific, but I did say "web world" as opposed to "auction world." I was talking about something much simpler than this. The effort it takes and the likelihood of anyone toppling the 800lbs gorilla in a given market. In the case of eBay they're the 8000lbs gorilla. Apple is also at that point with the iPod and quickly putting the iPhone in the same position.

And my argument is that the iPhone has no competition. It has basically created a new market. Two, really: consumer smartphones and a new generation of smartphones in general. That certainly gives it a large advantage, but it's not unstoppable.

I'll totally buy the notion that the iPhone could become the 800 lb gorilla, but that differs greatly from your earlier statement that it was already the worldwide leader.

There is no uncontested worldwide leader in smartphones right now. The field is wide open, and I think it'd take at least another year or two of iPhone's current sales figures to get to the point where it could be considered the leader.

Feel free to mark this post. In 5 years time I expect the iPhone platform's dominance to match or surpass the perception of eBay's stranglehold in the auction game. I'm almost willing to say "significantly surpass."

No one else (and I do mean no one else) is establishing a viable long-term platform other than Apple and Google at this point. Palm has been all over the map in the past 10 years. They're done. WinMo is a path to nowhere.

Blackberry will continue to do well in the enterprise market in the short term, but it's completely washed up before it even took off in the consumer space. I wouldn't be surprised to see a BlackBerry service running on Android and iPhone handsets in the future.

And Mark, about dev-tools, I'm not discounting what's available for Android/Linux, but the set of APIs for the iPhone is a much sweeter piece of cake. I don't expect Google to be able to ever match Apple on this front, no matter how much contribution they get from the open source community.

Again, console comparisons are irrelevant because none of the makers really define their products as a long-term platform. Sure, you could play PS1 games on a PS2 and you can play GameCube games on a Wii. Besides, the PS2 continued to outsell other newer consoles for a long time, including in software sales.

The mobile platforms are most comparable to desktop platforms. In that light, let's say iPhone will be where Windows is on the desktop and Android will be where Mac OS is. The other guys will carve out the remaining couple of percentage points between them.

BTW, Apple had (as of October of 2008) enough cash on hand to buy Palm approximately 37 times over and almost enough to buy RIM at recent trading prices. It's amazing how far they're going on what is compared to someone like MS, a shoestring budget. Anyone know how much MS has already bled on WinMo?

It's not the installed volume leader as a platform yet. It's already the leader in many markets based on quarterly unit sales however. And it's already close to the 800lbs Gorilla as a viable development platform for third-parties.

I think the ramp is going to easily surpass iTunes initial growth rate. Just wait until the really sweet applications in development now are released.

BTW, I don't have an iPhone. I do have an iPod Touch which I bought for development and testing purposes though. It's used heavily as a remote control for SqueezeBox as well.

So many people like to predict Apple's failure in any given market that it's become the default thing to do - moreso than any praise they get in the media. I can't believe how many "professionals" (analysts, journalists and the like) even fail to mention that the iPhone has done what it's done in only its second minor hardware revision and scarcely over 6 global availability. Application development and the online store are in their absolute infancy. There's a ton of garbage software released for it. The crap:quality ratio isn't likely to change for the better either. But the volume of releases will continue to increase. It's going to be important and valuable to consult trusted resources to find the best of what the platform has to offer. Sort of reminds me of Windows software availability.

??? We're in agreement there. I was just pointing out that your accidental wording indicated you thought Apple was way behind.

Cheers

Maybe I need to read both what I wrote AND what you wrote again. I'm trying to do too many things at once here.

Replying to emails, reading up on some CES news, checking stock prices, playing Pirates! and installing two new Seagate 1.5TB drives into a small RAID box (had to update firmware on drives and chat with Seagate - also while posting here).

My personal verdict: Pre looks cute. And Colligan has his head way (way) up his own arse. He's trying to do a Steve Jobs in recent comments to press it seems.

There, made an edit. Now it's less colorful but plainly obvious what I mean.

Okay, on the BBS's calendar.


I'll just point out that since the iPhone explicitly prevents developers from running apps in the background, that is currently impossible. Not saying it can't or won't change. Just pointing out the current state of affairs.

I don't think either Tony or I are predicting Apple or the iPhone to fail. We just don't think there's been enough evidence yet to assume that it's definitely going to be the supremely dominant platform. (I don't think either of us is even saying it won't be dominant; just that the question is still in the air.)

The lack of background apps on the iPhone is, we can only assume, a consequence of Apple's goal to get the most battery life as they possibly can out of the thing. Presumably, they'll evolve the thing to either support it, or have enough hooks that you don't desperately need it.

I'd say it's a bit less clear how strong Android is versus how weak BlackBerry is. Certainly, BlackBerry is widely loved in the business universe, and the new stuff seems to be built from a different codebase than the old stuff.

If you said I had to bet my money on either BlackBerry or Palm for who's got the most market share in 5 years, I'd go with BlackBerry in a snap. I will give Palm credit for pulling off a hell of a demo.

I don't see this as incompatible with what I've been saying. I don't think anyone here has said that the Palm Pre is going to kill the iPhone, or that Palm's WebOS devices will be #1 in market share in X number of years.

All I said was that it could be a legitimate player, that I think there is room in the market for 3-4 major players, and that Apple should take this new device as serious competition. I really didn't expect those statements to be so controversial.

I think you and Bruno both have this mistaken notion that the iPhone's fantastic sales numbers have led to Apple dominating the entire smartphone market, which is not borne out by the facts. They obviously have some advantages, and have to be considered the favorite in the race, but they're not going to be able to coast to the finish line.

I'm not sure I buy that. Maybe it is, but it feels a lot like Steve Knows Best to me.


On a complete tangent, I don't understand at all why people like their Blackberries. (Not that I'm disagreeing with your assertion.) Mine gets poor service, the GPS sucks, there are about four useful applications, the UI is horrible, it's been RMA'd twice in six months, etc. I could go on and on. The only things good about it is that the email is decent and the battery life isn't horrible.

Log of GPS coordinates while sitting still on a table at home:

(Elevation here is about 300ft.)

What I think they're doing is completely dominating the platform wars by luring the most developers. This brings the most applications and with it the largest active audience. This takes into account iPod Touch users. Some of those iPod users might also have another smart phone. Users of other smart phones might also have a BlackBerry (for work for instance).

There is room for more than one smart phone out there. At least there is for what one might consider a traditional smartphone. The iPhone and some other products don't quite fit in that camp though. The traditional smartphone didn't make much of an impact in the larger consumer picture either.

I see the traditional (old) smartphone continuing to become more irrelevant as time passes. What will be left are mobile device platforms with a phone feature. Much more than a smart phone. And I expect that Apple will grow their business and dominate. It's not even a race. The whole big picture is already Apple's to lose. They'd really have to stumble hard to let their groundwork all fall apart.

I don't think Palm has much of a marketable image in the consumer space. They have very little name recognition and they're not going to be able to offer the content that is helping Apple to push its devices.

I think the BlackBerry and WinMo devices will be the smaller players, but I think palm is going to disappear completely. That is, products running on their own platform. I can see them staying in the handset business if they stick with someone else's platform (Android for the best shot).

Oh, I also forgot to rip on WebOS. Last year everyone was going ape-shit mad that the iPhone didn't have proper SDK. Now for this device a number of blogs seem to think developing essentially a web page as an application is a good idea. Yes, you get to install it on the phone (right?) but come on. Is this supposed to be a joke?

DEAD. IN. THE. WATER. I'll be flabbergasted if Palm can turn the Pre into any kind of profit. I mean, they may never recover from all the money they likely paid the blogs for all their recent coverage. I swear this little thing is getting more attention than Android did.

One possible counterpoint: each major cell service provider is angling to have its own snazzy smartphone. Verizon/BlackBerry. AT&T/Apple. T-Mobile/Android. And now, Sprint/Palm. If you assume that this isn't just a short-term fluke but actually represents some kind of long-term force to be reckoned with, we may well see all of these platforms around for a while.

WinMo and Symbian? Not so much, at least in the U.S.

Even if Apple allow full background apps in the future (not likely I think unless on a future revision of the hardware), I think the fact that they weren't allowed to start with has made the third party apps better than they would have been otherwise.

The lack of backgrounding means that third party apps have to assume the app will be quit at any moment. This means that 99.9% of them work brilliantly with respect to persisting exactly what the user was doing when they quit.

If the apps were backgrounded all the time, the vast majority of third party developers wouldn't bother with niceties like that. Us developers are typically lazy by default...

I suspect that the driver behind no background apps is as much memory as battery life. The iPhone clearly needs more memory. It has a desktop OS slimmed down to fit on a phone and because of that probably needs more memory than things like Windows Mobile. If Apple did what MSFT and leave all apps running in the background then the iPhone would run out of memory very quickly.

There are three apps where I really wish there was backgrounding:

- NetNewsWire my RSS reader (that gets it RSS feed information from the developers website)
- Chess With Friends (play chess against random humans around the world)
- GPS track logging

The first two can be addressed without true backgrounding, Apple's proposed notification system should work well for them. The GPS track logging is more of an issue...

Why a joke ? Running on the phone will make all the difference. If the SDK gives developers a decent javascript framework then WebOS could be a very attractive platform for developers.

Of course I come from the background of writing highly rich Intranet apps using javascript, so I may be a little biased...

The US market is large, but it hardly defines what goes on around the world. Look at Nokia for instance.

Android is also not a handset, but a platform to run on many handsets in the future. It would be highly short-sighted for the various carriers not to offer one phone or another running on Android as they are developed.

In Canada (at least) BlackBerry products and service are available with all three of the major carriers.

I fully believe that the efforts of carriers to self-brand the phone products is going to hurt the product's market share and in the end may even hurt the carrier. It's so prevalent, but it's yet another telecom practice I despise. If Apple's exclusivity contract with ATT was over you can bet the other carriers would be jumping to get the iPhone on their networks (those with GSM and UTMS anyway).

I'd like to see iPhone's carrier exclusivity go away, but I don't ever want to see an iPhone support other telecom standards like CDMA/CDMA2000 or whatever other else is being peddled today by those outside the GSM association. We need the remaining US carriers to get into step by standardizing on what the majority of the world has long ago decided is the best path. This shouldn't be as difficult as adopting the Metric system.

There's no doubt about whether the iPhone and its current subsidization brings Apple huge revenues, but it would be nice to see a contract and lock-free version at a palatable consumer price point for use on any carrier with the infrastructure to support it. Just sell the things like iPods. I don't think any other phone would stand a chance.

Anyone know how much RAM the iPhone actually has?

Stu

128MB

I don't think apps should run in the background all the time. I generally approve of the idea of having one program running at once, with a few exceptions. (An ssh client comes to mind. It's a pain to realize you need a piece of information from another app and have to logout and back in again in order to retrieve it.)

I was really commenting on the fact that there's no service/daemon framework. Developing one of those would increase difficulty. Apple could even design it so that they weren't allowed to have UIs, so that people who wanted them would be forced to write two applications that communicated with each other.

For anyone interested in how Android deals with this, here's what I've gotten from a developer I've been communicating with:


I don't totally disagree with this method of application management. It would be nice to have things running at all times in the background, but this isn't a desktop computer, so I don't expect the same type of multi-tasking experience.

Anyway, I've given up arguing in this thread. I'll admit a bias and rooting interest in the Android platform, and while I have a hard time seeing how it will get there, I think it's going to be pretty big. I certainly hope so, at least.

Oh, and on the original topic, there was one announcement Palm made that cannot be touched by any other phone company in the market: the Touchstone.

I'm only half-joking here. I would love to have a charger like that for my phone. I find it amazing that we've seen all these wireless charging mats pop up at CES for years now, with nothing great to show for it, and now Palm brings a real product to market. Who knew they'd make such hot hardware...

The problem with the Touchstone and why it's rather unremarkable is that it only handles a single device.

Induction charging is nothing new nor is it something uncommon in homes - my wife's electric toothbrush has charged this way for years.

But how much of a convenience is it? Contrast to my own electric toothbrush which just takes a normal AA. I keep a NiMH cell in it which lasts at least a few months. It's such little effort to swap out the battery every now and then that I don't notice any inconvenience of not having a charger. In fact it's a convenience because it's one less thing to keep track of, to clutter the counter, to clean, and of course to keep plugged in.

The wireless mats shown for years at CES are a "neat" concept because they'd ideally support a wide assortment of products, all or any of which could just be dropped onto the mat as you'd simply drop them on a table top.

The Pre's solution while convenient from the point of view where you don't need to make any careful docking connection isn't really such a big deal. Compare the docking experience of an iPod or iPhone. The thing just slips right into its dock without any fuss. It's not something you need to keep plugged in constantly either.

Now, if we had an entire desk's surface able to charge gadgets, that's something significant. If you included a charger in the box that worked through induction and didn't significantly add to the cost of the product, that too would be fine.

The Pre's implementation is more of a gimmick and that's why I didn't even blink when I saw it announced. Plus, they put magnets in the handset itself to hold it to the charger? It will be interesting to see if that idea comes back to bite them in the ass if people start finding other things getting magnetized or demagnetized because of their Pre.

Another complaint about the induction charger: do you want to haul that thing around in your travel luggage? Apple, particularly with the iPhone 3G, has done a great job of reducing the travel weight of the accessories you might need.

Also, I'm curious about power efficiency. How many watts does the induction charger consume relative to a wired charger?


I didn't realize they had magnets in the phone case. That's a potential disaster if somebody shoves a credit card into the same pocket as their phone.

Well, you can also charge it off of USB, so presumably you'd leave the induction charger at home.

Do you have a source for that? I can't find anything. The more logical assumption would be that there are magnets in the charger and merely ferrous plates in the phone. Or, even better, the charger would have electromagnets and some sort of sensor (maybe some sort of inverse reed switch?).


Until the contact slot gets jammed up with pocket lint. Or you have some sort of case or skin.

Any of the good cases come with a docking adaptor for the universal docks. The pocket lint issue is a good point though for any pocket gadget, as it is usually the reason my iPhone tells me the iPhone dock is not made to work with it.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/10/palm-pre-touchstone-eyes-on/



They could be wrong of course. I would have avoided the use of magnets for physically securing the unit. If they were in the base it would still require extra metal and weight in the unit. More bulk isn't a positive quality in this type of device.

Anyway, I really think the press salivating over this thing need a serious reality check. If they sell 1/100th of the units Apple is moving I'd be absolutely amazed. If they sold 1/1000th I wouldn't be surprised at all.

The Palm web site says you need an accessory backplate to make the magnetic attachment work, so there's no extra weight if you're not interested.

There are many people who still hate the iPhone's lack of keyboard. There are many people who hate AT&T, for both political and practical reasons. There are many people who hate Apple.

I think that you're right that iPhone will continue to have the largest sales numbers. But it still remains that they have virtually no competition.

And there are many people who hate (or at least dislike Palm) as evidenced by their poor performance over the past few years. Plus, there are other products besodes the iPhone out there and more coming. Those are the only ones Palm should be concentrating on competing with.

The ATT deal won't last forever. The initial deal will be over in about 3.5 years if the reported term of "5" was/is correct.

I see a lot of people banking on the iPhone's development to remain static. I can't believe it, but one of the bigger features I've seen talked about the Pre is that it has "cut and paste" - oh boy.

I don't have anything vested in the iPhone. I think there's a lot Apple has done wrong with it and a lot they're still doing wrong - as per my own desires. As far as the market in general goes and "everyman," I think they've been doing extremely well in balancing what the device is and does and what it should or shouldn't offer to joe sixpack. They've (obviously) done exceptionally well at marketing it as well. I don't think Palm will be able to execute on any of these fronts at all. No matter how much glazing is currently present in the media's eye (which i still can't understand), the public won't buy into it.

I'm still amazed Palm's CEO can state they have a better product than the iPhone when all they have to show is the Pre. That's not confidence, that's complete denial and delusion. If they can convince an unsuspecting populace, they might get some sales. But the device is about as underwhelming as they come. it's something I would have expected from Sky Dayton and Helios.

I don't expect the Pre to generate any buzz or response within Apple. I don't expect Nokia are worried nor do I expect Google to give a care. Palm can rest knowing they beat Apple's Newton with their Pilot, but this isn't the mid nineties anymore.

Given, this is an incredibly basic feature. It's only big because the iPhone lacks it completely.

You can continue to have your unwavering unevidentiary faith that Apple will continue (?) to dominate the smartphone market. They may; I don't know. But it's ridiculous to make these unwavering assumptions.

Anyway, I'm done arguing with your brick wall.

I'm really puzzled by your reception of the Pre. I'm a very happy iPhone owner, but I can see how impressive the Pre is.

From the launch video the user interface seems just as coherent, slick and easy to use as the iPhone. The extra gesture area looks like it will move things on as well, that page down gesture in particular looked very useful for web browsing.

From what I saw they had even sussed the Safari style zoom in/out in a way that Nokia and Google have not.

The card based UI looked like a big improvement on the iPhone way of doing things. Being able to quickly switch between two emails, contacts etc looks very handy.

Despite all that, I wouldn't want a Pre. For a start I don't want or need a physical keyboard. My last phone had a slide out keyboard (HTC S710) and the iPhone had taught me that a touchscreen keyboard can work better than tiny keys on a physical keyboard.

Compared to the Nokia E71 the Pre (and iPhone) looks like some sort of unearthy magic. I had a play for a couple of hours with my brothers E71 and I couldn't believe what a mess it was.

I always owned Nokia phones in the past (before they started using Symbian) and loved their ease of use and coherent UI. The E71 in comparison is awful. It is like they tried to cram as many random UI metaphores into a single interface as they could manage. It is also painfully slow when doing anything vaguely interesting.

It is kind of ironic, given that I loved my Psions before Psion lot the plot and went and got involved in Symbian.

Nokia need to do a lot of catching up on Apple (and the Pre) otherwise I reckon they will be in big trouble in a couple of years.

I'm making predictions based on the information that's out there, but I'm not arguing whether someone should personally like one product over the other. I don't have an iPhone now, I am almost always hyper-critical of Apple and I also don't intend to buy a Pre.

I'm also extremely technology jaded, so 99% of everything announced at shows like CES doesn't impress me in the least. The effect is even more pronounced when I attend the shows and wander as well as systematically hit up display after display.

