Pre-meditated Lust
Dear Palm,
Please consider this my Pre-order for the Palm Pre, the first phone designed specifically for the internet from the bottom up.
“Under the hood is a speedy new microprocessor from Texas Instruments that runs videos quickly and smoothly, with less of the herky-jerkiness that mobile devices are known for. The phone has 8 gigabytes of storage, which is decent but not great; it can run Adobe Flash, and can cut, copy and paste, which iPhone can’t; it supports multimedia messaging service (MMS) so you can send text messages with photos attached, which iPhone can’t do; it has a 3 megapixel camera and a flash, which iPhone lacks. There’s a button that lets you buy music from Amazon’s download store. Then there’s the multitasking. Want to talk on the speakerphone while browsing the Web and entering stuff in your calendar? No problem. Palm expects people will keep 15 to 20 applications open at the same time.
Palm’s engineers have done some really slick things with applications themselves, especially contacts and calendars. You can pull together multiple calendars and view them all at once—say, your work calendar, your home calendar, even calendars from other people, like your spouse’s Google calendar (your spouse needs to give you the log-on info). The contact manager pulls contact information from multiple sources—Yahoo contacts, Google contacts, Facebook contacts. A listing in your address book can contain every way of reaching that person—via work mail, Gmail, or Facebook mail, for example—and lets you send a message to a friend using any one of these. Also, the applications talk to one another. When the calendar application prompts you for a reminder about a meeting, it also pulls up a list of the people who will be attending, with their contact info. So if you’re running late, you can let everyone know.” [Newsweek]
Here’s more on the way the various applications are integrated to create a better user experience, hopefully one that is seamless and blur-ry, the way my online/offline is.
“Thanks to Synergy, all your conversations with the same person are grouped together in one chat-style view. (Even if it started in IM, for example, and you want to reply with text.) You can also see who’s online right from contacts, and start a new conversation with just one touch.” [Palm Pre site]
Throw in a removable battery, WiFi, GPS, wireless charging, and the ability to use the phone with one hand, and I’m SO there.
I’m also looking forward to using DCPL’s second phone app for searching its catalog. Coming soon to a Pre near you me, right, Aaron? After all, it is just a flavor of Linux, and “all apps are just CSS, HTML and JavaScript. ALL OF THEM..” 
I’ve been waiting for this post from you, not only hoping you were excited about the Pre but also to tell you that I think it looks very promising too. See, I don’t like Apple stuff for the sake of like Apple stuff. Call me superficial, but I’m more of a design fanboy. The Pre looks usable and pretty. My interest is piqued.
The development environment seems like it is quite straight forward, which bodes well for DCPL’s mobile efforts, and everyone else’s too.
I know they couldn’t have highlighted everything about the Pre during the talk at CES, but I can’t believe that they didn’t mention the MP3 player at all. The fact that my iPhone is so convergent is important to me (and others, I think) and Palm might have to be successful with music playing for the device to take off. Now that it is a bit more open I assume that the Pre will be able to sync with iTunes, which won’t hurt people’s willingness to use it.
Also? Conductive charging? Wow.
Comment by Aaron Schmidt — January 15, 2009 @ 10:04 am
Abso-doggone-lutely! I’ve been lusting after iPhone cool, but unwilling to give up my years of loyal Palm use (and all my eReader books. As soon as I saw the title of your post in my feedreader, I knew where you were at!
Terry
Comment by Terry Dawson — January 15, 2009 @ 10:47 am
Yep, Jenny, as a long-time Palm and Treo user, I am definitely very, very excited about this. It should be released right around the time my contract with Sprint is up, so I’m already thinking about getting one. Another colleague, and my wife, both Treo users, are also very, very excited as well. It should be a really cool phone.
Comment by Chad Boeninger — January 15, 2009 @ 3:59 pm
The DCPL iphone app is not a web app, it is a true iphone app written in objective C. Our roadmap for this application includes more than OPAC functionality, really targeting people who use their iphone as an ipod or smartphone (with its Apple-specific feature set). The iphone is ubiquitous in the DC area, so it is natural starting place for our mobile efforts.
Comment by Chris — January 16, 2009 @ 7:01 am
I am so glad that you posted this. Not yet owning a phone, I had been contemplaiting the possibilities. Reception is so ify in Northern, NH. However, this sounds like the phone for me. Thank you!
Comment by Jen Carbonneau — January 16, 2009 @ 9:23 am
Aaron, I know *you* don’t like Apple stuff just for Apple stuff, and I’m guessing Apple’s recent gaffes with DRM and personal info rankle you as much as they do me.
I’m guessing they didn’t mention the MP3 player because they may still not have a native one. Treos and the Centro have always bundled Pocket Tunes for this purpose, and the program is pretty good. It doesn’t have the album art flow that Apple products do, but I find that type of browsing annoying, so it’s not a problem for me. In fact, I’ve been streaming internet radio through PTunes for years, so my definition of “music player” is a lot more robust than just iTunes. What I’m hoping is that PTunes has been working on a new version that will come with the Pre and take advantage of the new features.
I would have absolutely no problem with the Pre not syncing with iTunes, but I know I’m in the minority on that one. I’d much prefer it to be like the Archos products that let me drag and drop, sync, and organize my music the way *I* want it organized.
The Palm folks are saying they’re not competing with the iPhone and that they’d be happy with just 1–2% of the world market. I know that’s not really the whole truth, but I think they’re smart to focus on the internet experience instead of on the digital file, because we’re only a few years away from music being streamed directly from the cloud. I have a feeling Apple’s engineers are working pretty furiously to back up and start over with an internet-focused OS for the iPhone instead of OS X. It will be interesting what comes from Apple a year from now.
That gives you plenty of time to work on a Pre app.
Comment by jenny — January 16, 2009 @ 9:29 am
Terry and Chad, I’m totally with you on the Palm loyalty. I’ve been pretty happy with my Centro, especially this week when I’ve been able to operate it completely with one gloved hand in the cold weather. I have a ton of programs I’ve used for years that I’m guessing won’t port directly to the Pre, but I don’t think it will take long for the developer community to jump all over this and make Palm programs even better than they’ve always been.
Comment by jenny — January 16, 2009 @ 9:33 am
That’s great, Chris. Is there any reason that DCPL wouldn’t create an app for the Pre, given its open nature and the broad base of Palm users?
Comment by jenny — January 16, 2009 @ 9:34 am
As soon as we can get a pre to evaluate we will start on this.
Comment by chris — January 18, 2009 @ 7:30 am
Do want. The multicalendar function is right on — I have about 12 simultaneous google calendars to run our household…not to mention several different topics in Remember the Milk. We used a couple of HP PDAs synced to our main PC for a year or so before the calendar became inadequate. I *loved* the ability to write an appointment in my PDA and have it apprear in my husband’s.
What I really miss from this experience — and what would make me buy a smarter phone tomorrow — is the stylus that allowed me to input my notes and data via handwriting. It took a while for my PDA and me to get it together, and I know that many people never do — but for it’s made a phone with a keyboard, no matter how sophisticated,seem like a dumb relation.
Comment by Kathryn Greenhill — January 18, 2009 @ 11:06 pm
This is *all* my boyfriend talks about now. I’m so going to show him this post!
Comment by leah — February 25, 2009 @ 2:57 pm