Springtime, when videos turn their attention towards impending gadgets that are other than the iPhone. Samsung Instinct, BlackBerry Storm, Nokia… what was it again? This time it’s the Palm Pre, with interactions lifted from the iPhone and a faux-Scottish accent taken from Scrooge McDuck, and it’s dreaming of taking out the iPhone with a little 1960’s Adam West Batman ZAP! POW! action, chum.
Only problem? The iPhone is the 2000’s Christian Bale style goram Batman.
Dieter managed to score an awesome video walkthrough of the Palm Pre’s app launching functionality and a look at some of the apps themselves. We’ve joked about how the Palm Pre, supervised by the guy who helped build the iPhone, developed by engineers who helped program the iPhone, felt more like a branch of the iPhone sometimes than a linear descendant of PalmOS.
Turns out we were wrong. To be joking. You swipe horizontally to switch Home Screens, just like the iPhone (though you can scroll down vertically as well to jam more apps on each screen). You hold your finger down and then move to reposition apps, just like the iPhone (though they don’t do the jiggle dance). They even seem to be a little bit laggy and slow to launch at times, just like iPhone 2.0 was! (Though these are widgets, not native apps, so that’s really more of a concern at this point).
Palm, I love ya. I had PDA’s going back to the Visor, smartphones going back to the 600. You left me, I didn’t leave you, remember? So now I found a new phone, and seriously, dressing up just like it isn’t the way to win me back. You gotta be yourself, the new you not a new version of it.
Don’t get me wrong, I really dig your Synergy, that touchstone charger, and that awesome alert system. Gold. But Apple didn’t make that first big iPhone splash by holding up something that worked like a BlackBerry or a Treo. They didn’t show off a Nokia-style experience. They made something new and instantly iconic. Copying the iPhone’s UI and interactions to this degree isn’t recognizing that Apple nailed the multi-touch paradigm for all time. It’s not surrendering the default behavior. It’s just copying Apple’s experience when you should be creating the next generation Palm experience.
Maybe you should have stuck with Palm leadership, engineers, and innovation?
Ouch! According to PreCentral.net, Palm has just given uber-investor Roger McNamee the PR equivalent of the Price-is-Right FAIL buzzer. Bum-Bum-Ba-Bum-Bowwwwwwww…
Much of it is numbers and analyst based, but a few gems glare out, especially #5, #8, and #9. Words like “premature” and “withdrawn” are used. Double ouch.
Read the whole post for a great daily dose of schadenfreude.
Of course, it wasn’t all bad news for Palm yesterday: Engadget editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky hit Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to show off the Pre, and show techies are comedy gold as well.
I wasn’t at CES with CrackBerry Kevin and Smartphone Expert Dieter. I was at Macworld getting, you know, iPhone news. But even TiPb couldn’t ignore the Pre and it’s former-iPod/iPhone team designed goodness. So tempting is the Pre, in face, that we suspect iPhone and BlackBerry loyalists alike might stray from the fold to at least try it out come launch day (whenever that is). So, the question becomes, what to call them roving polygadetists? What matches up with CrackBerry or the Jesus Phone?
CrackBerry Kevin has been using Pre-Jects for a while now. TiPb has thrown around Pre-Verts. We’ve even carried the argument over to the Twitter (@reneritchie and @crackberrykevin — just don’t tell @backlon!)
Are we being Pre-Mature about the whole thing? Or Pre-sumptuous in not letting you, or much smarter and better looking commenters choose the name? We’ve even set up a handy, dandy poll in the forums.
UPDATE: Ah hellz ya! Dieter has got him a rebuttal going on over at PreCentral.net! Let’s get it on!
Seems McNamee thinks iPhone Mobile Safari ain’t all that, compared to the Pre (even though the Pre uses Apple’s open-source WebKit foundation — which we know comes from KHTML/Konquerer…):
“Our product is just going to run rings around them on the web. If you want to go the web, it’s going to be a million time faster, well, not a million times, several times faster and that’s a huge deal for most people.”
Really? And since Sprint can’t do simultaneous voice and data, the minute you answer a call, your speed drops to zero. How much faster is that?
Apparently, however, McNamee’s hurt turns to heart for Apple’s Mac platform:
I’ve been an apple fan for years and I would never use any other kind of computer!
Bulletin: Some may just feel the same about the iPhone, b’okay Roger? See the whole crash-and-burn on video at Bloomberg…
Hey, it’s nice to see Palm getting back into the game! No, not with their admittedly compelling — if Apple inspired — Palm Pre handset set to land sometime in the first half of 2008. But with their rhetoric. You know, the same rhetoric that had Palm CEO Ed Colligan, when asked about the iPhone before it’s launch say, Apple wasn’t just going to walk in and figure smartphones out.
