Don’t get me wrong. In many respects, the Palm Pre is a ground­break­ing smart­phone that por­tends the oblit­er­a­tion of the line between phone and full size com­puter. It joins the iPhone and arguably the Android devices as the only com­puter some peo­ple would ever need.

How­ever, Palm missed a lot of the lit­tle things in this first release. It’s an admirable attempt, given what they’re shoot­ing for, but the fact of the mat­ter is that the devil is in the details, and Palm fum­bled too many. Any one of the fol­low­ing items is easy enough to over­look in an oth­er­wise stel­lar device. But the dif­fer­ence between, frankly, the Palms and the Apples of the world is that the Apples don’t miss over 20 of them. They add up to an annoy­ing user expe­ri­ence more akin to Win­dows Mobile than the iPhone.

1. Tiny, un-​thumbable keys. One of the rea­sons the keys on the Pre (and Cen­tro) key­board are so rub­bery is that they’re intended to be snagged with your thumb­nail rather than the meat of your thumb. It works, but it’s not as com­fort­able or as fast as, say, the Black­berry Bold.
2. No soft­ware on-​screen key­board. If the thumb­nail tech­nique doesn’t work for you, there’s no other way to do it. In fact, you even have to slide the device open to enter a things like passwords.
3. 8GB limit on stor­age (really 7). 7GB doesn’t hold a lot these days, espe­cially if you like video. Of course, you can’t sync pur­chased videos from iTunes (DRM), so unless you rip your own DVDs this may not bother you as much as both­ers me.
4. Let’s talk about that iTunes sync, shall we? Palm has done a lot to ensure peo­ple can sync the Pre as though it were an iPhone, but this trick only works as long as Apple chooses not to block it. Basi­cally, this works because the Pre reports itself as an iPod in Media Sync mode. But it still reports itself as a Palm Pre on the base USB chan­nel, so Apple could fil­ter this out if they decided they didn’t want to deal with sup­port calls about sync­ing issues with things that aren’t really iPods.
5. Try scrolling a long web page on the Pre. Where are you on the page? How close are you to the bot­tom? You don’t know, because unlike pretty much every other smart­phone on the mar­ket, the Pre has no scroll­bars at all, not even the tem­po­rary scroll indi­ca­tors you see on the iPhone.
6. And there’s no way to jump to the top or bot­tom of a long list. On the iPhone, you can tap the sta­tus bar to jump to the top. On every­thing else, you have scroll­bars. On the Pre, flick flick flick…
7. Assum­ing you don’t fork over $70 for a Touch­stone charger, you have to plug the Pre in to charge it. No big­gie, but you also have to open and close the flimsy lit­tle door that cov­ers up the microUSB port every time you do it. I know they put this here to keep the Pre’s “organic, river-​stone” aes­thetic, but this is going to get old quick.
8. For a device that’s designed to be online con­stantly, to live in the cloud, the bat­tery life on the Pre stinks if you actu­ally con­nect to any­thing. We’re talk­ing Android G1 bat­tery life.