This year didn't offer anything new at CES. And the Pre, fit right in there. It's not significant in my opinion. At least not to the industry. It is for Palm because they've been stuck in a vortex for years. It's better conceived than their Folio product and looks like it will actually make it into the channel, but I believe it's too little too late for them and don't have a problem sharing that opinion. I don't know why anyone would want to make me believe otherwise.

I also don't own stock in any of the companies mentioned in this entire thread so there's currently no financial stake riding on the product successes/misses.



I think Nokia will do okay for now and also come out in decent shape in the future. They have always had a large portfolio and I don't see that changing. The new class of media/communicator device isn't for everyone and Nokia (and others) will have plenty of financial opportunities in other categories even if their smartphone sales dramatically drop. I expect they can quite easily outcompete Palm on a global scale. If anyone continues to be in serious danger it's Motorola. I said it 4 years ago to friends - "these guys are going to be in trouble when their razr bubble bursts."

Okay, I know I said I was done arguing, and I'm not going to argue about the smartphone issue. But:


So you're allowed to espouse any opinion you want, with or without any evidence beyond your personal "expertise", but the rest of us aren't allowed to disagree with that opinion? How do you find hats to fit that head?

Of course you're allowed an opinion. In fact I normally concur with most of the opinions expressed here, and I certainly always value them, those are the reasons it's the only board I have kept as a regular online place to visit all these years.

Is the problem that I'm so firm in my beliefs about the Pre? Because I don't think I've tried to make a point that others aren't allowed to think differently. A lot of what I've expressed in these last messages is about what's going on in the press, not necessarily what's been mentioned by others here.

Anyway, I did have some additional points to add to the lest message so I'll add them here. It's become somewhat fashionable lately to dig on Apple so every time anything is released it's turning into some type of sensational headline as "an iPhone killer" or a "Macbook killer" or... You get the picture. Online, I find this really common in blogs that are accused by others of being Apple-biased. In the traditional press it's usually when they pick up a story that originated online, but it's there all the time since they're more corporate in mentality anyway.

All these "killer" products are simply variations on a theme and more often than not, very uninspired ones. Meizu M8 anyone? We've seen one giant leap in innovation in the past few years and it was the initial introduction of the iPhone. Period.

It bugs me to see people continually rip on a couple of Apple or iPhone faults while ignoring much more serious issues with their products. As an example, there's so much more that can be addressed or fixed with the iPhone before even considering spending any time on Cut and Paste. Don't even get me started on the massive amount of problems in Leopard and Apple's apparent inability (or unwillingness) to correct the vast number of small issues that plague daily use of the OS.

Nope, it's more important to rip on them instead (and try to sensationalize the issue) for wise ideas like non-removable battery in the latest 17" MacBook Pro. There's an insignificant amount of people that ever swap out the battery in their notebooks. Or even their phones for that matter. It's generally a non-issue.

Sometimes they get called out rightfully so, like their initial stance on iPhone development. It's acceptable they didn't have an SDK ready, but they should have just said that - that one was coming within a year. Plam comes along with a slightly souped-up variation on the web-as-an-application and I'm not seeing any such complaints. It's a nice alternative for those who want to make some light-weight software, but it's not a long-term solution and completely not applicable to any software designed for heavy lifting (games, visualization, audio, speech, mapping, etc..)

So when I hear Ed Colligan flapping his lips, all I want to say is STFU, pull the trigger and let's go. Let's see who's left standing at the end of the day. Jobs may talk in a grand fashion, but he's first backed everything up with success. Though it also doesn't impress me very much when he goes off either.

Apple should really just buy Palm and scuttle their entire product line:

http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/23/palm-responds-to-apples-veiled-threat-over-pre/

Prediction failure #1.

It's probably best to actually quote the dialog here. A lot of press people are making assumptions off this that are probably not correct. These questions came in during the Apple financial call earlier this week:

If anything, it wasn't the Pre, but Palm's loud-mouth CEO that would have prompted any type of comment. But that comment was by the media anyway, not Apple.

Maybe I should have written "worry" or something else other than "buzz" however. I suspect that plenty of people inside Apple have had a chuckle or all-out fits of laughter at the Pre and Palm lately. One might say that's "buzz" but it's not what I meant.

The only reaction or worry I see is from Palm who to this date have yet to show any type of real innovation - I'm going all the way back to the first Pilot here. Palm's reactionary development and twist on a theme worked for them over a decade ago, but it's going to fall flat this time around.

They're being praised mostly by media people who don't know much at all about the product. They're receiving more than their fair share of blog coverage because they're perceived as the underdog and a lot of people love the underdog story. However, Palm are acting like a bunch of arrogant dipsh*ts who are completely out of touch with reality - this has been going on for quite a few years (recall Colligan's comments regarding Apple's then-unannounced iPhone rumors).

I don't know how much more of a beating they need to take to knock some sense into them. Palm has a lot to be thankful for, but innovation isn't one of those things. Instead they need to acknowledge the deep pockets of friendly investors and Apple for providing the blueprint for their products. Not to mention Apple defectors within their company helping them stay afloat.

What on earth are you talking about? What comment? The one coming directly out of the mouth of someone at Apple? You're saying that was created by the media? If anything, that reporter was surprised by a comment that was slightly out of left-field.

If you read the quote Tom posted you'll see they weren't referring specifically to the Pre in the initial comment. The press person specifically mentioned "Andoid" and "Pre" but Apple didn't.

There are other "competitors" coming out from the likes of Meizu, LG, Samsung, Sony, etc. With software from Google and Microsoft to name only two. The comment was quite broad and appropriate because a lot of what's been seen is not simply inspired by the iPhone, but often a plain rip-off. With Meizu going so far as using Apple icons early on. Did anyone else see the iPod rip-off "ePhone" by some other company?

The second "question" was an attempt to goad Apple into commenting on the Pre, but they didn't bite.

Now, the whole theme of IP protection could have been topical due to the comments that Ed Colligan has been making, taking every opportunity to pronounce their product is better than the iPhone while the media has been paying a lot of attention at product comparisons and elements that the Pre might be lifting from the iPhone.

Palm has never had a significant share of a large market. They've been leaders (big fish) in a small market (small pond), but the landscape for this type of product has changed in a big way. I think different people at Apple are paying close attention to everything that's coming out from all players. But to suggest that the top brass at Apple are worried about the Pre specifically is likely as far from the truth as one can get.

The Pre is like a nice shiny new PMP from Creative. The iPhone is like.. The iPod.

I really wonder where your assurance of Palm's implosion is coming from. Palm has been an innovator in the handheld space for years. Yes, they've fallen behind recently, but they fell behind before and got back up. Palm was nearly dead before they bought handspring for one product that was still in development. That one purchase has sustained them for the last five years.

Palm knows how to build a mobile device. They understand usability. They understand battery life. They must understand marketing to be able to sell as many Centros as they have. Palm understands how to support a mobile developer community.

The apparent subtext of palm's "bring 'em on" statements seems obvious. How many patents does Palm own that the iPhone infringes on? How many patents does Google own that the iPhone infringes on? I don't know the answers to these questions, but my bet is "a significant number" and "zero" respectively.

I bought a Palm Pilot. Considering how much I actually needed one, i.e. how much I ended up using it, I'd say they must understand marketing pretty well

Peter

So the Pilot wasn't borne of the Newton from Apple? If Palm thought they stood any chance with a patent infringement lawsuit against Apple, for specifics of the iPhone, they would have launched one, or more, in the past 1.5 years.

Elevation Partners saved Palm's ass more recently. They've been on the way out and it's obvious from their results that they don't know how to build a handset people want nor how to market it so that people do. Just look at all the money they've lost quarter after quarter. They've been having their collective asses handed to them by RIM.

The Pre is a nice effort for the consumer space, but it's going to be too little too late. What am I saying, it doesn't matter what it is, Palm would ruin it. Palm's attitude is hubristic to the core as well. Time to pay the piper sooner rather than later.

I bought a Palm Zire72 a few years ago, and it is *still* an indispensible part of my kit. Dunno how much of a part the marketing played in that purchase, but I did buy one in the end.

Cheers

Kudos to Palm for coming out of dormancy with an exciting new product.

I bought a Palm Treo 650 three years ago and I couldn't live a day without it. I will buy a Palm Pre and benefit from it for as many years.

If Palm falls off the map, I'll still have my Pre. When dead iPhone batteries force their owners to upgrade, I will buy a replacement Pre battery and continue uninterrupted. Planned obsolescence is a filthy revenue stream.

The Pre hardware is an iPhone with a time-tested and beloved keyboard. webOS is innovative and could have some serious potential. These elements make it the best iPhone clone out there.

If Apple did it first, but Palm does it better, who is the winner?

With regard to patents:

The decision by a company to engage in a nasty patent fight doesn't happen lightly. Patent cases take years to litigate and the outcome can be quite uncertain, particularly when jury trials come into play. Oh, and these cases easily cost millions of dollars in legal fees.

On the other hand, filing for and getting patents granted is relatively cheap (five figures) and (sadly) easy to do (witness all the examples of bogus patents). The net effect is that these companies tend to pile up large stacks of patents. Does Company X's widget infringe Company Y's patent? You have to litigate to find out. Is Company Y's patent valid, or does the prior art anticipate it or render it obvious? You have to litigate to find out.

Instead, the likely outcome is that there will be a private negotiation. An Apple person on one side with a stack of patents. A Palm person on the other side with another stack of patents. At the end of the day, if both companies are rational, they agree to cross-license the stacks of patents and go back to competing in the marketplace.

Now, are they rational? Very interesting question.

The iPhone doesn't become a brick if the battery dies. Just because the battery isn't user removable doesn't mean it isn't removable. For $20, I can buy a new battery for the very first iPod, released in 2001, without a user removable battery. That same iPod would still attach to my 2008 computer, and work as it did in 2001.

I'll agree planned obsolescence is indeed a dirty revenue stream. But that statement doesn't apply to Apple products.

On re-reading this, it could be taken either way round; what I was trying to say was that I didn't use it at all. Yes, there are lots of people who genuinely need a PDA or smartphone, but it was only Palm's marketing that convinced me that I was one of them.

As another demonstration, not that any is needed, of the power of marketing: I bought some tinned tuna in the supermarket today, for the first time in ages, because I really fancied a tuna sandwich. Only later did it occur to me that I'd recently been re-reading Calvin and Hobbes.

Peter

Unless your 2008 computer is a MacBook, which doesn't have FireWire, which is the only connectivity on the 1G iPods. (I still use my 1G iPod.)

The recent Pre news has been pretty encouraging. The lack of a storage card slot is definitely problematic, but they've committed to allowing phone as modem tethering from day one, and will allow users to install apps from outside of the app store without any kind of circumvention needed. Both of these are things that Apple has gotten wrong IMHO, and though I know there are workarounds, it's refreshing to see a company go a bit more laissez-faire on restricting access to the device's capabilities.

So far they haven't really made a misstep. All they have left to do is let some real hands on reviews out.

I'm sure that has far more to do with the cellular provider than it does with the equipment manufacturer.

Yeah, but the device itself has to support it. It's good news that the device supports it, and good news that Sprint is continuing their policy of being reasonably tether-friendly.

I really like the concept of the App Store being the only source of apps for the iPhone. It's one place to go to and find something, rather then having to search all over the place. Finding apps for my Palm, and my old iPaq was a mess. Even the jailbroken community can't keep things easy, as there are two separate installer apps, and multiple repositories you have to know about to see everything out there.

I can understand the issues though with the App Store policies and restrictions. While some moderation is nice, I think Apple has been a bit heavy handed at times against a few apps, and not allowed entire segments that should probably be allowed. So I suppose to me the concept is good, and the execution has been mostly good, albeit with some concerns.

Palm will still have an App Store, which I imagine will be vetted, but the ability to install whatever you want (without having to pay $99 for a license) is still nice.

What Bitt said. I like the idea that Palm will provide a store, but allow you to get apps elsewhere. Choice is good.

I disagree. I thought choice was always good, but in the case of apps for mobile phones it turns out I was wrong.

With my Windows Mobile phones I rarely installed anything new. That was because I had to:

- go and search out the apps to install
- work out whether it worked with my particular phone/os version
- work out which way to install the particular app
- go through the whole download/install process when there is a new version
- backup my data for the apps so that I could get it back after an os update
- reinstall it all after an os update
- work out how to uninstall all traces of apps I tried but didn't like (sometimes a very painful task)

etc etc

There is loads of stuff in the App store and the App developer have to play by Apple's rules, which makes all this headache go away. If developers had the choice not to use the App store then we would have a similar mess to the Windows Mobile approach.

The end result is that I have a couple of dozen apps on my iPhone, many that I use regularly and many that I paid cash for. In this case lack of choice has been a very good thing.

Does Windows Mobile have an official app store? I really don't know, but I've never heard of one.

If it doesn't, your comparison is misleading, because Palm's app store will (presumably) address the problems you're talking about. Pre owners who are worried about those problems can use the app store and not bother with developers who don't distribute their apps on other sites. And, obviously, developers are going to WANT to get their apps onto the official store to get the widest audience.

I remain unconvinced that the lack of choice is helpful in any way.

Just to rebut (all of) your specific points:

If you want to look only on the Palm Pre App Store, fine.

Well, there's only one Palm Pre model. Shouldn't be a problem. However, I'm sure that if/when there are additional models, the app store will have that information easily available.

This is more of a failing of the OS than any distribution method.

Again, OS problem.

Again, OS problem.

Again, OS problem.

Again, OS problem.

Hopefully the new album does well for U2, because Bono is going to lose a sh*tload of money with one particular Elevation Partners investment. Hint: Palm.

I also think Roger McNamee, one of his partners, has gotten deep into his drug stash. Feeble.

I did love this bit of the interview:

"Palm’s newer operating system will give it an edge, McNamee said. The underlying technology for Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry is about 13 years old, while the technology behind the iPhone goes back almost nine years, he said."

Ooooooohkay, so by those standards (picking when an OS with pretty much the same name first shipped) the Pre's linux kernel dates from... uhhh... 1991. 18 years old. And actually, if we leave aside the BSD origins, OSX goes back to 1987ish and NEXTstep - much older than his claim.

It's hard to claim that any unix-based system is a fresh take on OS design... sigh. I mean, if you're gonna make sweeping generalisations, try not to make too much of a fool of yourself unless you have a hairstyle to match.

Ah. He does

Hugo

I'd be surprised if even 10 (total) original iPhone customers bought a Pre. People switching from an iPhone 3G to a Pre, with or without contract is just not likely going to be happening. At least not in numbers large enough to even begin to quantify.

The trash talk is as ridiculous coming from this guy as it would be coming from the president of Meizu. He must think this market is the same as the one Palm took over from Apple in the mid nineties. The difference this time is that the customer base is not made entirely of geeks that look like McNamee. And it's more than 1000 customers globally.

I personally think that Palm will get a decent number of customers; the phone/OS certainly pretty and as long as it's sufficiently robust they will get a following. Lots of people want something different, don't fancy the klunkiness of winmo or symbian and aren't willing to give up totally on industrial design by getting a G1.

In my mind the problem will be whether they have the money to build momentum, provide good service and deal with the inevitable fallout from an all-new hardware platform. It's either going to be a blaze of glory or a blaze of returns and annoyed customers. Given their shortness of money (and hence time), one has to think that they're cutting every corner they can to get the phone on the market before they run out of cash - ready or not.

Still, looking forward to some competition. It's been getting a bit lonely

Hugo

I can agree with you here, but I don't believe a significant portion of those customers will be defecting from an iPhone. And I don't believe "decent" will be 10 million in 12 months either (the "iPhone number").

I think my biggest problem however is the grandstanding. It's really quite pathetic. They're riding on Apple's coat tails (again) while trash talking the company and platform that will be at least partially responsible for any margin of success they gain. For all of Steve Job's grandiose proclamations, there's always some element of humbleness (I'm not a bit SJ fan), especially if they're ever alluding to sales that have yet to happen. Apple definitely know how to work the media when it comes to competition, something Palm, and its largest investor, would do well to learn.

Remembering how Palm got to the low point it's trying to climb out from would be a good place to start.

By this you mean that they're leveraging WebKit in Palm WebOS? WebKit seems to be ubiquitous in these applications (where's the stripped-down Firefox?).

I figure that the Palm Pre, for Sprint, is analogous to the Blackberry for Verizon. Beforehand, they had some random Korean phone and/or WinMo phone. Afterward, they put all their promotional energy into the new Blackberry / iPhone knockoff. I expect no less from Sprint.

What will be interesting is if a Palm Pre "application" can be made to run on Android and/or iPhone.

Well, the demos I've seen are running palm pre apps in Safari on a mac (with some special sauce, I'm sure)...

Hugo

"Loc: Cambridge, UK"?

Yeah, I ought to update my profile. "Loc: Shenzhen, CN" is strictly more accurate at this second...

Sadly, only on Windows Mobile.

Coat tails: Pilot riding on Newton. Pre riding on iPhone. Without the iPhone the mobile industry would be as boring as it was 3 years ago and you'd only be seeing more variations on the RAZR this year.

Palm's budget is probably somewhere just north of Hugo's salary they don't have much room for making errors at this point.

I wish! I'm sure their finance team is stressing seriously about how they can finance production runs though... particularly tough when your credit rating has been slashed.

Kinda like the problem we had at empeg with financing production runs but on a rather bigger scale!

Hugo

Did anyone catch the one-time palm Pre commercial last night on the new Jimmy Fallon show? It was co-hosted by the editor-in-chief of Engadget, one of Palm's new PR companies. Most people know it as a gadget blog, but that's just a cover.

This comment (from Engadget) was the only one I saw during a quick scan which hit the nail on the head:


You have to be deluded to think that payola ever went away from the airwaves or that it hasn't always been a part of (some) online tech coverage.

On a related note, Palm put out an official retraction of the comments by McNamee about how the Pre will do compared to the iPhone as well as some additional CYA points. Specifically items 8 and 9 of their "Free Writing Prospectus" are noteworthy. I suppose they don't want to get their arses sued by their shareholders when they can't live up to what could have been considered official promises/statements by the company.

Obsessed much?

Is your ego tied to the failure of Palm?

Unlike some people recently quoted in the media, I have no affiliations, agendas or stake in the performance or lack thereof of Palm, Apple or any other company discussed in this thread.

