All Articles Tagged palm pre

The rumors had said that the iPhone would pick up some features that had been touted for the Pre. One feature of the Pre: Universal Search. The iPhone does the Pre one better with their Spotlight search — it not only searches contacts and apps, but will also search within other key applications like Mail and SMS.

Spotlight on the iPhone works thusly: it becomes your new left-most home screen. When you get there, you can just start typing to bring up a list of everything that matches your search. The list will include data from:

• Contacts
• Calendar
• Email (To, From, Subject)
• iPod
• Notes
• Messaging (SMS / MMS)
• Apps (name of App)

The search results get listed in a big, touchable list and each result will have the icon for the app it’s from set to the left of the result.

Ladies and Gentlemen: this is the single most important new feature of iPhone 3.0 for me and how I use phones. The ability to ‘just start typing’ in order to find what I want to get done is my killer app. How about you?

UPDATED 2: As commenters have pointed out, Rose doesn’t say “no MMS”, he says he doesn’t know about MMS. He does say Apple is not providing Video Recording due to technical limitations: writing too frequently to the NAND Flash memory would burn it out. (While it’s true writing to NAND is destructive and thus, there are limited write cycles, Dieter tells us devices like the HTC Touch Diamond and Sumsung Omnia allow writing to internal storage, so who knows?). Basically, the gist of Rose’s rumor is that iPhone 3.0 will have Cut/Copy and Paste, and “Palm Pre”-like features…

UPDATE: MacRumors has posted slightly clearer details on Rose’s description of how cut/copy and paste works, along with a link to the video (NSFW-L):

Double-tap to bring up a magnifying glass with two quotes, you drag quotes around text string to select, and then you can cut/copy and paste.

ORIGINAL: Kevin’s back. Back again. Digging iPhone rumors. Tell ya friends! Not iChat Mobile this time, unfortunately, but Gizmodo is reporting that during his SXSW live Diggnation, Kevin Rose – who’s flubbed almost all iPhone rumors, but nailed iTunes and iPod nano scoops — put it on the line again for iPhone 3.0 pre-Preview Event:

• Cut and paste (as previously rumored) using double-tap to zoom and activate, pinch boundaries, then options pop up.
• “Palm Pre” features. (Could that be integrated social network contacts, unified messaging, better notifications, multi-tasking?)

Also, what will NOT be included?

• MMS (despite previous rumors)
• Video recording

What do we think? Will Rose be right or wrong this time? Tuesday’s just under two days away!

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!

No sooner did we report the outlandish statement from Palm backer Elevation Partners head-geek Roger McNamee that come June, every iPhone 2G owner would ditch the platform and AT&T to become Pre-verts on Sprint, than our sibling site PreCentral.net went and updated.

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…

We’ve mentioned this in passing before, but the parallels, if any, are worth making more prominent.

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…

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Our best frenemy forever, CrackBerry Kevin Michaluk was gracious enough to join us on TiPb’s iPhone Live! podcast a while back to talk BlackBerry Storm, so this week I returned the “favor” by invading the CrackBerry.com Podcast to talk all things iPhone (and some Palm Pre):

Here it is folks. Another four-person CrackBerry.com podcast! We had a lot of positive feedback to our last episode, so we went for another humdinger this time around. Joining me and Craig on the crackcast hot seats is Rene Ritchie, Community Editor of our favorite frenemy TheiPhoneBlog.com, along with our Twitter-addicted friend and CB blogger / forums moderator, Adam Zeis.

I had a great time with Kevin, Craig, and Adam, so be sure to check it out for your bonus iPhone fix, and let us know what you think!

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…

Yeah, yeah, Michael Dell once said Apple should be shut down and the money returned to shareholders. We all know the can of whupApps Steve Jobs has unleashed on the industry since then. These days, Apple’s profits look as good as their products and Dell’s… likewise.

So it’s with no small amount of trepidation we notice WMExperts noticing the world noticing Dell might just be making an entry into the smartphone market…

What’s wrong with that picture is pretty much what’s wrong with the exhibit in general. While Apple holds a fairly small percentage of the global cellphone market (as it does the global computer market), it happens to enjoy among the largest percentage of profit in the market (also, as it does with computers).

MacDailyNews highlights that while Apple ships an insignificant number of units compared to a behemoth like Nokia, it makes DOUBLE the profit of Nokia. Likewise, while rivals such as the Palm Pre are getting some much deserved attention, their finances (and thus ability to pay talent and fund much needed R&D) are on the brink — while Apple has nearly $30 BILLION in the bank.

So, while carriers are increasingly desperate for “hero” phones to make a splash and attract high-spending customers, according to mocoNews.net, current performance is showing few — if any — can currently match either the return on investment, or user experience, of the iPhone.

Sure, the smartphone market in general is continuing to grow, and may even be recession proof according to Forbes, but is anyone outside of Apple really poised with enough creativity, cash, and cunning to leverage it?

[Thanks to Jeremy and Dieter for source links!]