9. And you’re unable to use exist­ing Centro/​Treo 800w bat­ter­ies, even though they’re exactly the same size, shape and pins as Pre bat­ter­ies. Some­thing about inter­nal “mechan­i­cal” dif­fer­ences. Yeah, right.
10. No on screen speed dial. I know you can assign speed dials to keys on the key­board (I know way too many peo­ple with J names) or put con­tacts on the launcher (see below), but this is lame.
11. Speak­ing of the launcher, Palm didn’t fol­low their own pre­vi­ous suc­cess and include cat­e­gories. You get three unnamed launcher screens, each scrol­lable as deep as you like. But given that “out of sight, out of mind, what you really get is one undif­fer­en­ti­ated scrolling list, or three iPhone like pan­els with stuff you’ll for­get to look for underneath.
12. At least you can find appli­ca­tions with Uni­ver­sal Search. You know what you can’t find? “Uni­ver­sal” search doesn’t search cal­en­dar, email, memos or tasks. Yeah, so much for uni­ver­sal. BTW, the iPhone does search cal­en­dar, email and notes with the 3.0 firmware.
13. You can’t change noti­fi­ca­tion sounds. Your incom­ing text mes­sages and emails sound just like every­one else’s. ‘Nuff said.
14. All or noth­ing Face­book and Google Con­tacts sync. A lot of review­ers men­tioned this. Face­book and Google Con­tacts prob­a­bly include a lot of peo­ple you don’t really know or barely know. But you can’t sync a spe­cific Face­book group or just your “real” con­tacts in Gmail. If you sync these ser­vices, be ready to flick through every­one you’ve ever emailed and friends of friends of friends in your con­tact list.
15. Memos is a joke, but I’d prob­a­bly replace it with Ever­note, even a launcher short­cut to the mobile version.
16. Can’t copy text from a web page. The Pre only allows copy (and paste) in “editable” fields. So read­ing a web page or read­ing an email, you can’t copy. You can for­ward the email and copy from that, now that it’s editable, but again, lame.
17. Given that the browser doesn’t han­dle Flash, it also doesn’t direct YouTube links to the included YouTube app. Uh, what?
18. No Ama­zon MP3 down­loads over 3G. We knew about this going in, and I know the iPhone had this lim­i­ta­tion when it was first released, too. But the iPhone doesn’t have that lim­i­ta­tion now. Why does Palm have to repeat Apple’s mistakes?
19. The Music app has no “scrub” con­trol to select play­back posi­tion within a file. Not such a big deal with music, but a really big deal with podcasts.
20. Music app also can’t fil­ter out pod­casts from songs when shuf­fling if you synced them via iTunes. Lame.
21. No Lat­i­tude or Street View in Google Maps. What’s the deal with this? The Pre has GPS. Why is Google Maps for the Pre so infe­rior to Google Maps on the iPhone, Android, and for good­ness sake, Win­dows Mobile?
22. Easy to run into “can’t open a new card until you close some exist­ing cards.” Say what you will about the iPhone and mul­ti­task­ing, but mem­ory man­age­ment gen­er­ally isn’t some­thing the user has to think about.
23. Weak auto­cor­rect. Maybe this isn’t as “nec­es­sary” on a device with­out an on-​screen key­board, but you have to watch what you type on the Pre a lot closer than you have to on the iPhone, or even HTC Win­dows Mobile devices.