I came across the "news" while quickly browsing tech items as I do as part of a daily scan of numerous sites.

I haven't started a Palm death-watch pool or anything yet.

BREAKING NEWS - Investor makes outlandish statement about the future performance of a company he's investing in. Film at 11.

Seriously, dude, regardless of whether you have a stake in the outcome, you're coming off as spiteful teen-age brat. We get it -- Palm is completely broke, the CEO and investors are all crackpots, and the PR strategy is an evil conspiracy involving Engadget/AOL, GE/NBC/Sheinhart Wig Company, Bono, The Carlyle Group, The Illuminati, and Major League Baseball. Can we please just wait for the device to flop before making all of these grand proclamations of death before it's even been released?

Josh is an enormous fan of the Pre. It's a giddy fanboy thing, not some nefarious plot.

This is a general reply, not to Matt.

If I waited for the device to fail then it wouldn't be speculation. I'm finding it amusing that critics of the Pre are getting the boos (including here in this forum where I wouldn't expect it) while the company and its investors have seemingly carte blanche on the bullshit train.

The Palm media soap opera is somewhat entertaining, but if you guys don't find it equally amusing, I'll try to cut back on anecdotes, opinion and links.

Matt, Josh should probably have mixed it up a bit with his time on the show, including perhaps some promotion of his site. It came off smelling like product placement and you could see at times Fallon was uncomfortable as he looked around the set. I'm sure it didn't help his ratings since neither the studio nor home audiences are such fanboys (or girls).

It's marketing. I couldn't really care less about it. I'm somewhat interested to see how well the device ends up working in real life. Feel free to speculate about device features.

I am, however, not interested in speculation about market share or how exaggerated Palm's management's claims are. Who gives a rat's ass?

I'm interested in the marketing aspects because it's something I've been doing for a long time. It's also a significant component of what will make or break such a product in this day and age.

Feature-wise the device has seen specs jump around a bit and nothing printed on paper (or screen) really jumps out. There are some interesting ideas there, but then you also have things like a clumsy magnet in the unit and a small screen. The entire product at this stage, for everyone but a select handful of people, is all marketing. Vapor if you will.

There's room for discussion because the ammunition has been put out there by Palm. I just happen to be interested in a lot more than the technical specifications. What we unfortunately can't speculate on are the products being produced the by most of the established players in this market because not much, if anything at all, is being put out about their upcoming wares.

So now that the Pre launch date is set and the price is known, who here is going to try and get one?

I'll admit, the Pre would probably be towards the top of my list if the iPhone hadn't come out. There are a few things that I dislike about the Pre though:

1. Sprint. It's less the company, and more the technology they back. I want a GSM phone.
2. 8GB of storage. The 16GB on my iPhone is almost constantly full, due to using it as a media device heavily.
3. Web apps. Sure they are HTML 5 and can run offline. But I'm really hooked on the gaming capabilities of the iPhone now, and a HTML 5 site isn't going to come close to even running Wolfenstein 3D.
4. Physical keyboard. After having spent 2 years with a very good virtual touch keyboard, I can't even consider a tiny physical keyboard. The ability to type as quickly as my thumbs can move and an auto correct/resizing touch area backed keyboard lets me fly though composing messages even if I do miss the proper key from time to time.

The top things I do like about the Pre from the info available:
1. Multitasking. It's annoying trying to chat from time to time with someone while also using another app on the iPhone. This is only going to get worse with the 3rd party push access for IM and such. The Pre handles this much better.
2. Universal search. I've been using search on my iPhone now for about two months and find it very useful.
3. Web browser. Much like the iPhone, the Pre looks to offer the best in mobile browsing due to both a decent renderer, and multitouch.

Gizmodo has a nice Pre FAQ.

Oh, and I don't think the Pre is going to hit the same level of ease of use like the iPhone with gestures like these. Lots of various important ones to learn that I'm sure owners won't have a problem with, but it makes it less friendly for non owners to use. So far, most people have been able to use my iPhone after only explaining the home button and the sleep button.

I think the Pre will have a problem with this if/when they open up the platform to real development instead of running Web apps. The issue with the iPod is its limited resources, chiefly memory. The 128MB on the iPod goes very quickly with Safari alone. Many games can chew through this without batting an eyelash as well.

We'll have to see how well iPhone OS 3 and any new hardware are able to address these resource constraints. Which, were likely imposed in the first place to better manage battery life.

I'm really eager to see the launch of the Pre in early June followed up by Apple's WWDC announcements. I have a feeling Palm is going to get the heavy (heavy) hammer dropped on them. If Apple release anything even mildly interesting it's going to completely saturate mind-share.

Battery life is the real trick. Much as the iPhone restricts what you can do with it, the battery life is really quite good. If you try to use the Palm Pre like it's a full-blown computer, it's going to chew through power.

If by "Web apps" you mean the HTML5+Javascript apps that they have said it will be able to run, then that doesn't make sense at all.

"web apps" as you describe them will eat up far more resources than the equivalent app coded natively. If Palm in the future allow "real" native apps I would expect the resource usage to fall for apps with the same functionality, not rise.

My iPhone is great, but I would never describe the battery life of "really quite good". I really miss the days of phones that could be relied on to survive a weekend away. My iPhone has yet to manage that without charging.

You had the problem where some unknown background process pegs the CPU and causes the entire iPhone to heat up and drain the battery like crazy?

Those seem less than complicated to me. And not particularly supernumerary.

I am certainly going to swing by the local Best Buy and/or Sprint store to take a look, but the fact that I'd have to double my monthly phone bill is going to make me very selective. Just like the iPhone, Sprint is making up the cost of the phone with outrageously expensive plan prices, so my excitement about this device is going to be tempered by the $840 premium (over the next 24 months) I'd have to pay to use it.

That said, for my needs, the Pre wins hands down, so if I don't get a Pre, I'll continue to muddle along with my Treo 755p until such a time as either device becomes worth the additional cost.

You expect the resource usage to fall when apps go native? I wouldn't. Sure, any given executable can be more optimized, but the scope of an application can be an order of magnitude greater. Each developer doing their own asset management to boot.

Right now the HTML renderer and JS interpreter are essentially running all the time. Each application a sort of advanced web page. Running multiple applets isn't going to be such a big deal.

There are plenty of iPhone apps out right now that will suck down every byte of available memory on the device. When you're running a web browser, a game, a paint program and an audio sampling/mixing application, things are going to get tight, I don't care what platform you're on.

The Pre isn't magic and its components are all filled with the same blue smoke as everyone else's.

I'd classify the battery usage performance (duration) of the iPhone as above average and that of the iPod Touch as far above average. Taking into account of course what you're actually doing while using up that charge.

The gestures that struck me as odd are the ones that require the user to hold down a keyboard key while also interacting with the screen. Really seems to be an awkward way of selecting text or even just moving the cursor around.

This isn't why I want multitasking on the iPhone. I just want to be able to reply to an SMS or IM without having to close down whatever I was in the middle of, especially when it is listening to music outside of the built in iPod. The phone seems capable of allowing me to run various apps when I have an active phone call, and can also pop up a dialog alerting me to a message, so why can't I reply right there? The Pre does this, even if it is done by having web apps.

I'd probably get one if I could keep my plan, but with the new plan requirements it means I'll definitely wait and see what the next iPhone looks like.

I'm likely to pick up a used Touch Diamond and live with the wonders of windows mobile a bit longer. I'm stuck in the golden handcuff's of Sprint's sero plan. $35 a month for insurance, enough text messages, and an easy hack to bluetooth tethering is going to require a big improvement to get me to give it up.

If they all share a single interpreter and renderer then if a single web app dies or locks up then it'll take down everything.

Well, the text selecting thing is akin to selecting text in Windows using the keyboard: hold down shift and use the arrow keys. This "gesture" is also what the Blackberries with trackballs use for text selection (I am desperately sad that I know this), which might be important to note.

I'm tired of speculating why Apple chose to implement some things the way they did. Apart from the obvious which we've discussed, device resources. They obviously saw fit to temper that issue with a pretty heavy hand and in a rather inflexible way. And it's obviously a big deal for those people who only want "a little" third-party multi-tasking ability.

It's likely a matter of time before you're able to do more simultaneous tasks with at least Apple's own software. Their progress has unfortunately been rather slow on the OS and built-in Apps front. All the same, it's not something you want changing every few weeks either.

Fingers crossed things get better and there's more flexibility down the road. I'm still looking forward to the day we can delete or at least hide built-in applications, including swapping out a different music playing app for the crappy "iPod" app. But I won't hold my breath. Oh, I also despise mobile Safari and wonder if they'll ever fix the poor scaling in WebKit (which also affects desktop Safari betas and Google Chrome).

I haven't read anything that says any different.

The biggest question in my mind about this release is whether anyone will even notice there's a new handset out. So far I've never heard of anyone mentioning anything about the Pre (or Palm at all) in the consumer meat-space. In contrast to the iPhone which was being mentioned by breast-feeding stay-at-home moms while out in malls months before it was ever released.

Come on, that's not a fair comparison at all. Apple could release the Apple i or the iRack and it would be the lead story on CNN. They probably spend more on advertising in a week than Palm has in the last three years. To expect the Pre to get Apple-level hype before launch is plain silly.

I did, but that rarely happens any more, thankfully.

I'm not expecting the Pre to get the level of awareness of the iPhone. However, it already has greater than the amount of hype of any iPhone release from many sources. That's the rub. While it is getting certain media attention and the attention of many analysts, it has little to no consumer mind-share. And I suspect that's not going to change dramatically in the next six months.

Get a load of this most recent blurb from analyst Trip Chowdhry, of Global Equities Research, in an interview with Reuters:



A "superior operating system" (that said analyst hasn't used and hasn't been reviewed by anyone yet) and CDMA now a better telephony technology than GSM.

Many analysts and media are seemingly pushing hard to put the Pre where the iPhone is, while deriding the iPhone in the process. Why? I'm not certain I've seen any negative press about the Pre to tell you the truth. Do you remember how much negative sentiment existed for the iPhone prior to its launch? How many predictions of failure?

Smart money in 2007 was betting that the iPhone was going to change the game. Smart money today is that the Pre isn't going to make even a ripple in the pool, even though it may turn out to be a great product and thoroughly enjoyed by its niche market consumers.

Oh boy. What is that guy on?

A large stipend from Sprint? Notice it's not just CDMA, it's "Sprint CDMA"...

Also the same thing with Android since Cupcake.

BGR with a hands-on review of the Pre

Engadget's extensive Pre review.

And Gizmodo as well.

Have you seen their Pretentious commercial?

I don't put much weight in anything Engadget nor Gizmodo ever write, so while I read E's "review," I took it with a few grains of salt. It can make a nice little phone for some people, but it's not game changing nor altering in the least.

I really can't see any reason someone would dump their iPhone for a Pre.

Some people don't have iPhones yet...

Is your irony detector malfunctioning, or do they not air Apple ads on Canadian television?

Pogue's review at the NYT is now up. He basically really likes it with two caveats. The ringer isn't loud enough, and it drains battery like crazy.



He attributes this to his house being nowhere near a Sprint tower. Regardless, his review seems to indicate that they really did make a very good phone. Not good enough that I'd consider dumping my iPhone or anything, but for my Sprint contract-locked sister who kinda wants an iPhone but doesn't care all that much, this could be exactly what the doctor ordered.

And Mossberg's review.

Lack of e-mail search will hopefully be fixed, since it's not really "universal" if it misses that.

You're joking right? Apple's ads are always about the devices. Always about the features the device offers, the software available for the devices, etc.

Pretentious is saying or implying that by using a Pre you'll somehow be more enlightened, a better person, more socially aware, etc.

The Pre commercial is total and utter nonsense and a despicable marketing crutch.

At this point (and software rev), the Pre is still "just another phone." If anyone says "Wow!" I'd have to question their grasp on reality.

I have the same complaints about the iPhone, so...

Well, my sister is getting one, but the "wow" for her boils down to her contractual lock-in with Sprint. I'll hopefully get to play with it sooner or later. So far, from what I've read, I don't see myself running out to replace my iPhone with a Pre (or with the next-gen iPhone, for that matter).

You've never watched the I'm a PC and I'm a Mac adverts then?

I'll have to ask if you're joking too then. What, in any of those commercials suggests or even hints at what I wrote about being "pretentious?"

Those commercials are for the most part about the technical aspects of the machines. Who are, unbeknownst to Microsoft, portrayed by people. MS, and I suppose some viewers, are under the impression that the people in the commercial are users of those machines, when in fact they're plainly personifications of the machines themselves.

In any case, not since the Think Different campaign has Apple's advertisement been pretentious.

I mean, the Pre commercial can be about anything. A car, a tampon, Tomato soup, a grocery store, you name it. It's generic in its message, except for the fact that using that product makes you a better person.

Palm is on the road to nothing but FAIL starting with this bullshit.

Why are you complaining about the advertisement? What difference does it make?

Buy a PC and you're boring. Buy a Mac and you're trendy. That doesn't count as pretentious enough?

Now guys, why are you feeding the troll? Let's just admit that Bruno is right about 'everything', we're wrong about everything and we can go about our business as usual.....

The calendar on this phone looks great. Plus I like the social network and instant messaging integration a lot - threading together IM and SMS between the same contact is pretty smart. Camera looks to be quite decent too. I like it!

Based on reviews and reading quite a bit of Pre related stuff it seems better than Android 1.5 at the moment and still better than Android with the HTC Hero software. Specifically I mean in terms of online network integration, attention to detail (linking up birthdays, notes, todos with alarms and notifications for example), multitasking seems a lot better (I tend to do this a lot - phone/IM while looking things up) and the hardware is nicer than current Android phones. Admittedly it won't take long for Android to improve, but the Pre is still impressive.

Annoying bits are 1) it seems that you cannot choose which Facebook Contacts are sync'd with the phone, so you'll have old school friends in your contacts list 2) no threaded GMail. I'm hoping they fix (1) asap with a simple update, and I'm just spoilt by (2) on the G1 and can live without it I guess. I'm already used to janky battery life!

Looking forward to it eventually coming out in the UK.

You are not dense enough to truly think that there's no relation between how the devices are portrayed and the not-at-all-subtle message that's sent about the users of those devices. If Macs are portrayed as hip and cool, then Mac users are portrayed as hip and cool.

Just because they say "I'm a (Mac | PC)" doesn't mean they're not also saying something about the users of those machines. Every other person I've ever talked to about this has picked up on that message (including my coworkers, 90% of whom are avid Mac users like myself.) I find it impossible to believe someone with your intellect can't pick up on this.



Alright, here's the ad. Yeah, it's new-agey and reminiscent of the hippie vibe of those old Fruitopia ads. But what about it is pretentious? Here's the narration:

My life
Like all our lives
Is made up of so many other lives
My family's lives
Friends' lives
Work life
Play life.
My life today
and my life next week.
All of them rearranging themselves.. all the time
Isn't it beautiful when life simply... flows together?


When coupled with the visual of flipping through the device, looking at contacts, calendar, etc, the message I'm left with is "this will help you get a bunch of different stuff organized." They're not saying you'll be a better person, they're saying you'll get more organized. Which is what the Palm brand was built on, right?

I guess I don't view Justin Long as hip and cool. Just average. The everyman.

The subtlety of the Get A Mac ads coupled with the overt parody and individual themes is what makes those ads work IMO. That doesn't make them pretentious, it makes them clever. Contrast this to MS's commercials, the "I'm a PC" which are anything but clever. It's just an obvious example that they simply don't understand the Mac ads nor why they work. MS did finally put together a good ad. The best I've seen in a long time from them, and a really good ad compared to the industry at large. I'm talking about the one of the kid putting together a movie and then playing it back on the family TV.

Anyway, I didn't mean to take this topic off the device itself, I was just making an observation that the Pre's sole commercial was a little lifestyle-heavy and just the type of material-goods make you a better person drivel that many critics would normally hammer with other companies. It may already be getting this type of attention, but I just haven't been around the web the past couple of days to check.

The morsels of Pre UI and device in the commercial are insignificant compared to the rolling landscape and crane shots of the synchronized performers. The usage shots are exactly what this type of device should have in a commercial. However, they aren't strong enough to differentiate the product from so many others. In the end, it's back to what I've said about the Pre, that it's not a significant step forward in any meaningful way. It doesn't do anything to alter the product category and that's likely why the ad agency had to rely on pretentiously pulling those emotional strings.

Hey, I'm ok at being the sole voice of dissension. While I love pulling for the underdog, Palm was not always the underdog. They were a big player, perhaps the 800 lbs Gorilla in the handheld space, that simply didn't innovate and eventually got clobbered.

I don't think that the Pre won't be a wonderful device for some people. I just think it's not very significant in the grand scheme of things and it's not going to be the device to strongly compete against the big players currently in the game. This is probably the main point I have that contradicts those of so many others that are vaulting the status of this product primarily to vilify Apple and Microsoft. They're just bloody handhelds, and this isn't the one that's going to solve world hunger and cure its diseases.

Players? The only other player is the iPhone. Android tried, and it may do something yet, but it's simply not there. (We may find that WebOS is in the same category, but we just don't know yet.) Blackberry is still in the 20th century. (I have a Blackberry, an 8820, assigned by work, and I'd far rather have a Treo 650. In a vein similar to yours, Bruno, I don't understand why anyone would want a Blackberry. The difference being that I've actually used one, and for a year or so.)

The big deal about the Pre is that it is, after two and a half years and three iterations, the first real competition for the iPhone. No one is saying (nonhyperbolically, anyway) that the iPhone sucks. Some may have problems with the soft keyboard, or with the lack of copy-and-paste, or the lack of multitasking, but I think we all agree that it was, if nothing else, the first of a new generation of the smartphone, and we're all happy that there's simply finally another product of the same generation, and has some distinguishing features, like a hard keyboard, for example. Especially one that doesn't use AT&T's spotty and spied-on network. Not that Sprint's network is that much better. At least all our communications aren't being forwarded to the NSA.

I hate to thread hijack or anything, but there were some comments here about Gmail not being properly threaded on WebOS, a problem shared with the iPhone. My solution to this, for now anyway, is that I've been switching back and forth between the Gmail web app and the native Mail app (e.g., using the web app for indicating spam, starring messages, search, etc.). This approach seems to be working, but it's still annoying to need to flip back and forth.

