Review roundup: Palm's Pre and its fledgeling WebOS - Page 2

Aren't MS shareholders going to get sick of them supplying loss-leaders just maintain a bit of the pie? WinMo? Zune? What other parts of tech can they lose money in? Just asking.

As for the Pre, I don't see how they are going to garner enough people to make this thing profitable seeing how many subscriber that Sprint has been losing.

Most people will not see this as cheaper than the iPhone. $250 a year is nothing.

No applications to speak of. Apple has a huge head start.

Apple will surely disable the iTunes syncing thing. If Palm doesn't have the licenses then no way is Apple going to let that continue.

The only two things I can see that this phone has is a physical keyboard, for those that think they need one, and it isn't an iPhone, for those that don't want to drink the Apple Kool-Aid(in spite of the fact that it is so tasty!).

I guess you never owned a digital camera?
My point is the more apps and bullsheet added to these devices, a swappable battery is mandatory- like a camera.

If build quality is your thing, check this out http://www.uncells.com/

You may have to be a millionaire though!

It's interesting how many people are saying "Good job, Palm!" when it's really more like, "Good job, Jon Rubinstein, former Apple employee and engineer behind the iPod, and well done numerous other former Apple employees in Jon's 250 person team."

My hope is that the Pre becomes the main competitor to the iPhone, in that the iPhone can never take over the whole market anyway (nor should it), and the most compatible device to "take up the slack" and that will do the most for consumers is the Pre.

This is because the entire OS of the Pre is web-based, open standards infused, and (more importantly) a subset of the iPhone functionality. The Safari browser on the iPhone looks and acts almost identically to the WebOS interface. I am hoping that Apple sees this and both makes mobile Safari a little more attractive and easier to use (closer to WebOS), and at the same time pushes more developers to using web-based solutions which actually work better in many cases than native ones.

IMO the ideal smartphone (or even cellphone) market is a 60/40 one with the iPhone platform as the 60 and the WebOS platform as the 40.

I wish it was included, if only because I think its racket, especially when paying for unlimited data, but Sprint needs to attract users more than AT&T. I think the best thing that can happen to AT&T and US iPhone users is for the Pre et al. to impact the iPhones success negatively. As a stick holder I wont be too happy with that, but as an iPhone and AT&T user the outcome should be favourable.



The devils greatest trick was to convince people he didnt exist. His 2nd greatest trick was to convince people he was harmless.

Personally, i dont believe in good or evil as we define it, but I do believe that Google will work for their best interests as a publicly traded company. That said, it does appear that Googles current longterm business practices are good for us. In a similar vein does anyone think that Apples open-source support is altruistic in any way?

MDN's take is spot-on today . . .

Almost every reviewer (yes, we've read them all) either fails to mention the specter of new iPhone hardware that looms over Palm and the Pre or, worse, compares the Pre with iPhone 3G (now a year old) and iPhone Software 2.0. Also, nobody seems to see fit to mention that a device with an accelerometer to detect and enable landscape view (wonder where they got that idea?) comes with a less-than-stellar antique physical keyboard perpetually stuck in (and with keys crammed into) portrait mode. Turning the thing sideways results in a useless appendage; simply bad design.

By some miracle, even the most deluded reviewers do mention the Pre's complete dearth of apps before resuming their breathless comparisons with Apple's old iPhone and OS. RIM is the odd man out, warranting little or no mention at all in many of these reviews; that's telling and of import to the mobile device market as a whole. BlackBerry could get squeezed here if and this is a very big if (consigned to Sprint for at least 6 months, no apps, scant developer support, non-competitive price that's about to look even worse, iPhone 3.0, new iPhones, etc.) Palm's Pre is a sales hit.

By our calculations, the media's Pre orgy has about 96 hours left or several thousand less hours than Palm desperately needs.

Where did they get the 96hrs figure from? WWDC keynote?

I think that Fennec (mobile Firefox) will be very important to Nokia when it is officially launched this year. Theyve been doing a Qt port for over a year now. Im surprised that its taken so long, especially when Mozilla has lost so much mobile marketshare to WebKit-based browsers with iPhone OS X, BB OS, Android, WebOS. You can even get WebKit-based browser as Iris for WinMo devices. It scores a 100/100 on Acid3 thereby making it the most advanced mobile browser engine on the market to date.

