Palm’s Pre won CNET’s Best of CES award for 2009, and is getting tons of love from around the tech world. Not a bad accomplishment for a smartphone with a completely new OS, from a company written off as dead not long ago.

I wrote something like this about RIM’s BlackBerry Storm and got some heat for it, but still…where’s the music?

I don’t mean that the Pre won’t play music–of course it will. Palm even announced a deal with Amazon to let users buy music downloads without any intervention (cooperation? interference?) from the carrier, Sprint.But let’s recap why the iPhone became the first smart phone to capture the consumer imagination. Sure, its design had a lot of pleasant “just works” surprises, from the bright touchscreen to the way the keypad auto-corrects for big fingers. But a large reason is because Apple branded it as an extension of the iPod, which has become synonymous with mobile music. When music fans were looking to consolidate from two devices (MP3 player, phone) to a single one, the “i” brand reassured them that they wouldn’t get a second-class music experience.

Equally important: iTunes, the software that every iPod user was already familiar with. It’s not perfect. I know people who hate it, particularly on the PC. But compare it with the proposed Pre experience, as covered by PC Magazine:

9.) How do you get music and video onto the Pre?

You can drag and drop it over from your PC using USB mass storage, or buy songs on the device using a built in Amazon MP3 Store client.

My immediate reaction upon reading those three little words, “drag and drop”? Yecch. No sync? No library? No rating system? No playlists, preset or automatic? No way to view and change information about songs?

Here’s the thing: without iTunes, there’s no iPhone. And without the iPhone, there’s no consumer smartphone audience. I don’t doubt that Palm (and RIM, for that matter) understand mobile communications and information management, and there’s certainly a lot of room for improvement in business phones. But if I’m going to replace my MP3 player with a phone, these phones won’t cut it.

That’s why Microsoft’s recent justification for the Zune–it helped them learn how to build music-management software and an online store–didn’t ring as false to me as it did to some other folks. The device might be a failure. But whenever Microsoft rolls out its next-generation mobile phone platform, at least it has a reasonable story for managing and buying music.

Source: CNET News – Posted by Matt Rosoff

When Psion made a generation leap it proudly broke backward binary compatibility – gambling that the new platform was so much richer than before. It kept a semi-official API in the form of the BASIC-like OPL interpreter, but without such a tool at its disposal, Palm didn’t have that option. The developer base has been largely dormant for three or four years now. Palm needs these developers back, and the best way is with a shiny new thing. So, in all, it was a wise decision to leave the legacy applications to an emulator, and the business of writing an emulator to someone else.

But what does Palm’s return mean for the market?

Swiping a few features

Firstly, let’s take stock of how quickly the market has moved. 30 months ago I despaired of the smartphone ever achieving anything like the claims once made for it. The best devices – from Nokia and Sony Ericsson – remained clunky, and few people ever used anything that could be described as a “smart feature”. They were phones with OK cameras – but probably slower and less reliable than other cheaper feature phones which also had OK cameras. Why bother?

As the smart device dream died, so did the idea of mobile data. It’s amazing how much that has changed. With BlackBerry moving into the consumer market, the iPhone, and even Google introducing yet another new platform, we’re awash with options. With Apple, Android and Palm, we can entertain the idea that there’s more of a future here than a glorious past. So what might Palm bring to the party?

Well, the company has the advantage of being a second (or third) mover, which should not be underestimated in IT. Let someone else take the Fail – then learn from their mistakes. Or observe which aspects of the device are enduring and valued by users, once the gimmickry has worn off – then steal them, and implement them better.

Apple’s iPhone proves that you don’t need a stylus, and that a well thought out gesture UI does most things very well. It also demonstrates a crying need for context switching, better integration (the absence of a clipboard really hurts many power users) and Palm has taken full advantage of all three. Have a look at the video – captured by Mobile Burn – to see how nicely multitasking is implemented.

There’s no reason why the iPhone can’t have a real QWERTY keypad, either, the argument being that it spoils the “purity” of the design. People made the same argument against colour TVs once too, I recall.

For my money, the iPhone is the best piece of kit on the market today – if you need something more than a phone, and are prepared to leave your inverted snobbery behind. It’s raised the quality of design across the industry. When the novelty wears off, you’ve still got a great deal of utility, which increases every day thanks to the wide choice of applications. I parted with mine, with some regret, because task switching was so tedious. My current phone does it within a couple of seconds with a couple of keypresses. But it’s not invulnerable, and neither is RIM.

Palm looks the weakest of the five smartphone players – obviously one must include Nokia – because it’s dwarfed by their cash reserves and (with the exception of Google’s Android) customer loyalty. Palm’s lack of funds is reflected in its ultra-cautious roll out schedule: Sprint is the guinea-pig, and no GSM/WCDMA version has yet been announced. But build something popular and the developers will come.

At the end of the day, Palm has reminded everyone, technology is just a tool.

By Andrew Orlowski • Get more from this author

A few years ago, Palm was the unquestioned leader in the U.S. smartphone and PDA market. But it has failed to keep deliver devices that consumers lusted after, and it has been rapidly losing customers and has posted six consecutive quarterly losses.

