Dan Dilger's take on the Palm Pre
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/0...ors-new-phone/
Palm Pre: The Emperor’s New Phone
January 12th, 2009
Daniel Eran Dilger
Palm impressed CES attendees this year with the unveiling of a new
smartphone OS and prototype hardware called the Palm Pre. Given the
low expectations set for the firm, the demos drew applause. But why?
Imagine a company announcing a new smartphone that blew away the
current state of the art and ushered in a totally revamped user
interface with intuitive touch control. That would merit applause. Now
wait two years and duplicate the same demo, with missing functionality
and lots of important details still unreleased, including the phone’s
price. Why should this receive any applause at all, pity?
Palm simply showed up with a copycat iPhone interface two years late.
But that isn’t the most egregiously lame part of the Pre’s
introduction. Imagine now a different scenario: a new phone with a
radical new approach to UI and mobile software is given an open, web
standards-based SDK and developers are invited to write cool new
applets for the device. Everyone groans and registers a wintery volley
of discontent, complaining that without a native SDK, they’d rather
develop for other platforms.
That of course was the iPhone in the fall of 2007, before Apple
released its Cocoa-based development tools that allowed developers to
write actual apps, not just Widget-like JavaScript applets.
Palm’s webOS.
So now Palm scrambles out a demo of a Linux phone running what is
essentially a Dashboard layer of browser widgets written in HTML and
JavaScript, and CES pundits hail the project as a phenomenal wonderful
development, even though the company hasn’t released any details on
how to actually develop those supposedly wide open apps outside of a
small, closed subset of developers.
This is just another gagging example of how the tech media can
complain about the downsides of getting Christmas ponies from Apple
while marveling at the potential of diamonds from the chunks of coal
thrown at them by other tech companies.
At the same time, Palm’s supposedly marvelous Pre has been associated
with the fact that a handful of Palm’s employees once worked at Apple,
which they suggest should help make the new Palm device magical.
What’s up with these schizophrenic sycophants?
The software
Palm calls its web development framework Mojo. It has revealed enough
information to make it clear that this is plainly widget level
development. There’s nothing really wrong with that; I suggested that
Apple’s best bet in delivering early apps for the iPhone would be to
create a widget sandbox for its web developers so they could run
standalone widget-like web apps.
The development community laughed that idea off the table. They
demanded nothing short of full access to the Cocoa frameworks Apple
itself was using on the iPhone to build its own apps. Apple delivered,
creating what has since come to be a blockbuster development program
that has attracted massive development resources and resulted in the
kind of revenues that are sustaining the development of hundreds of
significant new apps from major publishers and indies alike.
Palm is playing a different game, relying on HTML5-style, freestanding
web applets that can talk to the device’s internal contact, calendar,
and location services via JSON messaging. The web browser Palm showed
off on the Pre is based on WebKit, and borrows a lot of the UI and
behavior from Mobile Safari. It’s great Palm has joined Nokia and
Google’s Android to avail itself of the existing WebKit code that is
quickly emerging as the standard for mobile devices, but clearly
Palm’s browser is not a JavaScript plus HTML applet; it’s a native app
just like the iPhone’s Mobile Safari. In fact, it appears that the
Pre’s entire public SDK environment is based upon its WebKit browser
engine.
The apps
The Pre applets Palm is trying to all but pass off as equivalents to
iPhone apps are not real applications at all but just a mobile version
of desktop widgets. If you’re wondering why Palm didn’t trot out EA,
Sega and a series of other developers to show their games for the new
Pre, suffice it to say they’re not going to be building anything
approaching the more demanding iPhone apps as HTML widgets for the
Pre.
That might not upset Palm’s user base, which is used to running fairly
simple, single-tasking cell phone software apps for the archaic Palm
OS. The move to an widget environment that can run “multiple widgets
at once” might be seen as an improvement for Palm OS users who have
never been able to run two apps concurrently, but sorry I have to
throw up a little at the painfully strained attempt by Palm to present
the Pre as more advanced than the fully multitasking, but third party-
restricted iPhone OS environment.