Sorry Mossberg.

You're dreamin' if those tiny keys are an advantage over Apple's keyboard touch screen.

While I agree with what you are saying, I have seen far too many people using the external AA rechargers for Blackberries and other phones to believe that most people want second batteries. A single, long-life battery is what makes using a phone simple. When you wake up in the middle of the night remembering you need to plug your phone in to charge... not so much.

If a phone has a long battery life (3-5 days with heavy use), nobody cares about the battery. If it is less than a day then it becomes a big issue. Less than two days, and some people get upset but not the majority.

Safari will continue to evolve, but Apple's iPhone OS isn't going to drive Web Apps on the iPhone as their first solution for development on the iPhone. The SDK is the future of the iPhone. They'll add more functionality with those native applications to interact with Safari, but it won't be a priority driving through Safari when you open up APIs and allow developers to drive profits through native apps.

They are trying to appeal and plead with the Twitter junkies and kids who waste their day away texting on their phones.

Nokia/Symbian won't disappear, but I think they will be powering mid-level phones instead of full-featured smart phones. The whole point of smart phone is to have third party apps. Nokia won't succeed in doing that. However, they will have phones with good in-house apps for much cheaper price (like those free AR phones).

WM is down but certainly not out. WM has the best development tools, on par with iPhone. Just that is enough to make them a strong contender. However, between WM and BB, I still think BB has the upper hand because corporations will be reluctant to change their standard handset.

As is, WM will beat Android and WebOS for the #3 spot. Palm won't survive, simply because they won't have enough volume to have positive margin. Eventually, after Nth time, they won't find investors to keep on filling the hole.

On the other hand, if Google buys Palm, Android/WebOS have a good chance to compete against WM. I would say 50-50.

But if you are out all day - let's say on vacation, making calls , taking pics, makig videos, etc, etc, It's a hell of a lot easier to swap out a battery than look for a place to charge up your device.

Or, it is a hell lot easier to have a phone which will last all day.

Does one exist? Everyone I know is constantly charging their iPhone all day at work and using while it's charging!

I love the on screen keyboard on iPhone, and think the additional physical keyboard sucks. The keys are too small for normal use, and it adds fatness to the phone which would bulges in my pocket. Also NO APPS on WebOS! This phone does not compete with the iPhone, or with the iPhones that will come out on June 8th. It competes with Android OS, which is not bad in itself, but seems to have more phones and developers on its side. How about software upgrades? Are those possible?

Just don't see why people are so excited about this, definitely not an iPhone killer.

If you're on the web all day on your iPhone, playing games, using apps, etc. It'll drain faster. People love to use their iPhones, and play with them constantly. You're likely seeing an inordinate amount of usage. It's an addictive device, to say the least.

By the way, you should change your sig. It seems grotesquely out of line with your posts.

Funnily enough I do have a digital camera. Funnily enough I made it through a trip to the zoo taking multiple pictures of every single animal without swapping my batteries too. Do you have some really crap batteries or something?

maybe people just want to use the work electricity instead of their own at night?

Why are people still comparing it to LAST years iPhone. That would be like Car and Driver comparing the New Corvette to last Years 911. As awesome as some may think this new device is, maybe you should wait until the new iPhone comes out to make any direct comparisons.

It will be, but Palm has been very open about their product and Apple, as usual, hasnt said anything about the next iPhone HW and associated SW features. For this reason we can only compare it to the current iPhone, which is why its important for Palm to launch it before the next iPhone is announced. They need the first comparisons to be against the current device running 2-year old HW. As soon as the iPhone is launched well see new comparisons.

I have a sony DSC-750, it takes well over 400 pics at 7mps one one charge. Maybe you need a better camera. Also don't leave data connections on if they aren't needed. No matter the phone it will kill it fast if your "connected". Thirdly, are you human? Most people tend to get smarter as they get older.