Anybody else have a better solution?

Also, driving even farther away from our unproductive flame-fest, has anybody tried the Gmail-as-Exchange-Server thing for the iPhone? I still haven't bitten the bullet and done it. I'm curious where it's going to cause me grief versus where I'm going to love it.

I haven't used the Google provided Gmail->Exchange service. I do however use the http://www.nuevasync.com/ service that does the same thing. It is free, at the moment and works very well.

I only use it for calendar syncing though, my email is on my own IMAP server, so I use the iPhone IMAP client to access that.

I apologize, but I feel the need to chime in and say that this is the exact reason I went with the G1. Despite all its faults, there isn't a phone in existence at this point that handles GMail better. I get threaded conversations, all my labels, stars, etc. The G1 has its faults, but nothing does GMail better.

I apologize, but I couldn't tell if your post was about finding a software or hardware solution to this issue. It was probably software, though, in which case I apologize again for the unhelpful response.

There's nothing subtle in the least with those ads.

As for the Pre ad, I'd like to share a good definition of "pretentious:"

I suppose the Pre ad comes across as a little self-important, but I kind of like the message they're trying to impart.

I have no beef with the iPhone commercials. Bruno is correct in that they pretty much serve to get across what the phone can do and how you could use it, and they do so in a nice, straightforward manner. I like them quite a bit. However, I believe they exist in this form only because the iPhone's the hit that it is. When (if) there's significant competition, we'll see what kind of advertising they trot out.

Because the word you guys are looking for when it comes to typical Apple advertising is not pretentious: it's "smug." This has been a big factor for me personally in why I've chosen to stay away from Apple products. I simply can't stand smugness.

So, yeah, the iPhone hype was big, but I don't remember people driving through storefront windows to get their hands on one!

Amusing Pre easter egg.

Heh, that's cute. I saw the ROM was leaked on the Pre forums earlier today, and I downloaded it just in case it disappeared quickly. Hopefully, this opens the door for tethering, the lack of which is, at this point, the main thing keeping me from hopping on board the Pre train.

There are other concerns I have, of course. A lot of former Blackberry/Treo users have had some difficulty getting used to the smaller keyboard, but others say it's fine, and a few iPhone owners have popped in to say their Pre typing speed is already on par with their iPhone speed. Some users are saying the battery barely gets them through the day, though in my experience, most devices get better after the first few charge cycles, so we'll have to see how reports are in a couple weeks. The PIM apps are pretty spartan at this point, certainly something that will be addressed in the future. And, of course, the myriad reports of crashes, spontaneous reboots, hardware failures, etc. that come with any first-gen device in the early going.

But, all-in-all, I think it's got a lot of potential, and if the initial estimates of 50-100k units are accurate, the launch certainly made a big (though not iPhone-sized) splash.

And the iPhone and G1 have better battery life after software updates. I think power management is a low priority when trying to rush these devices out the door. I wouldn't be surprised to see better battery life in the upcoming 1.1 release or another one down the line.

Frankly, I'm not surprised by the battery life of any of these devices. I was thinking about this recently, and I think that every smartphone I've had has really had about the same battery performance. I just didn't notice it before the G1, because I didn't use my other smartphones nearly as much. I've had the Blackberry Curve, Treo 700W, Treo 650, Treo 600, and the Sony Ericsson P900. None of these got me through the entire day if I really used them. I just happened to usually get through an entire day because those "smartphones" were such a chore to do anything fun/useful on that I ended up minimizing my use of them.

Example: my Curve probably had the best battery life of the smartphones I've used, but once I started using it in the car to play music/podcasts, and once I found a half-way decent browser and a couple good applications for it, I'd easily run the battery down before I got home in the evening.

And this discovery in the ROM had me (and a few others here in the office this morning) in stitches.

…

That's the same one that Tom posted.

Damn! Missed that post of his. Sorry!

The Pre is DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!

Palm really should have found a way to put a D-pad on there...

Well, with the discovery of a crude but acceptable tethering solution, I ran out of excuses to avoid taking the Pre plunge. Every store in the area was out, so I'm 7th on the list at the local Sprint store.

The hacking community for the Pre is really coming into its own, and so far, Palm's been pretty laissez-faire about it. So far folks are tweaking the built-in apps, messing around with the device's internals, and all of the other fun things we used to do on the empeg so many years ago. I think it'll be a fun device to play with, and hopefully it works okay as a phone, too.

<hybrid8>You idiot, what are you thinking!?!?!!?</hybrid8>

Consumers buying a Pre aren't idiots. Ed Colligan and Roger Macnamee were douche bags for spouting BS and the Pre is just another phone among many.

What I would not feel comfortable with doing however, is running a hacked tethering option on Sprint which they're likely going to shut down before it even gets mildly popular.

Palm themselves have already threatened that they may have to take legal action to force the shutdown of the wiki where the hacking and tethering were first discussed if the tethering talk isn't eliminated.

BTW, the iPhone 3GS, which is officially out in three days, has seemingly already sold many more units than the Pre in the US. It's a good thing that the Pre isn't competing with the iPhone but instead the Blackberry. I do find it incredible though, considering AT&T is so utterly crap by all accounts.

It looks like it might be quite the cat and mouse game till someone figures out how to disable the forced upgrades on the phone.

The tethering support for now is much like it was in the early days of the iPhone, via SOCKS proxy. I wonder how long it will be till the PDANet people get something working. They might have a head start if the classic side can somehow get access to the USB port.

Both of my two-year Sprint contracts had language saying tethering was verboten. Four years later, I'm still a happy Sprint customer, and tethering still works just fine. Judging by the Treocentral and Pre Central forums, there are millions of users like me who've never had a problem, and only a handful of folks who've been banned for abuse/overuse. Why would they start cracking down now?

Yeah, they're free to do whatever they want, whether it's applying pressure on the wiki admins or updating the firmware in the future to block tethering. But I don't see why they'd be concerned about light volume tethering using a not-at-all-user-friendly hack that only a small subset of users will bother to deal with. If they block it and there are no workarounds, I'll complain, but I'll live.

My hunch is that Sprint doesn't want tethering to be user-friendly, as I'm sure they want to sell their mobile broadband cards/plans. But with Apple's giant head start in terms of application availability, I think they'll want to take a hands-off approach to most hacking efforts.

In the end, even if Sprint decides to get Gung Ho about blocking tethering, I think the hackers will win as they usually do, and I'll have some mechanism for tethered EVDO access when I really need it.

The sad thing is that tethering on my old Motorola KRZR is a trivial Bluetooth setting, and I used it all the time, whereas tethering on these smartphones is a serious issue, yet I hardly ever feel the need to tether any more.

I'll be curious to see how things go with the forced upgrade issue. Sure, the hackers will probably find ways to get ghetto tethering going again. The real question is, how many people are willing to jump through the hoops every time to get it working? I got lucky on the iPhone twice now regarding tethering, but it's not something I depend on or expect to still work tomorrow. First, I was able to snag NetShare off the app store, providing the same ghetto tethering via SOCKS, and allowing basic connectivity. The biggest issue that method has is that there is no way to VPN with it, and it's tricky on OS X to get SOCKS wrappers working to allow other non proxy able apps to work. Then somehow during the 3.0 beta cycle, the official tethering via USB or Bluetooth started working. This is still going for me, even with the 3.0 GM build cleanly restored onto the phone, so for now I've got full tethering. If it goes away tomorrow, oh well.

I just wish the carriers would allow tethering on a daily basis, instead of charging so much more for it on a monthly basis. The rare times I need tethering are usually when I am stuck with paying for crappy hotel internet.

Like you, I rarely feel the need to tether, but when I need it, I need it. Sometimes I'm in a hotel and their free LAN/wifi access is garbage, or I'm in an airport that wants to hit me for $9 to use the wifi for an hour before my flight. In many of these situations, using my phone will be good enough, but sometimes if I need to type a long-ish email, tethering is very useful. But not $30/month useful! And that's, I think, why Sprint has been hands-off with light tethering -- they know they're not going to get the light user to pay for a mobile broadband plan anyway.

I'd gladly pay $5 for an officially-supported tethering plan with a pretty low bandwidth cap, but such a plan doesn't exist, so I'm gonna go the unofficial route like I always have. If they want to keep me as a customer (the early termination fee is less than the cost difference between Sprint and AT&T service, and Verizon is getting the Pre in six months) they'll let me do it.

Pretty much the only times in the past year, since I got my iPhone, that I've wanted to tether was when I had a laptop full of work, fresh off the plane, that I wanted to sync with the outside world. More than once, I've found my way to the Continental President's Club, where the members-only WiFi leaks conveniently out through the walls.

Apple sez "hey, Pre, stop bitin' mah s**t."

Link about how the USB PID/VID changes when in media sync mode. For lazy people that don't want to go through the links.

I guess Palm didn't want the expense to make their own music syncing software that worked along side iTunes. You can still copy tracks directly to the Pre in mass storage mode though, right?

I'd expect Apple to refine its device detection to make sure that the correct iPods are being recognized. Note that this is different than "blocking the Pre" - that's what I'd do in their shoes anyway. Of course Palm can just back out the hack they have in there now, especially since it can be argued to be a DMCA violation.

Not sure what you mean by "along side iTunes", but it comes with Amazon's MP3 downloader thingie, which someone recently figured out how to hack to download songs over the EVDO connection. Probably won't make Sprint happy if they notice that.

Yeah, you can just copy songs over.

It's definitely in the DMCA violation neighborhood, so I expected this type of response. Frankly, I don't care one bit about iTunes sync, so it's no big deal to me if Apple successfully nukes it for the Pre.

What I mean, is that iTunes is an enormous development expense. It's also long established as the market leading music management application. Palm could not afford the expense of time nor money to make their own music management application. That much is obvious.

But instead of making their own bridging application that could look at one's iTunes music collection and then shuttle the appropriate files to the Pre, they went ahead and just implemented the current hack.

They could have also gone a different route and licensed SongBird. But they thought it would be easier and more convenient to leverage Apple's investment and property.

On that topic, I'm totally with you. Complete dickmove on Palm's part, and I hope that when the dust settles they officially support something legit.

FWIW, people have both Songbird and Amarok working just fine with the Pre now, but it'd be nice to see Palm officially support them in the future.

I'm a bit bothered by the fact that Palm is now trying to paint Apple in a negative light regarding their iTunes support docs and with regards to the prospect of the Pre not being supported in iTunes in the future.

I'd love to see them publicly disclose exactly how they "engineered" the Pre's iTunes compatibility in the first place. Your geek types know, but the general public won't, so it would be easy for Palm to continue to point the finger at Apple.

Is there some type of onus now, that when your application, designed to interface only with your own hardware, becomes popular enough, that you have to start putting in support for other vendors' hardware?

Really, if Palm don't want to sell a phone where people have to manually copy tracks over a USB mass storage connection, then they should develop their own application or LICENSE someone else's. If they want to pay to license iTunes connectivity, then let them approach Apple with that. BUt in the end it's Apple's call and they shouldn't be made to look like dicks because they're protecting their own work and revenue streams.

I'm afraid I need to disagree with you. Palm engineering the Pre to "lie" about being an iPod is really no different than the way browsers "lie" about themselves by claiming to be one another in the user-agent string. E.g., IE 6 calls itself "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; InfoPath.1)".

If Palm was somehow arranging to play Apple's DRM'ed content, then that would represent a significantly different position, but Palm is quite clear they don't support this. Instead, by building the Palm to be a drop-in replacement for an iPod, then they work great with iTunes and presumably with other non-Apple music managers.

My non-lawyer opinion of interesting legal questions:

- Did Palm illegally reverse-engineer Apple technologies? This is probably more of a click-wrap issue than a DMCA issue, since they don't support Apple DRM content.

- Did Palm violate any Apple patents? We know Apple's already rattled around on this issue.

My guess is that the two companies end up signing a patent cross-licensing deal that explicitly allows Palm to be iTunes-compatible as they are now. Unclear which way the money would actually flow, but given that Palm has its own stack of patents, both companies would be crazy to try to litigate.

I wonder what it would cost them to purchase the rights to Rio Music Manager? Or would that even be useful to them?

tanstaafl.

I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't need any Palm patents for anything, considering their Newton device had a ton or IP and predates the Palm products. I can't see too much coming over from the older Palm IP that would be useful for the iPhone and iPods. On the other hand, I think Palm is definitely going to step on some Apple patents at some point. Anyway, all that's moot, since I wasn't inferring any patent issues. My personal belief is also that all software patents should be eliminated and that no patents ever be issued on software again, but that's a topic for another time.

Palm are reporting their device as being an Apple product. That includes using the trademarks "Apple" and 'iPod" in their product strings. They are also violating USB rules by misrepresenting their product's descriptors. Pretty sure you won't find a USB logo on the Palm product since you're not allowed to use one if you break the USB agreements.

This tactic is completely different than browsers lying. Browsers aren't leveraging the IP of another company when they misrepresent their IDs. BTW, I'm not aware that any current browser does this anymore anyway. It's frowned upon in the browser domain, but in this case it's a matter of a hardware vendor trying to promote their product by leveraging the millions of dollars spent by Apple on iTunes. They're leveraging both Apple's development efforts as well as marketing efforts. So Palm are trying to get for free what other vendors must pay licensing fees for (iPod accessories).

This is their line of thinking "Why bother developing our own software when we can just use Apple's?" - Why didn't they do the same thing to be able to use the Zune software? Why did they do anything at all considering mass storage mode allows manual copying?

They're trying to ride Apple's coat tales here and IMO, they need to pay some financial reparations to make this right. I'm sure Apple won't accept any money from them and will simply maintain that iTunes supports only iPods. It's easy enough to make the Pre stop working with iTunes, it's just a matter of how this will play out in the media in my opinion. Will Apple look evil? And are they willing to take that chance?

Well, no, but isn't it true that under law there is an onus on you when you're the market leader, that you're not allowed to deliberately disable other vendors' products when they've made them compatible with yours?

Although I've only a limited amount of sympathy for Palm here, seeing as their interoperability technique only enables Itunes interoperability with Palm hardware -- they're guilty of exactly the same thing for which they want to portray Apple as evil. The Right Answer here would be some sort of driver that presents any mass-storage player as having the Ipod VID and PID in order to enable Itunes synchronisation.

Peter

That is the looked up VID/PID.


More people have iTunes. The iTunes/iPod database format is well known despite the attempts by Apple to lock people out.

I hate to say this, but try thinking of this problem like a lawyer and not a technologist. Palm can only get in trouble if:

- they misrepresent their product (e.g., saying it's iTunes compatible when it's not)

- they violated a click-wrap agreement that had contractual language that they violated (and that would make for a fun legal battle)

- they violated the DMCA (which would, likewise, make for a fun legal battle)

- they violated Apple copyrights in some fashion (e.g., they borrowed code from iTunes or from an iPod)

- they violated Apple patents

- they're misusing Apple's trademarks

- they stole trade secrets from Apple

I'm probably forgetting some things, but none of these legal issues are anywhere in the ballpark of "Palm is riding on Apple's coattails". That's not intrinsically illegal. The false USB identifier thing may be an issue with the USB Implementor's Forum (or it's Compliance Committee), but they're not Apple.

So long as Palm isn't using any of Apple's trademarks, and so long as they're didn't use some kind of insider information from Apple, then there's nothing legally wrong with what they've done. If anything, they're doing their customers a favor by being plug-compatible with a popular tool for managing tunes.

Again, I fail to see any reason that Palm owes Apple anything. If anything, Apple should try to encourage other media players to offer similar levels of compatibility with iTunes, rather than potentially getting itself into an anti-competitive position by tying iTunes together with iPods.

(Arguably, they should also let iTunes purchase tunes as easily from other stores as from the iTunes Store, but I don't see that happening any time soon, unless somebody like the EU antitrust busters comes after them.)

iTunes works with Rio devices and several others. The article is no longer updated, but iTunes 8.2 still has the code in there for these devices.


I haven't really seen anything to prove Apple is specifically trying to lock people out. The format has changed over time, but this is no different then major versions of other software changing it's structure of data files. Their stance on 3rd party iTunes tools seems to be very similar to the Apple TV hacking. Feel free to do it, but Apple makes no guarantee or effort to ensure backwards compatibility.

Palm is riding coat tails by relying on Apple's technology and investment in iTunes and iPod to provide a music platform for their Pre product instead of investing in developing their own technology for that purpose.

I wasn't making an argument for illegality, but what they've done is scummy as hell and a downright embarrassment for such a large commercial entity.

iTunes does work with a few other devices. Those devices, such as the Nomad, were licensed for operation with iTunes before Apple came out with the iPod and while Apple was still actively licensing this ability.

Pretending to be an iPod is NOT how you make something compatible. The Pre is not compatible with iTunes in the least. iPods are compatible with iTunes and the Pre is simply pretending to be a specific iPod.

Apple's music, purchased through iTunes, now that it lacks DRM, is fully compatible with many players, as long as they can play AAC. It would make no financial sense for Apple to allow iTunes to access any other music store. I don't think any case can be made legally to try and change this, nor do I think there should be (in case anyone is thinking of some new law because of the current situation). Likewise, I don't believe existing laws would be able to open the iTunes music store up to other applications or other parties. That would be like trying to force Amazon to allow their web site to function for purchases from Barnes and Noble (without giving Amazon a cut).

Apple got to where it is today in the music industry and player market through innovation, hard work, timing (which wasn't an accident) and persistence. If Palm or anyone else wants their products to work with iTunes then approach Apple and work through official channels.

If an unofficial method needed to be implemented, then they should have at least written some program for each platform they support their phone on to communicate with iTunes (or additional music managers), to find out where the music is and then shuttle it themselves to their device. This can be accomplished quite easily on Mac OS with nothing more than AppleScript and in Windows I believe you can accomplish it with Javascript. Or, they could have even just read Apple's plain text XML which details the music location.

Those approaches would have been fine. Pretending to be someone else's device is a cop out and it should be disabled by Palm before it gets remedied by Apple.

They added a hash to the iPod database specifically to block people from using something other than iTunes.

They added a hash to the DAAP protocol to stop you streaming from iTunes if you're not Apple or Roku.