The iPhone runs real apps and processes concurrently, it just doesn’t
allow third parties to install background servers and apps that refuse
to shutdown when the user hits the home button. That’s not a “missing
feature” that can be improved upon with competitive bullet point
marketing fluff, it’s a purposeful engineering decision Apple made
that might someday be answered by the availability of greater
resources. Palm’s Pre doesn’t solve any new problems in multitasking,
it just does less while advertising that it does more.
iPhone 2.0 SDK: The No Multitasking Myth
The user base
Legacy Palm users might be entirely happy with basic widget-like
applets. It also may be a significant improvement for owners of
Windows Mobile-based Palm devices. The biggest problem for Palm is
that its installed base has shrunk to the point of embarrassment. It
has no excited, loyal group of customers to upgrade.
Imagine if Apple had lost its iPod empire to Sony and other MP3 makers
back in 2005. Had that happened, Apple would never have been able to
win back dominance in that market. The same story is there for Palm.
It might bounce back from relative obscurity to become another
Motorola, but it will never win back its one-time position as the
dominant maker of smartphones, at least in the US, which it had in the
nearly part of the decade. The company voluntarily abdicated that
position through sheer incompetence.
Palm is a lot like Apple in some ways. And Apple did rebound from a
pathetic Palm-like position in the mid 90s to become a hardware
powerhouse today. However, Apple’s Mac sales never went away, they
just remained static and therefore began to pale in significance with
the explosive growth of PCs sold around them. Apple bounced back in
part by augmenting its Mac sales with the iPod, and it continues to
branch out in new areas, adding to its core businesses while
strengthening its Mac position.
Palm has not only suffered from the emergence a wider, more diverse
smartphone market like Apple did in the PC market, but has lost all
relevance as a proprietary hardware vendor because everybody stopped
buying Palm devices. The company has no sales to rescue its future. It
has now obsolesced its existing Palm OS and Windows CE platforms,
rather than augmenting them with a separate successful product. The
last attempt to actually add to its core business was last years’
failed Foleo concept.
The Egregious Incompetence of Palm
The hardware
Now take a look at the Pre itself. It’s just over twice as thick as
the iPhone 3G. If that doesn’t have you drooling, perhaps you’re not
among the smartphone users who value clunky crap built by HTC. Again:
the iPhone is .33 inches thick, the Pre is .67 inches. Wow. In weight,
the two are about the same however. That means the iPhone feels solid
and is well built, while the Pre is the typical HTC smartphone design
where large amounts of dead air are engulfed by a cheap plastic
fenders.
In part, this kind of construction is there to accommodate the Pre’s
replaceable battery, which Palm hailed as an implied improvement over
the iPhone. It’s not. In years of Palm Treo ownership, the only time I
ever needed to replace the battery was after yanking it out to kill
the thing after it crashed. Apple is progressively proving that the
pundits are wrong: replaceable batteries are really a feature only in
the mind of people who can’t accept new ideas.
The Pre’s screen has the same resolution as the iPhone but is slightly
smaller. There’s a slide out Treo-style chicklet keyboard, but
apparently no provision for onscreen input at all. That means, like
Android, every time you ever want to enter a character, you’ll need to
slide the keyboard down and start thumb typing, except your key
targets will be far tinier than even the mini-keyboards of phones like
the Android-based G1.
There’s no stylus, so all existing Palm OS owners considering the Pre
will have to forget everything they know and learn how to use an
iPhone, without the iPhone’s software library, without its media
playback, without its industrial design, and so on. Why not just get
an iPhone? Is the allure of the Pre solely tied to Sprint’s amazing
customer service or Palm’s long history of competitive software update
prowess?
Stick to your knitting
Remember when the tech media fawned over the BlackBerry Storm,
assuming that if RIM could build those popular BlackBerry pager
devices, it must also be able to deliver an full screen, touch-based
iPhone clone that its satisfied pager customers would flock towards to
upgrade? The problem was that RIM wasn’t very good at building an
iPhone clone because its core competencies lied elsewhere, and its
current BlackBerry users didn’t rush to the Storm because they were
BlackBerry owners, not aspiring iPhone users.