When I come to my office, I plug in my iPhone. Hooking up iPhone is not just for battery. It is about syncing and I also hook up my speakers to the dock audio-out so I can hear my music. People are just used to plugging in the iPhone because it is part of their computing experience, battery is only a small portion.

For normal to heavy use, iPhone has no problem lasting the whole day. I am talking about reasonably heavy uses - including heavy web browsing for hours during the day, and gaming etc.

It won't last for extreme uses.

Actually, vacation usage is pretty light, since you will take the iphone out only occasionally. iPhone will definitely last for your weekend/vacation. You can take 1000 photos, browse the web for two hours and still have enough juice left.

Real extreme usage happens on airplanes. You may be reading ebooks or playing games for 10 hours non-stop. That will drain iPhone.

However, as I posted earlier, certain activities will use more battery. As you posted, a major one is video recording. I believe the battery usage is exactly why Apple left it out. Software encoding will run down the battery in 40 minutes or 1 hour. That's why I believe the next iPhone will have hardware encoding, and even with the iPhone 3.0 OS, older iPhones won't have it because older iPhones do not have the encoding chip.

I have used iPhone for a year or so. I only run out of battery maybe three or four times, and it is always because I forgot to plug in the night before.

From your posts, it seems you do not have an iPhone. I don't blame you for thinking it is a problem, but believe me, it is a non-issue for most people.

No opinion on the hardware part before I can hold one, no need for a physical keyboard though. I type in four different languages every day and no physical keyboard can cope with that anyhow. Replying to an email from my French father-in-law would require the better part of a week on this thing.

I like the Cards approach, but this merged address list and depending on Google services for everything seems like a bad idea. E.g. I use the "Remember the Milk" service for task management (and, yep, there's an app for that) they also integrate with Google Labs, so you can have these tasks show up in Gmail and Google Calendar... the feature breaks multiple times a year; every time Google performs a minor change, the developers of dependent products have to rush out adjustments. Having core functionality of a smartphone completely depending on Google's beta software seems like a risky approach. I also hate Google's approach of automatically adding each and every address as a "suggested contact" without giving the user any control over it. As a business, I would not even consider it.

What struck me with these Engadget videos is something else... while quite a few things look slicker than on the iPhone, quite a few parts of the operation look extremely complicated. You have a drop-down menu, gestures, a touchscreen, a separate touch area plus the keyboard. Certain actions require combining physical input using more than one of these interface parts (press the touch area + C, V or X for copy and paste, press a button on the keyboard plus swipe on the screen to select text, swipe up at different speeds to distinguish between launcher and quick launcher, wtf?). Does not really convince me. One of the main features of the original iPhone was 100% usability of all functions; according to these videos, the Pre is a lot more geeky.

What else can they compare it to? It seems as though almost every review of anything techy I see gets compared to something these days.

When you look at video card reviews, they always stack the fps results against other video cards in the same game. When you look at camera reviews, they always compare the functions to other cameras in the same price range. When you look at car commercials, they are CONSTANTLY comparing cars saying this has more of this than that and blah blah blah.

My point is, people want reviews now, and comparisons are just a natural part of a review. Nobody knows the full extent of what the next iphone will bring so comparing it to last years is all they can do.

Trust me, when the new iphone comes out, reviewers WILL compare it to the Pre.


I think the Pre has turned out to be decent. I wouldn't say it's better than the iPhone, but it definitely has a great start. Compared to iphone 1.0, it's good, but that's not reality. Nobody will compare this and the very first iphone running the very first version of the os.

That means so much, coming from the person who titled their post "wierd."

Where have you been?

Most of iPhone OS 3.0's features have been announced at MacWorld 2009, and developers have been testing the beta since then. You can find the video on the keynote.

So I've read a lot of the reviews, and although the Pre looks cool, I think I'm still going to go with a Touch Pro 2 lol.

I don't think it has anything to do with open-source support, or at most, it's an extremely tangential issue. It has to do with controlling and collecting information -- whether that be through web tracking, gmail, google docs, wave, orphaned books or your personal PIM information -- and what they will do with that information. I certainly think they will, "work for their best interests as a publicly traded company," and I don't think that will be good for any of us in the long-term. I know they will collect as much information on me as they can, but I certainly don't want to make it any easier for them.