Neither of those apply to the iTunes database format. The point Bruno was making earlier is that Palm could have written their own app that reads the iTunes database to find where the music files are, and sync them to the device.

I did miss your earlier comment about the iPod database, and I do remember that specific "lockout". To me, it still seems like it was a change to help with DB integrity between the iPod and iTunes, as it contained the iPod device ID and a signature from the iTunes DB along with some other numbers. Had Apple been sitting there making the change only to lock out 3rd party sync tools, they could have easily changed it every version of iTunes. They haven't changed it beyond that one time though.

The DAAP thing is annoying to me, as it simply pushed it deeper into being a proprietary protocol. DLNA seems to have become the standard for streaming media across a local network, and it's a standard Apple has continued to ignore.

Ah. Sorry. I meant the iPod database and not the internal iTunes one. If you're going to the effort of making an app that looks inside the iTunes DB, finds the relevant playlists + music and syncs it then you might as well bolt on a GUI and make a preTunes app. The Palm method is basically a hack. They get to use iTunes as the desktop app and they just need to make a basic player on the Pre.


iTunes already knows if you're trying to sync with an iPod that it doesn't manage. The only thing the hash did was prevent a third party app from creating/modifying the iPod database.

To find out where the music is you don't even need to look into the actual iTunes DB. You only need to look at the XML backup which is much easier to parse.

Doesn't make it not suck, though...

On MacOS only, and note that all those supported devices are ones which were released and/or popular before the Ipod was released and/or popular. (No Forge, no Nitrus, no Karma.) That wasn't an open-kimono policy, that was an attempt to remove a roadblock from potential Windows-to-Mac switchers.

Peter

Not quite relatedly, I've never before found myself hoping th...tly invented it.

Peter

Even more reason for Palm not to rely on it and a sure sign that they could obviously make something much better. Of course there's the flip-side, which is that no one in the software industry has made anything better yet.

So yeah, I agree it does have some sucky bits, but it's the least sucky program of its kind.

And for Peter, yeah, more proof that software patents should simply not exist. I actually have prior art (myself) which predates anything iTunes is based on, including the work done by the guys that pressured Apple into paying them a settlement for patent violations involving iTunes and some software they never actually created, but supposedly showed off ideas for at a tradeshow.

I should probably contact Apple to see if they want to reverse that and get their money and royalties back - I shopped my idea around on the net in the very early 90's, including sending descriptions and artwork to a number of prospective partners. I'm not saying definitively that this other company based all their designs on mine, but it's certainly in the realm of possibility and at least as plausible as Apple having copied them for iTunes.

I find that very, very hard to believe. Though admittedly I haven't played with the competition for very long AS I AM STUCK WITH USING ITUNES BECAUSE THAT IS THE ONLY THING AVAILABLE TO SYNC MY IPHONE (mainly because Apple have gone out of their way to make it hard for anything other than iTunes to talk to the iPhone).

Sorry for the shouting, I really don't like iTunes. At least after 8.2 it is finally reasonably reliably syncing my phone, I had a period of a couple of months where it would _always_ fail mid sync. Now it only fails sometimes.

I don't have now nor have I ever had those problems with iTunes, so that's not the type of thing I'm referring to when I say there are some sucky bits.

I'd say that your issue is not an inherent problem with the iTunes design nor implementation however, otherwise there would be thousands and thousands of complaints about the same issue. There has likely been a solvable problem there and it's something that Apple's support should have been able to work with you to fix. At least you'd have been entitled to have them try.

I don't think I've tried all the music software either, but I have tried SongBird, Media Monkey, that JR program, MusicMatch, software from Creative which I can't remember the name for and a few others that I also can't remember the name of. This related only to apps that can actually manage a collection, so I don't include the older versions of WinAmp that I've used and I have no idea how it's progressed over the years since I stopped using it - I don't really listen to audio on my computer, so that part's not really a top feature for me (though iTunes handles playback quite well anyway).

I found iTunes sucky long before it started failing to sync. That was just the icing on the cake.

I always found iTunes sucky on my previous attempts to use it. It worked quite well for my party playlist though (although I needed a 3rd party app to export an m3u playlist). Not a convert but definitely a lot less sucky than it used to be.

All versions of iTunes prior to 7.0 were crap and I simply went without using any music management app. No "album" functionality so it was just a mess of loose tracks in a list view.

Aha! That's the main reason I disliked iTunes. I'd forgotten. I remember now that the default sort for me was Artist-Album ordered. But once you got it to sort another way, it was impossible to get back. I have no need for it now since I have SlimServer, but it's good to know.

I've had slimserver for years, why have I never used it to generate playlists????

I use iTunes primarily for tag cleaning, including adding album artwork, with the ultimate destination for the music being Slim Center.

It's also a good way to browse my collection to make sure that everything is showing up in Slim.

Finally tried out a Pre today at the local Sprint store prior to getting my 3GS. First impressions were good, with the interface working decently. Multitasking worked, and the phone was responsive enough, though it did chug from time to time, even with most apps closed. Probably a 1.0 thing that I'm sure will improve, especially considering the Pre is very similar spec wise to the 3GS.

The first annoyance came though when it was time to type something. The keyboard is pretty bad. The keys are just way too tiny, and I was finding that I mashed a lot of keys at once frequently. Interestingly, it seemed like the phone does seem to have software to prevent issues when multiple keys are mashed, but this wasn't 100%. Over time, I don't see myself growing into the keyboard as well as I did the virtual one on the iPhone. What was really bad was when it came time to type symbols. I gave up on typing my BBS password in pretty quickly.

Overall, the experience was good, and if I didn't already own an iPhone (and now a new one), I'd consider it above a Blackberry or Windows phone. I'd want a better keyboard though to be really happy with it long term.

I got my Pre on Friday. Here are my thoughts/experiences so far.

I'll start with the really frustrating part. The first unit I got had an area of discoloration in the corner of the screen. Basically, it was brighter than the rest of the screen, and as I'd use the unit more, it would become more noticeable and distracting.

I went back to the store on Saturday morning to exchange it, but they were all out, so they said they'd order me one. I called a few other Sprint stores in the area, and one of them said they were all reserved for people on the waiting list, but when I told them my story, they said they'd do an exchange for me.

So, I do the exchange, and the new one doesn't have any of the discoloration problems. However, on my way home, I check the screen some more and realize there's a different problem -- a dead pixel. Yeah, one stinking dead pixel. I go back to the first Sprint store, and the Palm rep is there hawking Pres. She says that she had never seen the discoloration problem, but had seen a couple of units with dead pixels. I told the Sprint rep to keep my original order for a replacement unit, since I wasn't going to deal with a dead pixel on a phone that's costing me nearly a grand factoring in the extra cost of my plan.

So, hopefully, the third time will be charm, and some time soon I'll have a Pre in my possession with a pristine screen. I don't know if it's just my bad luck or if these problems are very common, but it's certainly something I recommend being very careful about if you decide to buy one.

Now, onto my impressions of the device itself.

The OS is basically what everyone says it is. Loaded with potential, still a bit rough around the edges, but ultimately very usable and natural. I don't think the value of true multitasking can be overstated -- it's one of those "how did I ever do without it" things that I'd have a hard time giving up if I decided the Pre wasn't for me.

The built-in apps are a bit spartan, but will improve over time. Basic functionality is there, but expert options/customization are not. The camera works well, but the flash isn't really bright enough to be useful unless you're in a nightclub or something, and video recording is absent (but Palm has confirmed it's coming.) The push IMAP works fine, but the email client could benefit from some flexibility in terms of notification options, display preferences, etc. The Sprint navigation app works surprisingly well, though I found at least one inaccuracy in the map data (Google Maps is also available and works well, but doesn't have the voice prompting for turn-by-turn, or a 3D map view.)

The 3rd party apps are limited now, but there are some good ones. Pandora is obviously a highlight, but the Fandango and Flixster apps for movies are solid as well. The quality is good so far; it's quantity is lacking.

My typing speed is basically where it was at on my Treo, except for the fact that I can use KeyCaps600 on my Treo to do capitals and numbers/symbols more quickly through double-tap and tap-and-hold. Hopefully something equivalent comes out for WebOS. My average Pre typing speed at mobiletypingtest.com was about 30-35 wpm, a number I think will get better as I get used to differences from the Treo keyboard.

The battery life so far is less than what I was hoping for, but users generally report things get a lot better after the first few days as the battery is calibrated.

Ultimately, there are a lot of things that just don't feel finished, and I guess that's to be expected of a 1.0 device, but some of them are just plain puzzling. There's a "back" gesture that works in almost all apps, but no "forward" gesture anywhere. There's no option to turn the screen off when the Pre is connected to the Touchstone charger. The accelerometer works to turn web pages to landscape mode, but then the back gesture doesn't work because the orientation is different. Things like that.

On the hardware itself, two things that I'm having a tough time with coming from my Treo are the lack of a D-pad or 5-way navigator and the capacitive screen. There's a "cursor movement" mode where you hold the Orange button down and move on the screen, but it is no substitute for a true D-pad or dedicated cursor keys.

Re: the screen, on my Treo, I can get really accurate cursor positioning with my fingernail, but on the Pre, I'm limited to what I can get with my fingers. Maybe I'll get used to these limitations and learn to love the new screen, but to me, I don't know that the benefits of multitouch really make up for these two weaknesses. Certainly, if you're going to sacrifice the ability to use a stylus/fingernail on the screen, at least make the multitouch useful by adding more and richer gestures.

So, overall, with all of its warts and yet-unrealized potential, this is without a doubt the smartphone for me. Something more ideal could possibly come around, but of the available options, it's the only one that was worth the cost for me to upgrade. I do think it's incumbent upon Palm to support the device, and on that front, things look good so far, as they've announced SDK availability by the end of summer, and have already pushed out 2 OS updates since the launch. With the homebrew scene already coming out with some great hacks, I think things really look good for this device and the WebOS platform going forward.

Tony, hopefully for Pre customers, Palm will be able to survive and flourish on limited device sales. I do think they need to move their product to additional networks to even hang on in the top 5 though.

Palm moved some 100k devices in their first weekend. Apple just moved 1 million 3Gs in the first weekend for a phone, that to many, was only marginally different than the previous version.

Palm only *had* 100k devices in the supply chain the first weekend. Two weeks after the launch, every Sprint store in my area is still sold out, and has a waiting list at least a dozen deep. Would they have sold a million Pres if there were no shortages? No, but to blame lack of sales on a lack of excitement about the phone is, at best, an incomplete explanation.

Verizon's already announced they'll be getting a WebOS phone (maybe not the Pre) once the exclusive period runs out at the end of this year.

But yeah, Apple is the king of smartphones right now, and nothing will change that in the near future. All I said when this thread started was that Apple should take the Pre seriously, and I stand by that statement now that I own one.

This has been my long-term beef with all "smart phones" that have physical keyboards. The process of logging in to any system with a reasonably secure password is a nightmare.

Aside from the issue of not being able to "see" the entirety of a WEP key while I'm typing it (discussed in an old thread), logging in to a resource with a password on the iPhone is a breeze. Sure you have to toggle between a numbers screen, a symbols screen, and the alphabet, but at least you can SEE which of those character groups you're currently using and clearly see which character you're hitting. With most of the physical-keyboard smart phones, you've got no idea at any moment if you're in shift mode or function mode or whatever, and even if you did, whether or not that current mode is going to produce the desired special character.

I'd heard Palm had 250k phones available (which included Best Buy locations). Problems with supply chain can end a company just as quickly as a lack-luster product. I don't think I read that all locations had sold out on the first weekend, so if they were truly limited to 100k phones, that means their sales numbers where even lower than common estimates. Regardless, having only 100k or even 250k phones ready for a launch that had been planned for so long is a real, and very serious, issue.

If you correlate sales to mindshare, I do think Palm has done better than the iPhone with these two weekends however. I suppose it doesn't mean much, but I can't imagine you'll even find 1 person that knows what a Pre is out of every 100 "normal people" that know what an iPhone is. Despite this, they managed a 1/10th sales rate. When you factor in this complete lack of awareness, the numbers seem pretty good. May not be good enough to pay back Elevation Partners at the rate they expect though.

I think Apple should take all competition seriously, but I maintain that they need to keep a closer eye on the established RIM Blackberry and the Android platform from other established players like Motorola. Palm has never been a big dog in the mobile communications space. While I think the Pre and perhaps a follow-on product will increase their share relative to where it was prior, I don't think any of the big players, including RIM have much to worry about. It's showing to be an extremely niche product and the road to change that seems very steep and a difficult climb for Palm given how they have gone about with their Pre roll-out.

BTW, how's the camera on the Pre? People are raving about the one on the 3Gs and frankly, I'm questioning their sanity. In the examples I've seen, the real showcase is the talent of the photographer first and foremost and the device's software. In the end you still have a crappy sensor and a crappy lens to deal with. The result is extremely grainy photos that don't really look very good unless down-sampled by photo editing or presentation software (such as Flickr). I think these folks aren't looking at the large or 1:1 versions of the images.

BTW, all (recent) reports indicate that Palm's exclusivity agreement with Sprint is longer than 6 months, though neither party has come forward with a specific time-frame. I also think the ATT deal is seriously holding back Apple's sales numbers, though probably not revenue. I'd love to see the phone sold unlocked just like any other device from them, but $599-$699 would be a hard pill to swallow for most people. I don't think the price elasticity stretches that far.

For a camera phone, I think it's pretty good, but it's still a camera phone. Indoor shots are grainy, sunny outdoor shots are a bit less grainy. This thread has some pics people have taken... Some of them are nice, others are bad. If you find the ones in the original 3MP resolution, most or all of them have some level of digital noise visible. It's not going to replace anyone's digital camera, but it takes better pictures than any other camera phone I've used.

I think most of the raving is due to it actually having a variable focus. It's possible to actually read text clearly, and the touch focus is handy (much like the feature on several touch screen digital cameras). Most of my camera phone pictures are either whiteboard shots, or attempts at product labels for serial numbers.

Tom, I agree, the implementation of the touch focus is pretty cool and that's what I meant by the software. I'm just not drinking the coolaid that some others are obviously swimming in. I've seen multiple times people saying that they'd have to seriously question ever buying another point and shoot camera again after using the 3Gs. That's a pretty bold statement when you have small pocket P&S cameras like the Elph series from Canon which produce really great shots, have usable zoom though wide and tele ranges, stabilization on some models and of course sometimes a decent set of manual controls if you need them. Images at the camera's full resolution look better than anything I've seen from the 3Gs at 1:1, and lastly, if you take any of the photos from these pocket cameras and down-sample them to 3MP they can even look dramatically better.

Maybe people surfing Flickr and Facebook don't care because all they'll ever look at are 320 pixel wide thumbnails (like viewing the image on the iPhone's screen).

It seems like every few months you hear about someone inventing/prototyping or releasing some new amazing sensor and lens package suitable for a mobile device, but I can't recall ever seeing these amazing components making it into things like the iPhone. I've been saying for at least 6 or 7 years that Apple should integrate a camera with their iPods.

I'm pretty sure that if focus could be corrected through software alone, that feature would have been added to every picture-taking device in the world.

People like having a cheap camera available at all times for snapshots. Few people are likely to carry a camera around with them all the time. Adding focus capability to a camera phone is significant. I don't know that anyone else has done it.

I definitely don't see these new phone cameras replacing point and shoots, but I could definitely see the 3Gs putting an enormous dent in the Flip's sales.

Pretty much. People don't care about actually getting a good photo. They just want to "capture the moment" even if thats an fuzzy, out of focus and grainy photo.

People have been saying for years that now they've got a camera in their phone, they're not going to bother buying/using a proper digital camera. *shrug*

I've tried the various phone cameras and found them to be blunt crap. I'll still carry around a compact digital to get photos. My friends still go on about how my photos are better quality than theirs. They've not noticed that I'm not using a phone camera I guess...

I'm sure the DSLR people are thinking that my compact digital photos are crap. Its good enough for me and I'm guessing thats what people think about the phone cameras.

The focus interface, the extremely cool part, is done through software. Apart from being able to simply focus on things that are relatively close to you (as opposed to a permanent setting of infinity on a small lens), it's the way the focusing works from a UI standpoint that's so cool.

Not only because of focusing, but also metering, which makes it possible to capture photos with the 3Gs that were previously impossible with the older sets.

BTW, the people that I was referring to were certainly not talking about the 3Gs' ability to simply capture moments. They were genuinely impressed with the quality of the photos. I suppose if taken in the context of other camera phones they may be great, but they're not P&S level. Not even at the level of a sub-$200 P&S.

In terms of convenience, I agree, nice to have it around. But if you want/need better quality, even if only a little better, then you're carrying a camera as well and the one in the iPhone is largely duplicated and unused. It's going to be cool for live barcode scanning though.

...or to merely take pictures in low light.

So the fact that it can do something no other camera phone can do isn't relevant, but the user interface to it is?

Quite a few phones have variable focus, including the G1 and N95. It looks like one of the earliest phones to have it was the mova P505iS, released in late 2003. How they handled the focus is another question, and I'm not sure if any other phone has done the tap to focus.

Oh, I forgot to reply to this. Unlike Tom, I couldn't name any specific variable focus phones, but I do know that a number of them exist, including I believe, at least a couple of models from Samsung. Samsung might also be the only ones I remember using one of those lauded sensors I mentioned earlier. I remember them having 5 and 8MP models with auto focus and a real flash for instance.

The fact the iPhone 3Gs has focusing ability however doesn't make the pictures any less grainy. Great if you're going after that Monet look (need to see the images direct from camera, 1:1).

Nice review. Makes me more impatient for its release on Verizon.

I did a hands-on with the Pre at a Sprint store. My first impressions after years of Treo 650 use:

Nice hardware! Fits the hand perfectly.

"Gummy" keyboard not great; keys not raised enough. Can be overcome.

Gesture area is awesome.

Intuitive UI, once you remember about gesturing.

Multitask is fast, intuitive, and simply awesome.

A tiny bit slow to respond sometimes.

"Weighted" momentium scrolling is too fast/light. I always prefer absolute input (keyboard shortcuts) over relative input (mouse and weighted scrolling).

Retained some classic design elements, like choosing appointment time from a vertical list.

"EDIT > COPY", first entry on every menu.

Small web text looks fine.

Haha, "self portrait mirror" stashed behind slide out.