Palm’s unveiling of its Pre smartphone and WebOS at CES on Thursday gives the company a decent shot at taking back customers who have flocked to Research In Motion (NSDQ: RIMM)’s BlackBerry smartphones and Apple’s iPhone 3G. The comeback trail will be tough, though, as the marketplace is wildly different from when Palm dominated it.

Once the domain of early adopters and business professionals, smartphones have now become a mainstream product. The space has strong entrenched players like RIM and Apple, and up-and-coming newcomers looking to capitalize on Google’s Android operating system. To make matters worse for Palm, LG and Nokia are making hard pushes for the U.S. market as well.

The smartphone market is still somewhat divided between enterprise smartphone users and the casual user, but that line is rapidly disappearing. Palm said it wanted to go after the “fat middle” of the market between the business-centric BlackBerry and the media-centric iPhone.

“We think it’s perfectly balanced,” said Palm CEO Ed Colligan during the handset’s unveiling. “It’s not just for work, it’s not just for play. … We think it’s the one phone you can use for your entire life.”

In terms of design, the Pre should be an appealing device to consumers. The 3.1-inch touch screen has a sharp resolution and it has multitouch and gesture-based navigation like the iPhone. The Pre takes gesture control a step further by including an area under the screen to let users quickly perform a few actions in any application with a swipe of the finger.

There’s also a slide-down physical keyboard that curves forward slightly, and it should make mobile professionals and rapid-fire text message users happy. Including the touch screen and a physical keyboard does have its price though, as the Pre is a bit thicker than Apple’s smartphone and the touch-screen BlackBerry Storm. Additionally, some may be bothered that there’s no on-screen virtual keyboard.

In terms of features, the Pre has nearly everything one expects from a high-end smartphone, including Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth, full HTML browser, 3-megapixel camera, the ability to add applications, 8 GB of storage, multimedia capabilities, and a high-end processor from Texas Instruments (NYSE: TXN). It doesn’t blow the competition out of the water with its specs, but it is a highly capable smartphone that isn’t out-classed by its rivals.

But most high-end smartphones share similar set of features anyways, and there’s an increasingly important emphasis of the software. Palm’s WebOS has been in the works in various iterations for more than four years, and the company believes that extra time allowed it to create the right OS for a modern mobile user.

Palm’s WebOS has been built from the ground up with constant mobile Internet connectivity in mind. Palm’s OS pulls information from various Web services and aggregates it into a single, finger-friendly interface. For example, it will be able to aggregate contact information from Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s Outlook, Web-based e-mail, and social networking site into a single contact list. The Outlook integration could make this a useful device for mobile professionals, and hands-on reports said it handles multitasking well.

The company said the platform was built on industry-standard technologies like CSS, XHTML, and JavaScript, and Palm intends to offer a rich open development environment for third-party developers to quickly create content. For example, the Internet radio provider Pandora was able to create an application in three days, Palm said.

Palm was well known for its rich stable of developers for past smartphone platforms, but getting developers to create compelling programs for WebOS may be the biggest challenge because the market is getting extremely crowded. While developing apps for Palm’s platform may be easy, developers are likely to go to where the largest audience is.

Right now, Apple is clearly the most attractive platform because its App Store has had more than 300 million downloads in the last six months. Developers may also be drawn to BlackBerry and Windows Mobile for their large user bases, and Google’s Android platform is expected to be on multiple handsets and carriers in 2009. Additionally, many industry watchers expect Symbian to make a strong play for the U.S. market once it has gone open source in 2010, further siphoning potential content creators away from Palm.

This could potentially lead to chicken-and-egg scenario where developers ignore the WebOS platform because it doesn’t have a large user base but it can’t get a sizeable following because there aren’t compelling apps. This shouldn’t be an issue with the larger entities like Facebook which have the time and resources to create programs for multiple platforms, but it could keep out smaller developers who create niche or exclusive content.

Additionally, questions still remain on how WebOS applications will be distributed. The company will most likely take its cue from the App Store and Android Market and create a single store for users to browse, buy, download, and install apps on the go. But the company has not said if this is the case, what payment method will be used, and what percentage of revenue developers will get.

Palm has partnered with Sprint to be the exclusive carrier of the Pre at its launch in the first half of 2009, and this has positive and negative aspects. AT&T has the iPhone 3G, T-Mobile has the G1, Verizon Wireless has the BlackBerry Storm, and Sprint will likely make the Pre its flagship handset. This means the Pre will benefit from Sprint’s advertising and marketing muscle, and it can take advantage of the company’s large EV-DO Rev. A network. But Sprint continues to struggle with maintaining subscribers, and it still has a bit of a reputation for having poor customer service. The companies haven’t released any pricing details, but it may be hard to sell the Pre for more than $199, which is what the iPhone 3G and BlackBerry Storm cost.

Palm appears to have cherry-picked popular features and services from its rivals while adding enough unique qualities to make the Pre and WebOS attractive. But there are still too many unanswered questions to say if these products will get it back to the top.

Source: By Marin Perez – InformationWeek