Let me answer this one at a time

1. No, MS shareholders will not get tired because windows and word are huge money makers and microsoft can always recoup cost via those two apps.. also, ms is not losing money.. they don't build phones, only the software..
2. The pre will get people.. more people that the treo gets and palm is still in business after selling the treo (which as you know sucks).. i have a treo and will be updating to the pre.. a lot of people have treo's.. my wife does not have a treo and she will get a pre.. palm will do fine with this product..
3. When the iphone came out, it too did not have apps.. what's your point?. The pre will eventually have apps. Obviously, people bought the iphone even though there were no apps initially.. you wanna know why CAUSE THEY WERE BUYING A PHONE!!. Yes, it's truly amazing that people in this day and age forget that most people buy a phone to make a call.. the apps are extra. I've never bought a phone for the apps (heck, i don't even know what apps are available for the iphone). only geeks buy a phone for the apps.. most people buy a phone cause it's either 1. cool, 2. easy to use or 3. their friends rave about their phone and then they want one too. My niece just got an iphone as a graduation gift.. not once did she inquire about what apps is available.. she could care less.. i am sure she cares once she gets the phone but that was not a consideration for her wanting an iphone.. she wanted one cause it was cool.
4. Apple disable syncing?.. what are you talking about?.. did apple previously enable syncing to a palm pre?.. when did that happen?.
5. I want a palm pre cause i am on sprint and it's plans are cheaper than AT&T also cause i don't like the iphone. It's a big phone.. even my old beat up sucky treo is smaller than an iphone. (although the iphone is thinner). Also, i've played around with an iphone.. i prefer a physical keyboard.. one thing i think palm should do is give option of software keyboard. I hope they rectify that and upgrade the phone to have a software keyboard.. not everyone wants a physical keyboard. I heard though that palm will come out with other versions of the pre and one of the versions will not have a physical keyboard.. i hope that is true.. they need to provide options.

That is the v3.0 that all iPhones will get. Apple has not stated what the new iPhone HW will be, nor has it stated what the associated SW features will be. IOW, things like the compass and video recording that developers have pulled from the iTunes and SDK codebase.



For your phone?

I'm with Sprint, but this is exactly why I will probably pass on the Pre. I've generally thought well of Palm's products, but the cold shoulder they give to Mac users is a show stopper for me.

problems and no way will i even consider switching
reviews have stated minimal aps and when an app was downloaded it crashed the phone and all that data was lost, and was able with online backup to get most of it back--holy molly, some back!!! probably the most important stuff lost (i'll try to find the link)

no video
NO VOICE DIALING-WTF--come on you had all this experience with other cellphones and this is dropped!!!!

minimal apps and poor sdk, developer support
less battery life than iphone
no thank you

take over bait,

What? LOL! You want to give it a TWO YEAR slack?! When have you ever given an Apple product anything but a "I want it yesterday"?!

"Mandatory"?! Are you teckstud or teckdictator?

Get over your swappable battery already! It's cheaper just to buy a $15 dollar add on to the iphone. That is if your really need it so bad. No one I know ever carries around a replacement battery, regardless of the type of phone they have.

Yeah man. I've got a touch pro now, and I absolutely love it, but the tp2 looks like what I want. The 16:9 display will be better for web browsing and watching movies. Plus, all the apps I have now will work on it since they're both based on WM. I've also heard people talking about hdmi out and while I don't expect to be running hd movies on the thing, it still will be a major improvement over the standard rca tv out the Touch Pro has.

Out of curiosity, what phone are you working with now?

Well they said video is coming, and the crash issue seems to be something an over the air update can fix. Early adopters always take a risk with new technology which is why the true test will be in a few months, when Palm's had a chance to iron out the kinks. It's all at it's infant stage after all.

In regards to switching, people said the same thing about the iphone when it came out. It had it's fair share of problems also.


LOL. Maybe he secretly holds Apple to a higher standard, or thinks much more of them ;P

I gotcha. I read Touch and thought of the iPod Touch, and figured the Pro 2 was a reference to the next generation device coming out in the fall. I forgot about the HTC device.