Otaku Gadgets

It has been a while since the Palm Pre has been released and much has already been said about it. One thing that should be highlighted here is that Palm’s existence is was at stake here. (I think it is safe to say that Pre is more or less a hit)

Palm was once known as the company who practically invented the smart phone category. But that is but a distant past now. It has barely kept up with the times and as we all know – the iPhone has been eating in to everybody’s market. Arguably, had the iPhone not existed we would not have seen the likes of HTC Hero, Sony XPERIA or may be even the Palm Pre. But the iPhone has upped the ante for everybody and love it or hate it – you can’t ignore it. Every touch phone will be measured against the iPhone.

So how does the Pre measure up? It measures up quite well actually but mostly in the OS and touch/gestures area.

The Palm Pre has a brilliant new Linux based OS called the WebOS and on it rides the hopes and dreams of an entire community. Everyone wants to see Linux on phones and the Android is just one culmination point of this desire.

The WebOS is where Pre is its strongest. It is extremely well designed and works brilliantly on most counts. It is visually quite pleasing and has all the touch gestures that iPhone has and more. The bit of space that you see under the phone is actually a touch/gesture area where you can swipe left to go back a screen or swipe up to the screen to get to the launch tray. Another gesture that is different from the iPhone is swiping apps upwards and off the screen to close them, which I personally find quite nice.

While we are on the area, I would like to mention that the shiny little round object on the bezel isn’t a trackball, even though it looks like one. It is just a plain button.

When it comes to multi-touch the Pre actually outshines the iPhone and I really mean it. People have been raving about how great the multi-touch is on the Pre. May be it is just the better processor or may be it is just better software but the multi-touch is simply great. You don’t have to take my word for it, even Gizmodo is gushing about it!

One clunky thing about the Pre is making a call. You would think that being a phone it would make sifting through your contacts easier. But other than the old-hat assign-to-a-key speed dial, there are no fast ways to make a call from your list of contacts. One way is to go to the contact menu and start scrolling. Good luck with that if you have hundreds of contacts. Another way is the universal search. You simply start typing and the universal search picks it up from your list of contacts and you can dial, finally! This actually one of those points where you would want to go – now that wasn’t such a good idea. This is one of the many design flaws that the Pre has. One hopes that Palm will learn from all the reviews.

Now the universal search is quite nice actually, it lets you search on Google, Wikipedia, and twitter. Its just that I don’t want it to be the only way I can search through my contacts.

Since it does not search through your music, mails or calendar events – it is actually quite faster than the iPhone search. But that also makes it less ‘Universal’ in nature.

Synergy is great and syncing to your online contacts at Facebook and Google is fairly easy and reliable. It even merges the contacts together to eliminate any duplication. A really cool feature is the merging of SMS and IMs. So theoretically, you can have a short SMS conversation and then start an IM conversation once the person is online again. I say theoretically because usually we do not carry over threads of conversation from text messages in to IM conversations.

Think practically! We text people not to have conversations but to inform, affirm, negate and question. One off communiqués that end after the first reply. But that does not stop the thing from being a cool feature and it is bound to come in handy from time to time.

Multitasking works quite well on the phone, thankfully and it is quite easy to do too. To open a new app all you have to do is hit the small button in the center and launch something from the launch tray or the launcher. The running apps appear as cards and you can select the one you want to work on. If you hit the center button once again, all the running apps appear as cards and you can switch between them. Swiping it off the screen closes the app.

There is a reason why I am going on and on about the WebOS. I see it something that can actually take on the iPhone for what it is, if given enough time. Every new touch phone that comes out now is at an added disadvantage. The iPhone has been around since mid 2007 (June 29 ’07 to be exact) and these phones are coming out mid-2009. Kudos to Apple for making it so early but it is unfair to judge the other phones against the iPhone now. They need time to grow, just like the iPhone has.

Although, I must say that most of these attempts have been forgettable ones. Out of the entire lot, the Palm Pre and the Android (as a platform) have a lot of potential because of their new approach to mobile phone OS. They have another thing helping them along – Linux.

Developers really want something as flexible as Linux to develop on and that in my opinion will carry this entire wave forward. The Android marketplace is filling up nicely and that is a good indicator. Now that Palm has Mojo, things should take off in the right direction for it. However, this might sound slightly biased but I really feel that the ultimate competitor for Apple in this segment will be the Android platform because of its inherent flexibility as a open source project. But the Pre just might surprise us all.

So it seems like Palm will live to see many more days and with the right moves (especially in the hardware area) it is likely to become a very strong contender indeed.