We’ve had a lot to say about the Palm Pre over the last few months, but it pales to insignificance compared to the epic monster of a Palm Pre review our noble Editor-in-Chief, Dieter Bohn, has just dropped on sibling site PreCentral.net:
There are Pre Reviews & then there are huge Pre Reviews with 12 videos and photo galleries w/ 200 images for companions
Well. Done. Sir.
If you’re tired of the sizzle and want some steak, if you’ve seen smoke but question if there’s fire, get thee over to PreCentral.net and read the Palm Pre review.
Then hurry back here and tell us what you think of it, and how you think it’ll compare with the iPhone!
Our all-grown up sibling site, PreCentral.net has just hit the mid-point in their debut device, mega-give away contest, What Would You Do for a Palm Pre? And the answers, at least thus far, have been as compelling as they’ve been — well, quite frankly disturbing.
From Pre-verts to Pre-jects to all around Pre-fects, (tip o’ the meme to CrackBerry Kevin), their awesome community showed up in full force — if not full faculty — video cameras in hand, and oh my but they’ve brought’n'd it!
And more to come! Keep an eye on PreCentral.net for the rest of the week, for the rest of the videos, and if you’re already lined up outside a Sprint store for this Saturday’s big Pre launch, do say hi to Dieter for us!
Palm faithful rejoice, Gizmodo — via an unnamed source — claims that Palm Pre still syncs with iTunes 8.2 release, same as it reportedly did with the pre-release version.
Meanwhile, Daring Fireball weighs in on the situation again, this time wondering if what Palm is doing is illegal, and if Apple stops it, whether that would be illegal. PreCentral.net, for their part, looks beyond the what to the why:
we’re increasingly getting the feeling that Palm is either trying to goad Apple into a legal showdown or they are so confident in their patent portfolio that they feel they can throw these features in Apple’s face.
To which Gruber aptly footnotes:
And, when judging the likelihood of Apple filing such a lawsuit, consider the perspective of a certain highly-competitive quasi-paranoid Apple founder and CEO who is famously sensitive to what he perceives as being “ripped off”. The one and only company to ship a product that successfully masquerades as an iPod via USB is the company whose engineering division is run by a former Apple senior VP and has hired a slew of former Apple engineers.
In — as they say — deed.
Jeremy already passed along the warning from the iPhone Dev-Team on iTunes 8.2. In case you missed it, they told jailbreakers and potential jailbreakers NOT to install Apple’s just-released iTunes update.
According to their latest Dev-Team Blog post, the reason seems to be:
It breaks your ability to use QuickPwn, PwnageTool, and iPhone Tunneling Suite (ssh over usb). We don’t think this is a deliberate breakage of these tools. It’s just that Apple has updated a low-level USB protocol that normally only Apple cares about (but jailbreakers care about).
Is Dev-Team working on a fix? Youbetcha, but they don’t want to release anything further until iPhone OS 3.0 is final. This may annoy people who have the 3.0 beta, but legit developers probably have more pressing concerns than jailbreaking at the moment, and why would the Dev-Team waste their energy and tip their hand to Apple when the betas will likely keep changing every couple of weeks before release anyway?
Of course, the blogsphere now has another concern, since last week’s announcement that the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes, likely by faking Apple’s USB protocols to disguise itself as an iPod (see Daring Fireball’s take on this as well). There have been two pre-release versions of iTunes 8.2, going back over a month, but the obvious question still becomes: will the iTunes 8.2 final release also effect the Palm Pre sync?
Dev-Team thinks it’s possible:
It may actually break Palm Pre’s connection to the device (please give us feedback on this).
We think Palm’s Jon Rubinstein — who used to head the iPod division at Apple — may just have compromising pictures of the iPhone taken during it’s “bachelor” party the night before Macworld 2007 … We mean, it’s got to be something, right?
nanocr.eu (via MacRumors) has a theory on how the Palm Pre is managing to sync so seamlessly with iTunes. Read the full post for details, but their conclusion is a tad concerning:
- When you select “Media Sync” on the Pre, it will switch its USB interface to use Apple’s Vendor Id and the Product Id for a specific iPod model
- The Pre exposes a filesystem through Mass Storage Class that mimics the structure of an iPod
- The Pre responds to Apple’s custom USB command and returns XML info about the device
They warn — like we have — that this will be pretty simple for Apple to intentionally prevent, uncaringly break, or accidentally bug up (they’ve done all three to jailbreakers in the past, after all, and expecting Apple to devote time and engineers to maintaining compatibility for unlicensed devices is just this side of silly).
