When Jon Ruben­stein and his band of Apple cast-​offs unveiled webOS and the Palm Pre, they were hailed as the next Apple. So it’s only fit­ting that the Apple of 2010 is tak­ing it’s cues from the Palm of old.

Remem­ber back in the day, when Palm’s mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion was big­ger than GM’s? While I think we can all agree that Palm was never really that big, they were the dri­ving force of mobile tech in their day. And they did that because they were mas­ters of effi­ciency, squeez­ing the best user expe­ri­ence out of the hard­ware avail­able at the time. Over time, through count­less man­age­ment and own­er­ship changes, Palm lost sight of this core competency.

To a lot of peo­ple in the tech world, Apple’s not exactly the first com­pany that comes to mind when some­one says “pro-​consumer.” I’d argue that while Apple is heavy handed in their app store poli­cies, et cetera, it’s all with the best inter­ests of the con­sumer in mind; they’re try­ing to make the user expe­ri­ence as good as it can pos­si­bly be. And in so doing, they’ve taken a few pages directly out of Palm’s playbook.

For three gen­er­a­tions, the iPhone and iPod touch screens have been the same half VGA 320×480 as the Palm and Sony Clie devices of years ago. Now Apple’s com­pe­ti­tion is rolling out higher res­o­lu­tions screens, and Apple has to answer. Con­sumers can see the dif­fer­ence between the iPhone’s 320×480 and the HTC devices with 480×800 screens. But the iPhone OS isn’t res­o­lu­tion inde­pen­dent (as, iron­i­cally, Palm’s new webOS is), so how does Apple roll out higher def­i­n­i­tion screens with­out break­ing the hun­dreds of thou­sands of apps peo­ple already use?

Palm had a sim­i­lar prob­lem in the early 2000s. They’d pushed their 160×160 res­o­lu­tion screens as far as they could, even adding color. But Microsoft’s Pocket PCs had 240×320 quar­ter VGA screens that just looked bet­ter. So Palm dou­bled their res­o­lu­tion along both axis — effec­tively qua­dru­pling the res­o­lu­tion — to 320×320. New appli­ca­tions could make full use of the addi­tional pix­els, but older apps were auto­mat­i­cally scaled up, or pixel-​doubled, by paint­ing a 2×2 square of small pix­els for every pixel of a 160×160 screen. Older apps worked just fine, and new apps looked even bet­ter than QVGA apps on Pocket PCs. (Even­tu­ally Palm added another 160 ver­ti­cal pix­els to replace the old silkscreened Graf­fiti text input zone that could be used for dis­play when text entry wasn’t needed, bring­ing us to the same 320×480 that all iPhones use today.)

So how is Apple address­ing the res­o­lu­tion prob­lem? As seen on the new iPad, they’re using the same solu­tion Palm did. Apps writ­ten aware of the iPad’s larger XGA (1024×768) screen take full advan­tage of the new res­o­lu­tion. Older iPhone apps can run either at native 320×480 in a small win­dow, or pixel dou­bled up to 640×960, tak­ing up most of the iPad’s screen. When Apple releases the iPhone HD this sum­mer, it will ship with 640×960 screen nearly the same phys­i­cal size as the cur­rent HVGA screen and auto­mat­i­cally pixel dou­ble older apps to take up the full screen. Because the screen sizes will be nearly the same — actu­ally, it looks like the iPhone HD screen is a tad smaller than the iPhone 3GS’s — these older apps will look exactly the same as they do on older iPhones. But updated apps designed to take advan­tage of the extra pix­els will look amaz­ing, bet­ter than any­thing on Android devices because of the iPhone HD’s supe­rior pixel den­sity. Thanks for the idea, Palm!

Let me give you another exam­ple. At the recent iPhone OS 4 sneak pre­view event, Apple unveiled how they would address what had been con­sid­ered the key flaw in their mobile OS: mul­ti­task­ing. Instead of run­ning an arbi­trary num­ber of full apps in the back­ground, chew­ing up mem­ory and proces­sor cycles that the fore­ground app — the app the user is actu­ally choos­ing to pay atten­tion to at the moment — the way webOS and Android do, Apple decided to go a dif­fer­ent way. Instead, they will con­tinue to default to run­ning only the cur­rent active appli­ca­tion at any given time, and allow devel­op­ers to opt in to using spe­cific APIs allow­ing back­ground threads when they’re actu­ally going to do some­thing use­ful. You can keep stream­ing music from Pan­dora in the back­ground, but the bulk of the Pan­dora app quits when you’re not actu­ally look­ing at it. You can be noti­fied of an incom­ing Skype call with­out hav­ing to leave Skype run­ning. The user gets the ben­e­fits of mul­ti­task­ing, but not the resource bloat downside.

When Apple announced this, it seemed vaguely famil­iar to me, but I couldn’t place why. Then a friend of mine pointed out that it was famil­iar because this is exactly the mul­ti­task­ing imple­men­ta­tion that was to be in Palm OS 6, known as Cobalt to Palm OS 5’s Gar­net. Cobalt never appeared in a ship­ping device, but that was more due to the byzan­tine pol­i­tics and rights issues behind Palm and its spin-​off Palm­Source in the mid-​2000s. Archi­tec­turally, Cobalt was sound, and its method of mul­ti­task­ing would have been far more effi­cient and snappy than the alter­na­tive in Win­dows Mobile. By exten­sion, Apple’s mul­ti­task­ing in iPhone OS 4 should be far more effi­cient and pro­vide a faster, more con­sis­tent user expe­ri­ence — and with­out the need for giga­hertz proces­sors and 512MB-​1GB of RAM found in Android devices — than found in Android and webOS phones today. Keep in mind the Palm Pre was con­sid­ered a poor mul­ti­tasker with 256MB until the updated Palm Pre Plus with 512MB, while the iPad, designed with iPhone OS 4 in mind, only has 256MB, as does the iPhone 3GS. iPhone mul­ti­task­ing will be dis­abled on the 128MB orig­i­nal iPhone and 3G, so obvi­ously Apple has deter­mined that 256MB will mul­ti­task just fine.

Good ideas are good ideas, and Apple has picked up the baton from Palm as the user expe­ri­ence cham­pion in mobile.