Again, I’m not say­ing the Pre sucks. It’s a really inter­est­ing device, and not bad for a 1.0 prod­uct. But Palm has to do bet­ter than this if they’re going to save their com­pany. The Pre needed to be as close to flaw­less as it could be to steal mind­share away from the iPhone and Black­berry. And the Pre we actu­ally got just doesn’t mea­sure up.

From c|net:

Sprint Nex­tel and Palm announced on Tues­day an offi­cial release date and pric­ing for the Palm Pre.

The Pre will be avail­able nation­wide on June 6 for $199.99 after a $100 mail-​in rebate and with a two-​year con­tract on Sprint’s Every­thing Data plan or Busi­ness Essen­tials with Mes­sag­ing and Data plan. In addi­tion to Sprint stores, the Pre will be sold online and at Best Buy, RadioShack, and some Wal-​Mart Stores.

Doesn’t sound too bad, right? Pretty much what we expected, and com­pet­i­tive with cur­rent iPhones.

Sorta. Don’t for­get to read the fine print. Like how that $200 price tag is after a mail-​in rebate, so it will actu­ally cost you $300+tax to walk out of the store with it. And then there’s the date, June 6^th. That gives them 48 hours to sell this thing before Apple announces the iPhone 3.0 at WWDC. From Wired:

The source told iPhone fan blog Apple iPhone Apps that the new iPhone will launch July 17. Many of the pro­vided spec­i­fi­ca­tions cor­rob­o­rate with past rumors that the device will intro­duce a dig­i­tal com­pass and a video recorder, among other fea­tures. (The source did not pro­vide a photo; the image to the right is from a past rumor report for the sake of com­par­i­son.) Here’s the list:

• 32GB and 16GB stor­age (up from the cur­rent 16GB and 8GB models)
• $199 and $299 price points to be maintained
• 3.2-megapixel cam­era (up from the cur­rent 2-​megapixel camera)
• Video-​recording and edit­ing capabilities
• Abil­ity to send a pic­ture & video via MMS
• Dis­con­tin­u­a­tion of the metal band sur­round­ing the edge of the device
• OLED screen
• 1.5 times the bat­tery life of the cur­rent models
• Dou­ble the RAM and pro­cess­ing power
• Built-​in FM transmitter
• Apple logo on back will glow
• Rubber-​tread backing
• Sleeker design
• Built-​in compass
• The cam­era, GPS, com­pass and Google map com­bined will iden­tify photo and inform about photo locations
• Turn-​by-​turn directions

Again, this is pretty much what we expected, though both I and Wired find the FM trans­mit­ter and OLED screen details a lit­tle dicey. But the rest parses with what I’ve heard else­where, as well as fit­ting Apple’s evo­lu­tion­ary update style.

So, this means the Pre will have 41 days, not quite six weeks, to sell against the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion of iPhones. But once July 17 rolls around, the Pre will have half the stor­age of the sim­i­larly priced iPhone (8GB vs 16GB at the $200 price point, or a quar­ter of the 32GB that costs the same $300 as the pre-​rebate Pre) and will lose a lot of the soft­ware advan­tages the Pre has over the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion iPhones. The iPhone 3.0 firmware will pro­vide sim­i­lar uni­ver­sal search and push noti­fi­ca­tion fea­tures that the Pre will already have, clos­ing the gap between the two plat­forms. The Pre will still have true mul­ti­task­ing, but rumor has it Apple’s look­ing into that as well, and I can attest it’s not hard to add on your own (I love being able to play Pan­dora in the back­ground while I’m reading).

And on the other side, Black­berry Curves are out­selling the iPhone if you count all the Curve mod­els as one. And for half the price of the Pre. So I don’t think Palm is going to cut nearly as much into the full QWERTY mes­sen­ger mar­ket as they will into the sleek touch screen smart­phone market.

Is the Pre, on Sprint, worth pay­ing the same price for half the capac­ity com­pared to an iPhone 3.0 on AT&T?

Palm has trou­ble, right here in River City. Apple’s COO and interim CEO said on their recent earn­ings call that they would aggres­sively defend their intel­lec­tual prop­erty. He didn’t call out the Palm Pre by name, but the sub­text was there.

Palm needs to be ready for this. Apple files for every patent they can think of, and they believe they have defend­able patents on mul­ti­touch and using a prox­im­ity sen­sor on a smart­phone to turn off the screen (which is why you don’t see that fea­ture on HTC devices). Apple also has lots of land sharks, I mean lawyers, and a lot more cash than Palm to han­dle legal fees.

I know Ruben­stein saw this com­ing, he’s too smart to have missed it and he knows well how his old com­pany oper­ates. So he imple­mented those two fea­tures on the Pre know­ing Apple would come after him. Why? What does he know that we don’t?

It’s about time some­thing went Palm’s way. And now, sud­denly, every­thing seems to be going Palm’s way. They blew every­one away at CES, are get­ting tons of pos­i­tive press in the national media, and now, their biggest rival in the mobile space looks primed to falter.