Their advice? Anticipate Palm Pre iTunes sync to go the way of the dodo and fast. Then get a copy of DVD Jon’s DoubleTwist and sync your hearts out that way…
As Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak paid rapt attention (via Engadget), Palm’s new dynamic duo, Jon Rubinstein and Roger McNamee took turns amazing, informing, and stupefying the crowd at All-Things Digital’s D7 conference. Our sibling site, PreCentral.net has complete coverage, but from an iPhone perspective there were a few things worth drawing attention to…
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Fortune scoop’let’ed the story: the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes. No, not like a dumb USB disk. Not even like a 3rd party-enabled BlackBerry on the PC. Somehow, when Jon Rubinstein joined Palm, someone at Apple forgot to frisk him for iTunes keys.
Our friends over at PreCentral.net, of course, are all over this:
If the Pre does indeed just show up as a standard device on iTunes, it would be big news — but it wouldn’t be unprecedented. Apple has allowed other OEMs to license the necessary APIs to talk directly to iTunes so they can show up as a device. If you take a gander at the list of compatible players on Apple’s support site, you’ll see that Rio players, Nomad Players, and others will all work with iTunes directly (not to mention various Motorola phones).
Still, the level of integration purportedly available to the Pre makes us feel more than a little violated. Did Apple really license them that deep a hook into the system? Given the existence of one Steven P. Jobs, we somehow doubt that. But if not, which 3rd party hook did Palm embed, is it all nice and legal, and how — if at all — will Apple react?
We know! At WWDC Phil Schiller will announce — iPhone compatibility with Palm Desktop!!
Ahem
Yeah, provocative headline, but we’ve lamented in that past that the Palm Pre was too iPhone-like for us — based on the involvement of transplanted Apple brain trust — and how we’d have loved to have seen a truly next generation Palm device. Could it be, however, that the former have saved us from being tragically wrong about the latter?
We’d heard before how the previous Apple iPod-lead Jon Rubinstein argued and lost with Steve Jobs over a hardware keyboard on the iPhone (much as Tony Fadell, “father of the iPod” and another former Apple exec, argued and lost over using Linux rather than OS X on the iPhone). Flash forward and Rubenstein is recruited by new Palm backers, Elevation Partners, to help oversee the development of Palm’s next generation handset — and potential company-saving gadget — the Palm Pre. (And Rubinstein brought over iPhone engineers and Apple PR people to help).
So what’s new? According to Fortune (via PreCentral.net) it turns out Rubenstein first had to save the Palm Pre from Palm:
Rubinstein started, in his words, “hanging out” with Palm people in late June. He didn’t like what he saw. The hardware for the Pre needed to be scrapped and rebooted. For one thing, prototypes were using old “resistive” touchscreen technology that responds to a user physically pushing the screen, not the newer “capacitive” technology manipulated by the electricity in the user’s body. Rubinstein tossed out the old phone’s hardware and built a new one in about 15 months. “We were basically running a marathon and doing a heart transplant in the middle of it,” says Rubinstein.
We’ve joked before that the device we all know and love is Steve Jobs’ vision of the iPhone, and that the Palm Pre is Jon Rubinstein’s vision of the iPhone, and guess what? We might have been exactly right.
(And does that mean if Rubinstein and Fadell had won their arguments, maybe the iPhone would have been the Palm Pre fully two years ago? We’re ecstatic they didn’t and it wasn’t because now we get to have both visionary products to choose from — and to compete for our choice.)
Only question is, where can we see that Palm-like Pre prototype?
To see the above image in all immenseness and glory, head on over to our sister site PreCentral.net. And yeah, AT&T did draw first blood a while back with their own internal comparison document, so we’re really more amused than amazed by this one, even if the categories chosen for the above comparison are a little on the weighted side. (If they’d chosen desktop syncing, massive integrated media service, 35,000+ current-gen apps, etc. things might have ended up a little differently…). Beyond the talking points, more details have also emerged:
We can also confirm that until you set up your Palm Profile, the Pre won’t work at all. You’ll also need to accept Google Mobile’s terms of service in order to get GPS services working properly. Multiple Exchange accounts are a go with full push support and the ability to search through Global Addresses on the server – but inviting attendees isn’t up yet.
Also, DocsToGo will be built in but read-only. Full version, with editing will be available to those on the “Now Network” at some time that is “later”…
What else? Heading into WWDC it’s pretty much all iPhone 3.0 and new iPhone hardware, all the time. Join Dieter and Rene for talk on the latest rumors, multitasking, Apple’s rejection of Eucalyptus, and more. Listen in!
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