This time time it’s not Colligan however, but Palm uber-financier and Bono-buddy Roger McNamee, he of the coolest utility belt since Batman, who’s firing the mouth-cannon Apple’s way. McNamee tells Bloomberg (via Daring Fireball):
“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee said today in an interview in San Francisco. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”
Not one? Really? We’re certain some die hard Palm faithful and curious technophiles will become Pre-verts come launch day (we even suspect an editor-in-chief we know might just be waiting in line already…) but not one?
Given Apple’s statement that June is also iPhone product cycle, and that the Pre has fairly shamelessly glommed Apple’s iPhone style — and several high profile members of the iPhone development team — we’re certain Steve Jobs won’t make it a point to have a shiny new iPhone 3.0 ready for just about the same time, so that original iPhone owners have an easier, maybe even moe compelling upgrade path available. Can’t see that happening, can we…?
Using webOS, which is a localized, almost widget-ized development environment (using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and enhanced local access), the Palm Pre can run many WebApps at the same time. The way it’s visualized is with the “card” metaphor, where a touch of the Home-like button shrinks the current screen down to a thumbnail that’s kept live and updated in real time. The interface also lets users shuffle the apps like cards in a fanned-out deck. You re-arrange the cards and can even terminate an app by “throwing it away”.
While the iPhone doesn’t keep them live or let you re-arrange them, and has an X to close rather than the throw-away gesture, going as far back as two years ago when Steve Jobs introduced it at Macworld 2007, it let you zoom out of the Mobile Safari web browser with an eerily similar thumbnail representation. (Though there doesn’t seem to be any patent contention over that just yet…)
Actually, given Apple’s recent obsession with Cover Flow in iTunes, OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Finder and now Safari 4 Beta, we’re surprised they didn’t just default to that for Mobile Safari tabs from the get go as well…
Confession: it was a pretty boring call from Palm CEO Ed Colligan today. No Pre release date. No Pre feature update. No assault on Apple. Nothing and pretty much more nothing. We kinda wish Steve Jobs had crashed the event and gone all Christian Bale on Palm. At least that would have been interesting! Still, PreCentral caught this tidbit, for what it’s worth:
On the issue of PATENTS, Colligan made sure to note that there are no pending legal actions with Apple right now. More pointedly, he noted that Palm has 15 years worth of patents (over 1500 of them in total) and that in patent fights often go like this:
The reason you do that is to have a defensive position. It’s like two little porcupines going around, and you don’t want to touch each other because you might get stung. You peacefully coexist and everything’s OK and you keep working together. We’re very respectful about people’s intellectual property, we believe we’re huge innovators and have been for a lot of years and that this product has an enormous number of innovations in it. If something does happen there, we do have the portfolio, we think to defend ourselves and to be successful doing that. But nothing’s happened to date, so we’re really just focused on getting the product out the door.
Note to Palm: while you fancy yourself a prickly little rodent, Apple’s totems are the big cats, so either you’ll bloody their mouth and run them off, or they’ll use those quills to pick their teeth clean after they’re done eating you.
We’ve heard whispers relating to this one for a while, but now VentureBeat (via MacRumors) is putting text-to-screen about it:
Apple, which of course makes the signature multi-touch mobile device, the iPhone, apparently asked Google not to implement it, and Google agreed, an Android team member tells us.
Apparently, Google didn’t want to risk their relationship with Apple or the iPhone. Google’s CEO is on Apple’s board, and Google has been releasing iPhone initiative after iPhone initiative these days.
Same Android team members is said to pleased at how this has turned out, given the recent legal noise around the Palm Pre, which decidedly does use multi-touch in almost identical — perhaps infringing-ly identical — manner to the iPhone. Though many behind the Palm Pre, like former iPod czar Jon Rubinstein came from Apple, their relationship is not said to still be as strong.
So, should Google have agreed to Apple’s request to remove multi-touch from the Android? Should Palm? We still don’t know the strength of Apple’s multi-touch patent portfolio, or portfolio’s lined up against it in defense, but if the Pre suddenly ships without the functionality shown in the CES Keynote, will it be a deal breaker for anyone?
What’s the one thing worse than bloggers offering opinions about the likelihood of an Apple vs. Palm patent fight? That’s right! Analysts! (Where’s our magic 8 ball for a dissenting view when we need it?!)
PreCentral.net picks up just such a story on how one analyst thinks Apple’s IP claims against Palm just might be — wait for it! — fruitless:
Though the review of granted and filed patents shows that Apple has a “formidable arsenal of capacitive, multi-touch patents that constitute a nearly impenetrable barrier to entry for companies hoping to commercialize capacitive, multi-touch devices,” Perez-Fernandez also noted that Apple’s key patents may be “invalidated based on prior art considerations if subjected to a review by the USPTO.”
Prior art can trump all, unless Apple’s own early patents, or the ones it acquired from Fingerworks, are the most “prior” of relevant art in question.
Of course, Apple has $30 billion reasons more than Palm for just why it might press its case anyway, even if it’s ultimately unsuccessful…