I'm a little confused. I've used a Blackberry and a G1 in the last couple years, and both have their different ways of telling you which mode you're in. After that, knowing what character is going to appear is a matter of simply looking at the keyboard. What's so confusing about that?

I don't recall how it worked on my old Treos, but I'd be willing to bet that those phones had a way of informing you of the current mode.

These comments about "I'll never get another point&shoot" are pretty interesting. I think this is one of those "128kbit MP3s are all anybody ever needs" kinds of things. For many people, they really and truly don't need 12 megapixels of glorious high-resolution low-noise expensive-glass D-SLR goodness, and phones are now getting good enough to do the job. (I've made 4x6 prints from my iPhone 3G and they look every bit as good as 4x6 prints from anything else, but I wouldn't try to blow them up, and I lucked out in terms of getting proper exposure from the get-go.)

My very first digital camera (a Canon G1, circa late 2000) was three megapixels and I loved that thing. Unsurprisingly, phones with three megapixels are enough for many people's needs.

As such, I'd expect the low-end point-and-shoot market, the $100 cheapo models, to suffer. I have less worry about the $250+ nerdy models with HD video, high-ISO performance, and so forth. While some of the cell phone vendors are integrating "real" lens systems and sensors, this increases thickness. Hard to say how that will all shake out.

I wouldn't worry about the D-SLR market. "Serious" photographers will always be looking to step up to something that doesn't fit in their pocket.

The Treo 650 clearly and consistently indicates what mode the keyboard is in. In the lower left of every window, there's a symbol for shift (arrow), caps lock (underlined arrow), num/symbol (circle), or num/symbol lock (underlined circle).

This has been carried forward to the Pre, perhaps more clearly yet less consistently. It shows the symbol right near the cursor, bringing it closer to your attention.

Unlike the consumer-grade phones which don't care to preserve consistency of input and OS through the years, the Pre keyboard is very familiar to Palm users and the drastically advanced OS has even maintained some similarities. They make the transition, and user retention, easy.

It isn't just about how many megapixels the camera is though. The quality & size of the sensor and the optics is what really makes the difference.


Its an improvement but still not enough for me to lose the "proper" digital camera.

Cell phones are inherently limited to what can be shoved inside a pocket. Even with fancy folded optics, that's going to limit what they can do. Still, it's safe to predict that the cheapest digital cameras, bought by people who aren't looking for the best optics and other features, are very much in the gunsights of the cell-phone vendors.

Interesting question: when will Canon, Nikon, and so forth put their name on a cell phone? What would a Leica-branded cell phone be (aside from a rebranded Panasonic product, of course)?

Somewhere, there's a joke picture to be taken with somebody holding a big telephoto lens up to their ear...

It gets confusing when you need a symbol not printed on the keyboard.

Looking at the keyboard and knowing if I'm in symbol or orange mode doesn't help to find the ~ \ [ } < or |. I could make some guesses, but I honestly have no idea where they would be. I'm also puzzled by the separate orange and symbol keys, when none of those seem to overlap.

I've always known what character I'll be typing on a virtual keyboard, be it the one on my iPaq, or the iPhone.

It's actually very intuitive. If you tap the Sym button, it pops up a symbol pad where you can scroll through all of the symbols. Or, you can hit Sym-E and then pick one of the accented E characters, Sym-R for the (R) symbol, Sym-C for the (C) symbol, etc.

Okay, I might be able to give you that, but the iPhone doesn't show every single symbol either, just a few additional ones. And other keyboards like the G1 have those symbols (heck, mine even has symbols for Pounds and Euros).

Besides, that was only half of Tony's statement. He also said that smartphones (other than the iPhone, of course!) don't give any indication as to what mode you're in. Clearly, we've had a Treo/Pre owner chime in and say that this isn't the case on the Pre. My Curve shows which mode you're in on the top right (it indicates symbol mode, shift, caps lock, and symbol lock). My G1 is more subtle, and just changes the cursor, using a carrot on the bottom or top depending on the mode (I can't remember which is which at the moment).

Meanwhile, here's a pro photographer who does artistic work, on the side, using an old Motorola cell phone's camera. NYTimes Lens Blog

Sprint has now officially called out the iPhone in its print advertising.

This type of message translated, loosely means "we're an also-ran and we know we have no hope of ever catching the competition, essentially we give up, but we'll keep chugging anyway."

Distant number two or three companies on the verge of becoming B-list brands are famous for this. Pepsi and Burger King to name two perfect examples.

What makes the Sprint example even more pathetic is that they're attacking a single product, not the network which they directly compete against, ATT. They also really need someone else to approve their ad copy. Read the last sentence in the ad again.

If Sprint were serious about promoting the Pre then they'd at least try to do a decent job pushing its benefits and price, without bringing the iPhone into it. That's not going to help them at all, but it does keep the iPhone on people's minds. Of course they have a lot more to worry about, even without factoring in that their exclusivity is for a limited time. For instance, running an antiquated network requiring phones that aren't compatible in any other market outside of the US/Canada. Their 4G is hardly there yet. And the Pre doesn't support it anyway.

Dude. Whatever.


I was going to argue that the punctuation after "Now Network" was a comma, but from other views, it's clearly not.

The fact that they have a Facebook account is a worse offense, though.

They have done so before as well, with the Instinct. The amusing thing about that campaign is that they made up a bunch of ads pitting the Instinct against the first iPhone. By the time the Instinct actually shipped, the iPhone 3G was also announced and near release, forcing Sprint to go back and take several of the ads down. At least this time the Pre is actually out, as is the 3GS.

When you have exclusive contracts with carriers, using the devices to sell the networks and vice versa is fair game. The Pre might as well be a "Sprint" product and the iPhone an "AT&T Product", at least in the U.S. AT&T sold a lot of 2-year contracts with the iPhone, and Sprint's trying to do the same.



Apple's a "distant number two or three" when it comes to desktop OS share, desktop/laptop sales, etc. With that in mind, how is this any different from the "I'm a Mac / I'm a PC" campaign? Sprint first calls out the competitor's weaknesses and explains how the Pre is better (using two of the major selling points, multitasking and a lower overall TCO.)

You have one or two valid points in there about the grammar SNAFU and the truthiness about 4G. But this is standard Madison Avenue marketing/advertising BS that every company, Apple included, engages in, and I have no idea how you can handle the cognitive dissonance of accusing Sprint of hitting below the belt when Apple does it regularly. The only reason they (and AT&T) don't do it with the iPhone is that they don't have to -- that's the benefit of being the BMOC.

Except that the overall TCO is not lower at the minimum level of entry, at least from what I can tell.

iPhone 3G 8GB = $99, 3GS 16GB = $199, 3GS 32GB = $299
Minimum voice/data plan $69.99/month - 450 minutes, unlimited data
2 year contract

Palm Pre 8GB = $299 (before a $100 mail in rebate)
Minimum voice/data plan $69.99/month - 450 minutes, unlimited data
2 year contract

I can't read the tiny disclaimer text at the bottom of the ad, but I would hope it explains whatever twisted logic they used to come up with a $1200 difference. Even adding the $20 unlimited text messaging plan to the iPhone makes the difference $480 at most.

On the web page fine print, it says "see value savings chart for details", also known as "Sir Not Appearing in This Ad".

This might be what they're referring to:

Sprint aren't hitting below the belt. It's fair game and yes, a lot of agencies and brands have gone the same route. I'm not even arguing, other than the crappy network and lack of 4G, that there's any untruth to it. But calling out a competitor BY NAME is weak and generally doesn't work except to further cement you in the follower position.

Apple's I'm a Mac ads do come close to this type of advertising, but they have not solely focused on calling out Microsoft. They have mentioned Vista a few times, which I also think was weak, though amusing (because most of those ads are). Apple is clearly the number two OS and there's little chance of that changing any time soon. Those ads aren't an attempt to do so nor do they ever imply there's ever a chance of that happening. I think most of them make it seem like they're content to be number 2 in quantity, but that they're visibly and empirically number 1 in quality.

What Palm needs is some non-sprint advertising that focuses on the benefits of the products. And not how the product will bring you to a zen state atop a hillside. Apple's products establish the iPhone as an Apple product. Even though they have an exclusive with ATT in the US, the iPhone is the farthest mobile handset from "co-branded" as you will find out there right now. I suspect most people, even in the US, don't immediately associate the iPhone to ATT. Palm needs this kind of distinction to promote itself, rather than their current network partner. But yes, this was a Sprint ad, so that's unrelated to this ad.

What I find most interesting about that ad is that it makes the assumption that iPhone owners are generally unhappy, and they are just chomping at the bit to get out of their contracts.

I'm sure a few might be, but I don't think that's a big enough market for them to target seriously.

First off, the Pre is $199, not $299. Yes, if you buy from a Sprint store you have to deal with a rebate, but you can get it for $199 out the door at Best Buy.

Second, the comparison is invalid because the Sprint plan includes unlimited text. Very few smartphone users go without a texting plan. Also, Sprint unlimited night minutes begin at 7pm, AT&T at 9pm. AT&T has rollover minutes, but I think the average user does better with unlimited after 7pm than they'll do with rollover.

If the bare minimum plan is okay and you never send a single text, the plans are roughly equivalent. Once you get into the plans a large majority of people will use, Pre + Sprint saves a lot of money. Whether it's $480 or the number Sprint's claiming.

You're basically making my points for me now.

Regarding co-branding, nobody needs to make an iPhone-AT&T association for it to be an example of co-branding. People buy iPhones based on the shiny Apple ads, which sells AT&T service plans. Apple and AT&T both have giant ad budgets, but Apple is famous for running good ad campaigns, and since the phone is the thing moving cell contracts and not vice versa, it makes sense for Apple to do the heavy lifting on the advertising front.

On the Palm/Sprint side, things are a lot different. Both are battered companies looking to make a comeback. Palm has the hot phone now, and it has definite advantages over the competition. Neither is known for great advertising. Why does Palm have to be the one to run the ads, and why do the ads have to focus only on the positive for them to be effective?

It's going to vary person to person. Yes, Sprint users with a Pre might spend less in 24 months then an iPhone user. And some iPhone users with AT&T are going to spend less. It all depends on their needs. Rollover minutes are going to be handy for the people making long calls around the holidays to relatives. 7pm nights are going to be handy for other people. Neither feature really makes the other side invalid.

Text plans, that is where I'll agree that AT&T is definitely ripping off their iPhone users more then Sprint is with Pre users. My needs are met by their $5 plan though, with no need to go to the full $20 a month. The initial iPhone included 200 messages a month as part of the $20 internet plan.

Overall, the differences are so minimal, that I highly question the "saves a lot of money" statement. Even with the $20 unlimited text plan factored in, you are still only talking 6.39 hours of work per year to make up the difference, based off the tech workers average wage in 2008. Bringing it down to the common average still only results in 12.36 hours. (both figures pre tax, so a little more should probably be factored in, but the ultimate point is that the difference is pretty minor in the grand scheme of things).

I am curious, does anyone here actually pay for the full unlimited plans offered by carriers? I personally would he happy to just drop the voice part of my plan all together, and use prepaid minutes instead.

Well, no advertisement is going to fail to use the largest number that they can. I don't think you can call out Sprint/Palm for that one.

I can't believe we're debating advertising.

I appreciate the attempt to transform the price difference into layman's terms, but in this case, it only serves to obscure the issue and understate the amount of money saved. I'd be willing to bet that a minority of those buying these phones is making the average tech worker's salary, and converting to "number of hours it takes to make up the difference" just muddies the waters further.

Stick with your original $480 number, which is the actual TCO difference for as close as you can get to equivalent plans. 480 bucks might not be much to the guy pulling in $78k, but it's still 480 bucks. If I saw 480 bucks sitting on the ground, I'd bend over to pick it up. If one phone is 480 bucks cheaper over the long run than another, it's relevant to my purchasing decision. And I *am* one of those lucky folks who are in the ballpark of the "average tech worker" salary.

But advertising is debatable, especially when there are points that can vary due to interpretation. It makes more sense to me than to debate a phone's features which at any point in time are at least factual/concrete.



That has yet to be demonstrated by public opinion and mindshare, let alone sales figures. The latest of which put the first weekend sales between 50k and 100k at "best/highest" estimates. I believe even the folks at Palm are a little worried because the only thing they really said about sales were that they were "pleased" - that's hardly bragging.



It's a nice phone compared to many other products out there. There's one particular product it can't really claim any advantages over for the average consumer though.



Nothing "has" to be one way or the other. I simply said that for Palm's greatest benefit, they would take a lead position on promoting their product and do so in such a way as to make it a favorable proposition in consumer's minds. That's generally accomplished by painting the product to be a good one, advocating its features and benefits. Not by letting your partner, who does not have a vested long-term interest in your company nor product, put out ads trying to paint the head and shoulders most lauded mobile product of the century as being inferior. Especially without providing even a single fact to back that assertion. Or worse, lies.

The iPhone has multitasked since day one. All iPhone models currently run multiple applications at the same time (just not any arbitrary group of applications and not third-party applications), and push notifications are as real-time as the network allows.

There's room out there for multiple products, and in Palm's position they need to move to make the Pre a viable choice, not let Sprint possibly damage their image while this exclusivity arrangement runs its course. I am sure that 199 out of 200 people would choose the iPhone over the Pre if given a straight up choice (ie. excluding all carrier concerns). Yes, I just pulled that figure out of my ass, but unlike what Sprint is advertising, I can back mine up with sales figures.

That's just disingenuous.

Regardless, the Sprint ad doesn't even say "multitask". It says "run multiple applications at the same time". Can you do that on an iPhone? Unless you consider "init" to be an application, the only reasonable answer is "no".


Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. I mean, what are you trying to accomplish? There's some vague merit in being concerned about the future of the company in wanting to confirm continued support, but now you're just kvetching about trifling nonsense.

Wait. Are you a marketroid now? I'll bet you got an MBA, didn't you?

No, I didn't waste my time on an MBA. Marketing and advertising are two very different things, but I am interested in both. Anyway, since this forum doesn't have any particular topic nor format, I thought it would just make for interesting continued discussion.

As far as being able to run multiple applications on the iPhone... You can run the iPod software while you're running any third party application. Mail continues to run as well. Like I said previously, you can't necessarily run any arbitrary set of applications concurrently, but you're not limited to having only one task active at one time.

There are actually very few things I'd like to keep "running" concurrently, as opposed to caching out or suspending. Many applications can gracefully quit and start and do so very quickly on the 3GS. I'd hate to have to purposefully use some different command to quit every single app instead of just tossing it into the background. Hopefully continued pressure will be kept on Apple for them to allow at least some third party apps to run at all times (such as navigation/mapping apps) - I just don't know how they're going to decide which ones. The whole App Store approval process is already a bit of a land mine.

That said, I don't believe this "feature" of the Pre is significant enough to sway someone one way or the other (between it and the iPhone). I mean, running multiple applications isn't all it's cracked up to be anyway when you've only got 30 total to choose from.

Every "smart"phone I've ever owned, I've had a secure shell app. Virtually every time I use it, I realize I need some piece of information elsewhere on the device. So I go to the other app to get that information, the ssh connection drops, and I have to log in all over again, potentially repeating a lot of actions to get back to where I was.

Honestly, if either could promise me an SSH app that would just remain connected while I go do something else, I'd be sold.

A jailbroken iPhone running Backgrounder should do what you want. Though I'm betting the Pre will probably have an SSH client via their app catalog before the iPhone has an official background app method.

There are already at least two ssh apps for the Pre -- their names are openssh and dropbear. If we're including jailbroken apps for the iPhone, then the Optware packages built for Pre are fair game as well.

Okay, you do need a terminal app to use them from the Pre itself, and though there's no official terminal app, folks have installed a Debian chroot on their Pres and been working on getting a couple of terminal apps working. They're not 100% yet, but it's only been a few weeks, so I'll cut 'em some slack.

Tony how's your Pre holding up? Are these just a smattering of isolated incidents?

Does anyone know who manufactures the Pre?

My first two had screen issues. The third has a pristine screen, but the slider wobbles a bit (2-3 degrees at most) when it's closed. Not enough that it bothers me, but it's something many folks have noticed, and something they should really fix.

Overall, I'd say build quality is definitely an issue with the first batch. I can't say I'm totally surprised, since it's a new design and the product was rushed to market. I'd expect things to improve soon, because if they don't, it's certainly going to affect sales.

Well, that didn't take too long. Now to see how this game of cat and mouse plays out.

http://www.precentral.net/apple-blocks-palm-pre-itunes-syncing

Looks like WebOS 1.1 is out now, with iTunes 8.2.1 support.

The Pre apparently also has a new landscape mode:

Also, this gem:


Clearly whomever implemented this gesture doesn't actually use a touchscreen phone. Or maybe it's just me. One would think Right to Left would be forward - as in moving the current page to the left which is moving your view to the right, being forward for most people. Similar to swiping up to move the view down a page.

Oh, the Pre is now using Apple's vendor ID - this is absolutely against USB licensing agreements.

I'm eagerly waiting for the next move in this pissing contest. I wonder how long Apple will play before they just buy Palm and scuttle it. It would hardly even knock a notch in Apple's cash on hand, at just over 2 billion.

Well, technically weren't they already using their vendor ID? I thought it was just identifying its self as a Palm First and iPod second, and this latest update swapped those two

Anyway, personally, I'll side with Palm on this issue.

They were using the iPod product ID, which is also not kosher.

Palm are a bunch of whining thieves for pulling this stunt. They simply recognize that they can't deliver a solution to rival iTunes, due to both financial constraints and lack of talent (head count), so they think they can leverage the millions that Apple has spent to provide their phone with a syncing solution.

This is the exact same scenario as if HP didn't want to make their own scanning software and instead modified their firmware so people could use Canon's software. It's against USB spec, it's a DMCA violation and it's a breach of licensing agreements. I'm sure it can be argued in court to also violate copyright on the software.

If only Apple were a private company and not accountable to its shareholders and the SEC.

Yeah, sure.


So let me ask you (and I know you'll go 100% Apple Fanboy on this issue like all the others), how do you feel about 3rd party syncing software like Media Sync? It's effectively the same in the end, and Apple has no problem with it. Why? Because they know that users of these other devices will be annoyed by the process (or not even realize it's available to them), and they'll theoretically want to move to an Apple product.