Well get ready for the same thing to happen again. Palm makes stylus
PDAs with mobile phone features. So now its going to crank out an
iPhone clone and suddenly deliver an experience comparable to Apple,
despite having no particular experience in digital media sales or
media playback, no history in developing a sophisticated operating
system, no business acumen in challenging the status quo of the
smartphone industry, no proven ability to maintain desktop software,
and a developer relations program that has been on life support for
years, without any real forward momentum in development technology
despite its doodling with Linux, PalmOS enhancements, Windows Mobile
tailoring, and even the purchase of BeOS?
Palm has to do something, and the Pre is a nice demo from the company.
It isn’t anything very novel or pioneering though. It smacks a lot of
last year’s Microsoft Surface: an attempt to take credit for existing
technology in a desperate bid to restore some shine to a battered
brand. However, it comes across as a bald man’s combover. Who is Palm
trying to fool with this nonsense that the Pre is amazing because it
accommodates a battery and runs multiple widgets “at once,” just not
at the same time?
Even worse, more than a few pundits have been duped into gushing
accolades over the Pre, as if there’s a lot to be impressed about.
It’s more than a bit early to suggest that Palm has caught up to
Apple, since all the Pre is so far is a nice demo. At the same time,
there are a few clever innovations on the Pre, including its gesture
bar, which replaces the typical, unimaginative, and clumsy joystick
navigation common to clunky HTC-style smartphones with a touch
sensitive panel outside the screen that responds to swipes in order to
go back.
Palm suggests this helps make the Pre more suitable for one-handed
operation, but then how does one type on those tiny chicklet keys with
one hand? Like the Surface, the Pre demo shows off a lot of things
very carefully in a fashion that skips over some important details.
What about the serious omissions this phone doesn’t handle?
Scratching the Surface of Microsoft’s New Table PC
Microsoft Surface: the Fine Clothes of a Naked Empire
Copy and paste
Palm has remixed a few iPhone features to make them different and
arguably improved (such as a fancier view of tabs in the browser, or
integrated mail and instant messenger inboxes), but it isn’t so tough
to tweak an existing system that already defined how the standard
human interface should work; Microsoft essentially did the same thing
when it introduced Windows as ‘almost as good as a Mac.’
The difference then was that the Mac of the mid 90s was too expensive,
and Microsoft held a monopoly with DOS. In this version, Palm is
intending to sell the Pre for more, not less, than the iPhone, and it
has no position of market power to force its clone into the
mainstream. Good luck with that, Palm.
And the Pre is a shameless clone; Palm has copied the iPhone’s design
down to even minor details, from oval number badges to many of its
icons. This isn’t innovation as much as imitation. The iPhone is a
good starting place, so there’s nothing really wrong with copying the
elements it got right. What’s really wrong with the Pre is that in
areas where Palm has introduced something new, it has created a bland,
flat interface that appears minimal but is really just lacking.
Everything on the iPhone is action oriented. It’s very easy to know
what to do because every screen only offers to do a few things with
large, distinctive targets. The Pre’s demonstrated user interface
tends to overload the screen with layers of icons and fields that are
not sharply outlined, but instead all blandly grey so nothing jumps
out as actionable, while everything actually is. It’s minimal looking,
but really just busy in a quietly noisy sort of way. It’s the kind of
interface where you have to read the entire screen to figure out what
to do next.
And now the tricky part
Even if this was an amazing device, how could Palm possibly sell it
successfully? Who is going to pay a premium (rumored to be $399) for
an iPhone clone that doesn’t do much of what the iPhone does?
How is Palm going to find any attention for a new mobile software
platform in the shadow of the iPhone when RIM’s BlackBerry, Google’s
Android partners, Nokia’s Symbian, and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile
licensees are already desperately hungry for any remaining market
share in the emerging mobile software business that Apple brought to
life?
Palm has accomplished step one in defeating Apple: introducing copycat
hardware that apes some of the iPhone’s features. Considering the
waves of similarly ineffectual iPod-killers that washed up dead on
Apple’s shores over the last 7 years, that’s not enough to claim
victory.
The real test will come when Palm reveals how well it can execute in
copying Apple’s business acumen, marketing savvy, customer support,
ongoing software development, security refreshes, and industrial
design enhancements. In those areas, Palm’s track record is worse than
the American car makers. Perhaps the company should proactively hit up
President Bush for a billion dollar bailout before he leaves office.
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