I'm not saying that it isn't Apple's prerogative, but this entire issue has nothing to do with whether Apple is letting a non-Apple product sync with iTunes, so that argument is invalid. The walled garden already has a visitor's entrance. This is about making it slightly easier for the average consumer to sync to iTunes, instead of making it a complicated mess.


Oh sweet Jesus, we should all be so lucky as to have HP give up on their own software.

I'm just curious, but do you have something that backs up that DMCA violation claim?

Yeah, it's also totally cheating to take advantage of people's existing copies of Windows, rather than writing and shipping their own desktop OS for people to use with their Palms like any normal company would have to do.

Peter

I don't see how this is a DMCA violation. Palm isn't circumventing any copy protection mechanism. Lawyers will probably argue that a VID/PID combo is a protection mechanism and yet again, the DMCA will be used for something it shouldn't be. *sigh*

Ignoring my opinions of either company, I'm siding with standards on this one. That that means Palm is the one doing the wrong thing here. Many sites point out this quote from the USB device application:

If this was some hack an end user did to their own phone and distributed to others, I wouldn't really care. But Palm is marketing a feature of their device based on breaking the USB spec. Lax enforcement of specifications leads to confusion on the end user side when compatibility issues come up.

Oddly, Palm seems to think Apple is in violation of the USB spec as well, so I'll be curious to see where that goes. Noone complains that an HP printer driver uses USB vendor IDs to only print to an HP printer, or that the Zune media software only syncs to Zunes.

Beyond the USB issue, I think it's a poor decision that Palm has made to involve their consumers in a media sync fight. They advertise iTunes syncing as a feature, and use tiny print that noone reads to explain it's only with very specific versions of iTunes that the hack works against. End users hacking their devices is fine, but a company selling a hack as a legitimate marketing bullet point seems bad.



I know you were probably being funny with this, and I would find it amusing if every smartphone came with it's own desktop OS. There is a big difference though. Operating Systems are made to have programs run on top of them, either for free, or with a small payment to acquire the proper developer tools. iTunes isn't a open media sync program, though Apple has supported 3rd party devices in the past.

Western Digital was the most recent company that affected me with their lack of standards compliance. Their Velociraptor retail drives are marked as 3.5 inch form factor SATA devices. However, they use a 2.5 inch drive mounted in a heatsink, and mount the drive in a position that doesn't place the connectors in the proper place for a 3.5 inch device. If removed from the heatsink, the drive would be compliant with 2.5 inch SATA standards, however doing so voids the warranty. Why did I care? I bought one to mount in a standard cableless SATA carrier for my desktop. I had to return the drive, and wait for Western Digital to make a new model with the connector in the right spot, a drive that still sell for 30% more then the retail one.

Yes, but the whole question is how much Apple's intent as to what people do with the software, can constrain what people actually do with the software, and how exactly under law the licence acts to do that constraining. Clearly Apple are going to want to restrict the use of competitors' devices with their software, but then equally clearly their users are not going to want those restrictions.

This seems less clear-cut legally than the "clone Mac" wars, where the MacOS licence calls for Apple hardware only, because in that case installing or running MacOS involves making a copy of it -- so Apple can use copyright law to restrict people from performing that act in ways they don't like. Here you have people who've installed and run Itunes in ways Apple can have no qualms about (because they could, theoretically or even in practice, then plug a real Iphone into it) but who have then used it in a way they didn't like. Copyright law doesn't let them stop that, it doesn't give them the right to impose their terms on use alone.

Peter

I'm sure in the next firmware update on the iPods and iPhones Apple will introduce some sort of relatively sophisticated authentication method which would require the hacking and reverse engineering of the Apple written firmware. Surely then Palm could only provide a workaround if they could prove they arrived at it without reverse engineering, otherwise 'then' it would be a legal issue wouldn't it?

Personally I think it's pretty shitty move by Palm to do it this way. Surely they'd gain more cred if they had proof they discussed the possibility of doing legitimately with Apple who then told them to fsck off. Why is it no different than me trying to impersonate a college student to avoid paying full price entry at the cinema?

Sorry, but another bad analogy. The only way to make that one work is if the theater had a table where you could fill out a form saying that you were a college student, even if you weren't, and then you could get the discount.

Remember, there are non-Apple devices that sync with iTunes, but they require 3rd party software. I don't see why all of a sudden it's so terrible that Palm wants to sync with iTunes directly. I see it as making things easier on their own customers.


I'm sorry, I didn't expand on my thought there because I figured it wouldn't be worth arguing with Bruno. I just wanted to play devil's advocate here. I make no claim that Palm is in the right, either legally or with the USB specs, but I maintain that I don't see why it's such a terrible thing for a company to want its devices to sync with iTunes in a way that consumers want.

I agree that they should have tried to work with Apple, but we all know how that would have ended. I also agree that they probably shouldn't advertise iTunes support as a feature when they know full well that Apple will be working to break it.

Yep, and there are 3rd party MP3 players and phones that sync directly with iTunes because the companies that made them worked out agreements with Apple. Some of those are OS X only due to the companies making the agreements prior to the Windows iTunes release, and some work with iTunes on both systems. Just as there are many MP3 players that work with Windows Media Player due to agreements with Microsoft. Same situation.

Much like Andy, I am curious if Palm ever talked to Apple about it. Being that Palm isn't saying that they were blown off by Apple to try and help their case, I'm guessing the USB hack was their first choice for getting iTunes compatibility.

If Palm really wanted to look like the good guy here and the one fighting for standards and the consumer, they should have ignored iTunes and built the foundation for a SyncML based media sync, or something similar.

It depends on what people you are talking about. For end users, sure, I don't see much use for EULAs as long as the software isn't being used for illegal purposes. The same doesn't apply to the people at Palm, who are marketing their device compatible with software that it isn't without Palm using a hack.

Lets change the name of the players here. empeg Ltd. made software called emplode that was used for syncing to the empeg car. Would there be a problem if SSI made their Neo-35 player show up over USB as an empeg-car (using the same vendor and device ID) for the purposes of syncing with emplode? All being done without a person from SSI contacting empeg for permission or approval. This includes using the possibly trademarked name "emplode" in marketing material for the Neo-35.

The weird thing to me about all of this is that Palm could have hired three programmers for two months and developed a better piece of software than iTunes.

iTunes is one of those pieces of software, like Outlook, that people use and claim to like, even though it's a piece of crap, because it's what's been plopped in front of them, and it's the client for a system for which there are no other clients (Exchange Calendar/iTMS).

Sorry, how is that a bad analogy? To qualify for student prices you need to be able to present an NUS card. If I forged a card and presented it, I could probably pass myself off as a student and get the discount. But I don't do that because I'm not a cheap bastard, unlike Palm.....

So they're seemingly happy to pretend to be an iPod so they don't have to pay someone to write some software.

So, it isn't just me, then? I think iTunes is ridiculously complex and unintuitive, and always thought it was because I just wasn't smart enough to use it.

tanstaafl.

Sorry, my analogy wasn't all that great either, but I said it was a bad analogy because there are already "non-students" (Blackberry) that can go through an annoying process like "filling out some paperwork" (Media Sync) to get the discount, even though they aren't "real students" (iPods).

In the end, what I should have said is that I don't care much for analogies for technology issues. I don't think they clarify very much at all.


Interesting. I wasn't aware of that. Could you give me a few examples?

Still, I wonder how the conversation would go now that Apple is on top and the #1 music store is selling their hardware for them.

Rio has quite a few, including some where a bundle (driver package basically) downloaded from Rio enabled native iTunes support. Apple has the full list. As for phones, there were a number of Motorola phones that had an "iTunes" player on the phone and would sync to the iTunes desktop software.

peter said this earlier in the thread regarding Rio and iTunes players:

So while it was a move to benefit Apple, it did also show they were at one time willing to work with other MP3 player manufactures. The phones were likely an experiment for Apple to get their feet wet prior to starting in on major development of the iPhone. Similar to Microsoft helping out with the Dreamcast, then turning around and developing the XBox.

I too wonder how a conversation would go now, but thus far Palm hasn't indicated that conversation even took place.

Thanks for the reminders. I'd forgotten about those products (and in the case of the ROKR, I'd put those phones out of my mind on purpose). Of course, Apple wasn't all too friendly towards Motorola. They had that arbitrary 100 song limit for the phones, and there was that press conference where they totally overshadowed the ROKR with their own product (can't remember which one it was at the time).

*edit*
Ah yes, that's when they introduced the Nano.

No, really, it's MacOS-only. "iTunes for Windows can only sync with iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV." And even that MacOS list is long-obsolete players only. The ROKR phone is the only exception, but the device itself was co-branded Apple, and I wonder how keen Apple would be to enter into phone cross-branding agreements nowadays when they have their own phone products?


Quite a different situation, in fact: even after the Zune was released, Microsoft carried on entering into new agreements for WMP sync to newly-released competing players. (Maybe you can even do it with their published APIs now, and no further explicit agreement, as long as you don't care about DRM.)

Peter

Trademark law means they'd have to attribute that trademark correctly if they use it in their marketing materials. In other words, our competitor would be naming us directly, and as the standard they try to be compatible with, in their marketing materials. We'd be turning cartwheels.

I always thought it was dumb that Rio Music Manager would only sync to VID/PID pairs it knew about. I wish we'd sneaked in a registry entry or something that would make it list, and sync to, all mass-storage and MTP devices. (The restriction, AIUI, wasn't there for product-tying reasons particularly, but because we didn't want it to be our tech-support problem if Rio Music Manager stored a bunch of stuff onto a third-party device that couldn't actually handle it.)

And in fact when I was still at Sigmatel working on the Trekstor Vibez firmware, I hacked my own copy so that Vibez had the Rio Carbon VID and PID, and thus could be used with existing copies of Rio Music Manager.

Peter

I'm not going to argue this (VID/PID and proprietary software) point because there's no grey area. It's pure, simple and black and white. This has nothing to do with the wronged company being Apple. This has only anything to do with Palm acting in violation of standards.

If you do want to argue, then yes, one can go either way on the laws in the US.

The bottom line is it's Apple's piece of proprietary software and Palm should keep their grubby hands off it.

If they (Palm) think they can hire 3 programmers for 2 months to write a replacement, I'm sure they would have. The problem is that it's been demonstrated elsewhere in the industry that you can have a dozen people working on this for two or three years, starting with existing code and still have but a shell of a program that relatively speaking, still doesn't do what iTunes does well. Case in point are Songbird and Media Monkey.

They could however have produced, as I suggested long ago, a program to communicate with iTunes using existing interfaces. A bridge/sync program if you will. This is totally and utterly different than what's been done now. Loudly claiming "iTunes compatibility" and using iTunes as part of their promotional points should also be avoided unless they get Apple's blessing.

I'm sure we'll see iTunes rightfully locked down, Palm made out to be the bad guy and eventually they'll get swallowed or fizzle out. The Pre is not doing well and this type of attention doesn't help it.

I'm also sure a real Apple Fanboy would have issue with anyone labeling me in the same camp. I'm super critical of Apple and think iPods (the music playing software and UI) completely suck. I don't think Apple make the best designed nor best working applications and I choose to use many third party alternatives. I've even replaced the desktop GUI because I think the Finder is extremely weak. But over-all they make far and away the best computers. I don't resent them because they cost BMW money compared to other brands, because the value proposition is fair.

Does anyone have any contacts in the engineering department at RIM? I need to give them a call to tell them to scrap their Blackberry desktop application for Mac OS and put its engineers onto another project or the unemployment line. They just need a small 8 character firmware tweak.

You mean like the agreement the NUS has to endorse international student ID's in the UK (Blackberry). As opposed to someone knocking up a dodgy ID card in Photoshop (Palm).

Surely 'filling in paperwork' is not the same as ripping something off.

The Windows software is no better.

No, it's not just you. I absolutely HATE iTunes. It even took me some figuring out before I could even start to use it! I never had this problem with Emplode, or with the synching software the Karma etc. (was that also Emplode - can't remember) used. That software was intuitive and simple: 1) Drag the files you want to see synched from your windows explorer into the Emplode window. 2) Hit the big Sync button. That's was it, and it worked!

I also find iTunes incredibly SLOOOOOW... Clicking from the library to 'my iPod' so I can sync takes more than 10 seconds! (and I don't have a slow computer either - it's a dual core CPU system bought last year) It'll also crash more times than not when I close the program. I can't believe this program was developed by people who also code stuff for the computer system that is said to be the easiest to use for the average consumer in the world. (I would like to point out that I have no experience whatsoever with Apple software - I can only hope the Apple version of iTunes does not have all these problems)

What you describe as easy in Emplode is exactly how iTunes also works. I don't use it with automatic syncing, but I believe it's the default unless you turn it off (like I did).

iTunes has a lot of really slow portions, but clicking from one item to the next in the source list (the list on the left) is usually instantaneous. And I have 30000 tracks in my library.

Things that I find really slow it down are accessing your music over the network, especially when it's doing things like checking for gapless information and updating artwork. Things it does every time you add new tracks and that you cannot (in any way) disable. You can cancel, but it will do it again/continue the next time you add tracks or restart iTunes.

I think iTunes is the most intuitive music management program in even moderate use today. This is after version 7. Prior to that it was crap because it didn't have any concept of albums. My empirical evidence for this is that every other would-be music manager is copying from the iTunes UI design. This includes Media Monkey and Song Bird which I mentioned earlier. Song Bird developers defend this by saying that they're not copying, they just implementing the most reasonable methods, which iTunes just so happens to also use. Yeah right.

iTunes has a LOT of (huge) room for improvement. But no one has written anything even half as good for any platform.

Yeah, the big slowdown for our newly network-ized iTunes library is when a lot of new music is added to the library on one computer, and then the other computer logs on and takes forever to update the genius information. I'm not sure why this isn't stored along with the library on the network, therefore only requiring one copy of the information, but whatever.


I'm not a huge fan of how either one does it, but at least Songbird has more potential for improvement, IMO, due to add-ons. For instance, my Songbird installation is fundamentally different from how it works by default and how iTunes works, because I have a Now Playing add-on that creates a sort of fusion of iTunes and Windows Media Player. Normally I'd say "great, two terrible music managers in one!" but I really like how this works now. Anyway, I'm a huge Songbird fan, and I'll say again: it does something that iTunes is completely incapable of and most likely never will be: syncing with my G1 (and almost any device, for that matter).

My only experience with such programs is Emplode and Rio Music Manager -- both of which are vastly superior for my usages.

To add music to my player with Emplode or RMM, I find the files, drag them to my player, click on "Synch".

To add music to my player with iTunes, I find the files, tell iTunes to add them to the iTunes library. Once that is done, I delete the files from the iTunes library that I no longer want in the player, then copy the files in the iTunes library into the Playlist library. Next, organize the Playlist library so the tracks (audiobooks, in this case) are in the proper sequence so that chapter four comes after chapter three. Check the settings to make sure that the "Random" box is unchecked, then click on Sync, in the full knowledge that my placemark in the file I was last listening to will certainly be lost so that I have to search through the book to find where I left off.

[RANT]I know that some of this is "It's different from what I'm used to so it can't be any good" attitude, but every time I use Apple software (particularly on SWMBO's Macintosh) it is an excercise in absolute frustration that makes me want to throw things. There seems to be no middle ground with Apple: Either you operate at the absolute dummy level and let the OS take care of everything, or you become an absolute Macintosh expert in order to find out simple, obvious things like just where in hell a file you downloaded is actually located on the hard drive. SWMBO downloads pictures from her camera, the Macintosh sucks them up and stores them someplace and she can view them anytime she wants with some sort of Macintosh picture viewing software, but God help her if she wants to attach one of them to an email. Apple's policy of hiding all the ugly nuts and bolts of system level operations from the user makes me crazy. [/RANT]

There, I feel much better now.

tanstaafl.

Yep. Dragging the picture from iPhoto to the compose window sure is a nightmare.

Oh, you still want to know where the file is. Hmm, where could that information be hiding.... Let's try the context menu. Hm. "Show File". That couldn't be it, could it? Ah, nope. It just opens a Finder window to the directory the picture file is in, with the picture file selected. I suppose you're out of luck; I don't see anything that will give you the actual path.

Not on my Windows PC. What annoys me most about iTunes is that it doesn't have any feedback to tell you it's noticed the click. On almost all Windows apps, you click something, the focus/selection changes, and _then_ it updates the window.

Oh, and the Windows version doesn't obey Fitt's law. Try clicking on the close button on iTunes when it's maximized. There's a single-pixel-width line across the top that does nothing.

Frankly, I could write a better piece of music management software. Oh wait. I did. Twice.

It's amazing to me how Apple's failings here depress everyone's expectations of other media devices. Here's The Register reviewing some kind of Central+Receiver setup from Sony:

Is gapless playback a subtle and hard-to-determine property of an album, that's secretly being calculated somewhere and communicated to the thin-clients? Or is it perhaps that this device just does what's obviously right -- what every CD player in the world does -- and that today's ready availability of fail has blinded people to that?

Peter

I should have further clarified that no one else has written anything that does close to everything that iTunes can do. Emplode was fine for moving files over the the empeg but that's about it.

Your use of iTunes seems a little cumbersome - it's not the way it's designed to be used. Seems like you'd be better off turning OFF automatic sync and just dragging whatever files you'd like to the iPod yourself. You're not using iTunes as a music manager but rather as a file loader.

I'm not sure about iPhoto, but in iTunes you can get "info" on any track and it will display the full path to the music file on the first tab of the resulting window.

I'd like to point out that the empeg doesn't do gapless properly. (Maybe it does with the 3.alpha versions?)

But this is all based on a failing of the mp3 format, with its fixed-time-length frames and no way to tell a decoder to ignore certain portions. This has been resolved by retrofitting, but those are ad-hoc standards, at best.

Yes (and with Karma and Vibez, although not Carbon, Nitrus, or the flash players).

Peter

Okay, sorry. I still don't run 3.x. It seemed to keep crashing on me. Maybe I'm misremembering.

Still, it relies on ad-hoc LAME-"proprietary" headers, which weren't even introduced until late 2001, I think. Point being that it would be nice if the standard had the ability to encode arbitrary-length audio. (Well, without intentionally blank samples. Even CDs have to be in quanta of 44100ths of a second.) It's the spec that should have the fail attached to it in this case, IMO.

It only guarantees sample-accurate gapless with the headers, but the heuristics used on files without the headers are actually pretty good in practice.

CDs have to be in quanta of 75ths of a second: track breaks can only come at frame boundaries. And while in a sense the MP3 spec does come with built-in fail, other formats (Vorbis, FLAC, WMA) can encode arbitrary-length audio, and any added fail there is purely proprietary. I'm not sure about AAC; the Wikipedia article groups it with MP3 in the post-hoc-hacks list.

Peter

Oh yeah; I forgot about CD frames.


Of course, again, unless I'm mistaken, the LAME headers, sadly, predate anyone's heuristics implementations.


That's great for the eight people who want to use those formats, own no players that can't support them, and have the proficiency to rip their CDs using them.


True, and if you had a soup-to-nuts ripping and playback solution that didn't need any compatibility with any other system, or had very little restriction on storage space, there's no excuse for failing gaplessness. Otherwise, it's best-effort. (Of course, that effort should now include the use of LAME headers on MP3s.)

I've lost track of my point....

Oh, yeah. The expectation of fail in this space is derived directly from the mp3 spec. In general, I emphatically agree with your complaint about diminished expectations, but I think we should point fingers in the right direction: the mp3 spec and mediocrity-loving idiots.

This is one of the reasons I like my Mac and the programs it comes with. The computer handles the mundane tasks, I can handle the actual getting work done tasks. I plug in a camera, and import photos. I don't care where or how they are stored, just that said operation happens. Then up to an hour later, the backup kicks in and makes sure I now have a redundant copy stored off on the NAS. I don't want to manage hundreds of date labeled folders full of photos, I want to manage events, faces and such to find photos easier, and know all my work is backed up and safe.

As far as mailing a photo, there are many easy ways, all that don't require ever bothering with low level files. Bitt explained drag and drop. There is also a Photo Browser button in the toolbar when composing e-mail that shows me the photos in the same organization structure iPhoto uses. Or I can go to Attach File under the File menu, get a finder browser, and also a media browser that does the same as the Photo Browser button. Lastly, I could just click the Mail button from iPhoto.

Under the hood, I know where all the files are, since a context click (right click) on a photo allows me to reveal the source file. If I choose to move to another platform (Windows or Linux), I can easily still get to the files. If I wanted everything, I'd just copy my User folder, since everything is in there, but none of my installed applications to bloat the size.

As for iTunes, I'm still in middle ground there, and haven't fully moved away from my manual file managing days. iTunes has a decent selection of what music I want randomly synced to my phone, along with all of my podcasts. The main reason I even considered an iPod and iTunes years back was due to the lack of a seamless podcast solution with other products. I want my system to download the podcasts automatically, delete ones I've listened to, and sync new ones to whatever device.

But most players support at least one of those, and very few do so gaplessly; the point I was trying to make was that such devices don't fail at gapless because of the infelicities of the MP3 format: they don't get that far, they've already fallen at an earlier hurdle. (In case anyone relevant is reading, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys have enough buffer downstream of your decoders, that you can switch track and have the first samples of the next track coming out of the decoder before your DAC has underflowed. Which is why the flash-players couldn't do it: not enough resources.)

Peter

Worse Is Better

I don't 100% agree with Gabriel (and it could be written less clumsily), but the basic scenario is correct. People use bad things because bad things are available first. Then they not only get used to the badness, but expect it. Fixing the badness becomes a waste of time.

I think, really, we're in violent agreement here.

The Pre uploads your current GPS location, list of all apps, app usage times and whether anything crashed to Palm's servers.

http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090922/usb-if-slaps-palm/

Looks like Palm's plan to try and get the USB-IF to side with them against Apple backfired, and Palm has 7 days to explain why their device uses another companies vendor ID.

So what is to stop Pre from enabling a config item that lets the user choose to spoof the id? Much like mac id's are.

They'd still be in violation of the USB spec. They'd probably be kicked out and not able to use the USB logo. Perhaps even face some legal action for having violated their agreements.

It's just a waiting game anyway. Palm is still on the way out, not in.

Oh noes!!!11!!1!!1!

Now if there were a hack that made an Iphone appear on USB as a Palm Pre -- which is mass-storage class -- then that would be worth having.

Peter

I know, it's not a big deal for a company that sells some 10-15 phones per month like Palm.

The reason this whole fiasco is taking place is that the budget required to create a sync application would likely quadruple the revenues of the Pre, making it a losing proposition. As an aside, Apple has probably spent more money developing iTunes than Palm's last investment from Elevation Partners (that's $100M).

Yeah, you can tell how big a deal it is with how prominently the USB logo is featured on the iPhone box.

So, in more relevant Pre-related news, the Pre App Catalog gets paid applications tomorrow. The quality of the free apps is already quite good, though not near the level of refinement of the best iPhone apps. I suspect the ability of app developers to finally make a buck on their apps will push up the quality of the best apps and the quantity of the worst apps.

Still really liking my Pre. Been playing a lot of Word Ace (basically Scrabble and Texas Hold'em combined) which I guess is also available for iPhone now as well. Some really great stuff happening on the third-party homebrew front as well.

Really? You know the Palm Pre goes into airplane mode when you plug it into USB as, being MSC, it can't deal with the user filesystem not being accessible?

I think I prefer the way the iPhone does it. I can receive calls when plugged in and syncing (the sync just gets aborted cleanly)...

Then I guess I get the best of both worlds. When the G1 is plugged in, it only takes over the SD card, which leaves the rest of the phone available to take calls. Of course, any apps that use the SD card for data are unusable, but that doesn't matter much as I only put it in transfer mode when I need to.

I didn't know that, and it does sound a bit poor -- you'd think there'd be some sort of "phone-only" mode. Perhaps SMS is the problem; I've no idea whether the air protocols let a handset decline (defer) SMS while still taking voice calls, which would be the ideal.

But I'd happily put up with full airplane mode -- or for that matter car-player-esque locked-out "synchronising" mode -- if it got me mass storage. The user-story, which had happened to me shortly before writing that post, is this: I'd realised, just before heading off to lunch with Dave, that there was a photo on my PC that I wanted to show him (an osage-orange fruit in the Botanic Gardens that I'd snapped the previous day). I further realised that an Iphone, with a nice colour screen and the zoomy inny outy stuff, would be a good way of showing it. But gphoto2 seemed unable to send the photo to the Iphone over MTP ("operation not supported"); transferring the photo to the only PC with Itunes on (which is the laptop, outside the firewall), only to wrestle with the Itunes UI to work out how to send a photo, didn't seem appealing; and though t'internet alleged it was possible to store photos without Itunes, it seemed like a big hassle.

I could've had the photo onto the Vibez in seconds, and would've except of course the screen is about one squillionth the size. So (to the best of my knowledge) Dave still doesn't know what an osage-orange fruit looks like.

Peter

In that situation I just email it to myself, and get it from the mail client on the iPhone.

My Samsung SCH-R540 does that as well -- cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. I suppose this means it has some ultra crippled WinOS inside it, too.

Cheers

My imate 8502 with Windows Mobile 6.1 doesn't have any limitation like that whilst syncing or accessing the file system via USB.

You could have emailed the photo to an email account that the phone could access, then when viewing the mail on the phone press and hold on the photo which brings up the "what do you want to do with this photo" menu. Tap save and it ends up in the photo app.

Yes, a bit roundabout but IMO less hassle than plugging in for a single photo. I don't particularly like iTunes dealing with getting photos on my phone but OTOH it's sufficiently seamless that I actually do have recent photos of Chloe on there that I would have if I had to manage it manually...

That's because it's not mass storage. WinMo phones appear as network devices. When you access the filesystem, you're doing do via some network protocol (webdav?) - it's just support is built into windows to make this seamless.

Apple haven't done anything similar for the iPhone, presumably because users may be frightened of files. I guess it cuts down on support costs... there are webdav style apps you can use for this type of thing (provide a network-mountable view onto on-phone-storage), or you could use mobileme's iDisk cloud storage type thing which I use as a PDF archive that I can browse easily from my phone.

Looks like Palm is pissing off at least one developer with uncertain, black box like procedures for getting apps into the App Catalog. I guess they copied Apple too well there.


Anything like the jailbreak community on the iPhone side for app distribution? I was pretty impressed with Cydia and other efforts to make it easy to run homebrew apps, though the community suffers from drama and fractures quite often.

The comments on that blog post mention a couple of homebrew methods of getting software onto a Pre. The author of the blog also comments on them being a pain in the ass and that normal users won't use it.

With the iPhone's installed base you can get a decent number of people in the jailbreak community. When you're talking about a platform with an order of magnitude less customers and a homebrew process that is not anywhere near as unified or streamlined, you're looking at miniscule numbers.

I want to know who the "normal users" jwz talks about are. The market for the Pre is largely power users to begin with, and a novice can install PreWare or FileCoaster with a relatively simple process that doesn't require rooting the phone, and is about as complex as running an installshield wizard on Windows. (They could really simplify it further with some improvements to WebOS Quick Install, but even the current process is just a few clicks.)

I think he's got some valid points about Palm's crappy attitude toward open source, and while I'm sure the red tape surrounding app store approvals will get better, I sympathize with his plight to get a couple of simple apps going. If you're a developer, you want every opportunity to get your app to as many people as possible, and that means getting on to the official app store.

I hope jwz's post is motivation for Palm to streamline the submission/approval process, but I think he vastly overstates the difficulty of homebrew installation.

Says who, other than jwz and your natural antipathy towards anything from Palm? What about the jailbroken iPhone projects is more unified or streamlined than PreWare?

Just going by what I see as an outsider reading things like this:

http://forums.precentral.net/homebrew-apps/203951-webos-quick-install-contd.html

and this:

http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware#Installation__Steps

Easy enough for me, but not something the average joe would/could do. But I wholeheartedly agree that there are far fewer average joes using a Pre than an iPhone (or touch for that matter).

I've edited the previous post to remove the "anywhere near" as perhaps it was a bit strong. For the iPhone you'll find utilities that both jailbreak and automatically install the app management/repository application(s). You don't need to know anything about repositories yourself nor change/alter anything once you start the process.

The iPhone process isn't exactly very joe-friendly either, but it has more history, media coverage and word-of-mouth which does push a lot of joes into making the leap. A lot of clearly written tutorials, that for the most part say "download this, run this, press a button and you're done"

First-rate companies like RIM write their own software instead of trying to steal someone else's.

Bwah-ha-hah-ha-ha!

Oh, wait. You're serious, aren't you?

Only half... More appropriate would have been "even second-rate companies..." Then it would have been more obvious that I was making a dig at both RIM and Palm.

Totally correct. For all intents and purposes though it does acheive the same effect. My phone and I'm sure many others can provide direct access to the SD card at least via a program called WM5torage. In that case it does appear as a mass storage device but at the same time also prevents the phone from accessing it any more mentioned. Since it's significantly faster it's good for loading up a large amount of data.

We really need a decent open, cross-platform way of accessing a filesystem over USB that *isn't* mass storage. Speed really shouldn't be an issue - most "embedded" devices these days should have no problem doing filesystem management and shuffling data over USB with their 400MHz+ processors and DMA'ed everything. That way, devices get to keep their filesystem private - whatever format it is - and get to access their storage concurrently.

Problem is, the very fact that MSC exists has made everyone lazy

Agreed. I've got a NAS box here with USB slave on it, where the USB slave pretends to be a USB ethernet controller over which it then does NFS/CIFS/etc. Which is a neat hack, but it's also clearly a bit freakoid from a UI point of view, having to manage what are clearly USB devices as if they were on the wrong side of entirely fictitious LANs that your PC is now swarming with.

SCSI OSD is another attempt to solve this problem, and by "solve this problem" I mean "reinvent what CAFS was doing in the 1970s".

Peter

Mmm.. emulated VFAT / Mass Storage might be a decent/indecent short term workaround.

It's not that hard to manage a virtual VFAT (inside the device) on top of some other real filesystem. I don't think anyone has bothered to do it yet, but that's just more reason to go for it.

I keep thinking I ought to prototype it on an empeg first.

Palm continues on their trailer-park development path and once again hacks iTunes support. Why buy the cow when you can steal the milk, right?

Apple could buy Palm with lunch money and just scuttle the company to end this. Might take less time than a court battle and it would be so much more poetic.

Yeah, to the extent now of forging valid iPod serial numbers, along with appearing with the appropriate vendor, device, etc IDs.

I have a feeling that Mr Jobs would not want to give Palm the satisfaction of being bought

Instead of plain cat and mouse, Palm need to be widely and publicly humiliated. It would be nice to see this play out without Apple getting muddy of course. Can't start calling out Palm which will bolster their competitive position. Right now they're an also-ran and it won't take much to cause a stumble they may not be able to get up from.

Maybe it's time for some Microsoft-style strong-arm tactics with the carriers.

At least a funny message popping up when iTunes detects an unsupported device would be nice to see.

The Pre is out over here this month. On O2 again (like the iPhone was originally) so it's automatically a no go for me. Assuming I'm around long enough then I think I'll grab a 4th gen iPhone on Orange next year.

I find it hard to think the Pre would get a foothold over the iPhone unless it was made 'considerably' cheaper than an iPhone.

Just walking round Manchester on an average day I'm amazed at the number of iPhone users of all types, from the people you'd expect like Hoxton'ites and students to business men and women who'd you would usually expect to have Blackberry's.

I watched an interesting documentary on iPlayer yesterday about the 'upgrade' culture we have today. The presenter went to a school and asked a bunch of kids what the one gadget they'd love to own and every kid said they wanted an iPhone.

Personally I could easily see myself with an Android phone (it's certainly better than my HTC winmo phone, which is currently broken). But I'm pretty sure the Pre is likely to be fairly unpopular, especially since the iPhone is going cross carrier.

Looks like the Pre is catching up to the iPhone in one area:

Is there a site that reviews and compares fart applications so I make a rational purchase decision? It's clearly a field with a lot of research and advanced engineering, which makes sense, since there are so many people competing in the market. I don't want to jump on last year's train and look like an idiot to all my friends with the newest and greatest fart technology.

I know that the iPhone has more fart apps, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are better. Should I get an iPhone since there seems to be more fart research on that platform, or is either WebOS or Android a better environment for fart researchers?

I guess what I'm asking is: what is the killer fart app?

I prefer to roll my own. You know, like the kids say, "keepin' it real" Or if I were to post it to Twitter, "@me: kpen' rEalz d00d! http://loserurl.com/m#!ss45g"

Dragging up an old thread....

Our on screen talent got an invitation to collect a FREE Palm Pre today from Harvey Nichols in the city centre. Apparently they gave away over 200 unlocked handsets!

After spending 10 minutes trying to configure one of them I felt like throwing it against a wall. The thing is just shit, it's creaky, poorly built and feels really cheap.

As an epilogue to the story, everyone's putting them on Ebay (they're already unlocked) as they'd rather keep their collection of ancient Nokia's and Crackberries.

I think everyone agrees with you. Palm reported today that sales are lower than expected and that the year's results will be lower than expected as well. Stock has fallen a little bit, but IMO, Palm is still over-valued by a factor 2 to 3 times. There's no way this company is worth over 500M, let alone 1.1B.

If things continue this way, it seems to me they'll be ripe for a fire-sale. The problem is, I don't think anyone is currently interested in buying. Maybe RIM, maybe Motorola (though I don't think they have the marketing expertise to do anything with it).

My personal opinion on all the Palm acquisition talk is that the analysts are seriously underestimating how long it'd take to swallow a totally different software stack and get a product out. It's not like, if Dell or Nokia bought them, they'd be out with anything based on WebOS for a year+ (anything that wasn't just the same box with a different label on it, anyway).

Nokia certainly knows this, being pretty seasoned at the whole mobile game and having rolled out a Linux-based system already. Dell are likely to be aware of this having seen how much effort it took to take a supposedly portable system (Android) and get it shipped even when using processors that it was *already ported to* as the core of their products, and being ninjas at manufacturing.

Basically, acquiring Palm isn't going to be a shortcut to anything much in the mobile space, a market where newness is everything.

Maybe someone with no mobile products at all will swoop in and basically bankroll Palm to the tune of more hundreds of millions, as that's the fastest way to get more WebOS products out there, but then again maybe they'll look and think... what am I doing that's different to what Elevation did?

My $0.02

I haven't read anyone mentioning that buying Palm would give them a quick roll-out of a new product. It's certainly not what I think. But using their current products with some retooling is a lot faster than developing any OS from scratch.

I think it would probably be wasted on Motorola as I mentioned, and for Dell it would be like throwing millions of dollar bills out the window. Dell doesn't look like it has any future in Mobile. They're a quasi-house-hold name for cheap PCs. No one thinks mobile (phone or otherwise) when they think Dell.

That comment from Ed Colligan a few years ago saying that PC guys can't just move into the mobile space was proven wrong by Apple. But I don't believe any other PC company could have done it, even if handed a fully functional OS. Look, Android has been available for a while and we haven't seen any PC brand do anything significant with it in mobile.

I haven't spend much time thinking of the acquisition angle, but as a long-term solution it could be good for someone like Nokia or RIM.

I'm taking the plunge. Since I don't have an iPhone yet, I'm buying Palm.

You might be asking... "The Pre?, the PIxi?" No no no....

I'm buying the company.

You see, in a little while, Palm stock will apparently be $0 Time to scoop up all those shares. Though I don't know... I may wait until the price hits -$3 or -$5 and take some cash along with the stock certificates.

I'm not sure how an analyst sets a target of $0. Now, if they predict it's going to be delisted, that's one thing, but a stock can't be trading at $0.

Things don't look good for Palm any way you slice it however.

Well, Palm is still around, now integrated with HP, and a WebOS 2.0 product in the pipeline.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/19/palm-gets-official-with-webos-2-0-and-pre-2-hitting-france-on-f/

Tony, still using the Pre? And if so, anything exciting about WebOS 2.0 that will keep you on the platform? And is the Pre 2 on your radar as an upgrade?

So many people have simply forgotten about Palm and WebOS already, after the big amount of hype it had during the development cycle. It really feels like Android took the attention away. I personally see a lot of interesting features in WebOS that would be nice to see in other platforms. A high amount of detail and refinement seemed to go into the OS, something I can appreciate even if it's not my current mobile platform of choice.