I don’t think any­one at Palm was root­ing for Jobs to step down for health rea­sons, but the sit­u­a­tion is what it is. Cur­rently the mobile mar­ket is Apple’s to lose, but their hold is a lot more ten­u­ous than it ini­tially appears. No one has a lock on the still grow­ing mobile mar­ket, no one has estab­lished numer­i­cal dom­i­nance, and Apple’s early lead in a field that has only just recently pen­e­trated the con­scious­ness of “nor­mal” con­sumers could eas­ily repeat their early lead in per­sonal com­put­ing, and we see how that turned out.

And now, Apple is los­ing their rud­der. Steve Jobs, the “tyrant with excep­tional taste” that has dri­ven Apple in all their suc­cess­ful years, is tak­ing an indef­i­nite leave of absence from the com­pany. He says he’ll be back by sum­mer, but given how much he’s pub­li­cally under­es­ti­mated his health prob­lems already, many ana­lysts think this is really the end of the Jobs era and he won’t be com­ing back, ever. As 2009 wears on, Tim Cook will offi­cially lead the com­pany he’s been de facto lead­ing for a while now.

But there will be a dif­fer­ence. Cook may have kept the trains run­ning on time, but Jobs was the vision­ary. Jobs was the cre­ative force behind Apple’s big moves. With­out him, Apple will have a ten­dency to coast, to con­tinue doing what they know already works and stop inno­vat­ing. (It’s worth not­ing that the inter­nal force at Apple really respon­si­ble for two of their big Jobs 2.0 inno­va­tions, the first iMac and the iPod, is Palm’s Jon Rubenstein.)

So Palm may have an oppor­tu­nity here to swipe smart­phone dom­i­nance out from under a sleep­ing Apple. If the Pre really is every­thing peo­ple like about the iPhone and fixes every­thing peo­ple don’t like about the iPhone, Palm really could have the tri­fecta of industry-​defining devices (Pilot, Treo, Pre) and take the lead as the com­pany every­one else wants to beat. Before CES, I wouldn’t have bet that Palm could exe­cute well enough to take advan­tage of that oppor­tu­nity, but now I’m not so sure. Ed Colligan’s expe­ri­ence with mobile and the cell phone mar­ket com­bined with Jon Rubenstein’s knack for inno­va­tion and design are prov­ing a tough com­bi­na­tion to beat.

Don’t get too excited about the Palm Pre, folks. Palm them­selves is going to kill it the same way they they killed the Foleo, which could have been the standard-​bearer net­book: by fun­da­men­tally mis­un­der­stand­ing the mobile mar­ket. When they should have unveiled a slick and easy Linux-​based net­book, Palm insisted on tying it to a Treo and crip­pling that the device could do on its own. They were right in that small, cheap lap­tops would be the next Big Thing in com­put­ing, but insisted that they knew bet­ter than their cus­tomers what their cus­tomers wanted. And with­out a Job­sian Dis­tor­tion Field (JDF) you really can’t pull that off.

And with the Pre, they’re doing it again. Palm CEO Ed Col­li­gan made a telling com­ment at yesterday’s CES pre­sen­ta­tion to All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka:

The biggest unknown is price, which went unmen­tioned dur­ing the demo. My assump­tion is that Palm (PALM) would try to take mar­ket share by com­ing in sig­nif­i­cantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that the­ory by Palm CEO Ed Col­li­gan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a sig­nif­i­cantly bet­ter prod­uct,” he asked, then walked away.

Again, Ed fun­da­men­tally doesn’t get it. The iPhone 3G’s release at $199 changed every­thing we knew about smart­phone pric­ing. I’ll be dol­lars to donuts Palm is expect­ing to get $299 for the Pre with a new 2 year Sprint con­tract. At that price, they’ll be a niche player at best and fade away before 2010. I’m skep­ti­cal of Palm’s asser­tion that they can go it alone with­out a sup­port­ing ecosys­tem by tying into every­one else’s ecosys­tems, unit­ing dis­parate sources of mobile data. But if they plan to do it at a 50% price pre­mium in these trou­bled eco­nomic times (drink) over the com­pet­ing iPhone for AT&T, Black­berry Bold or Storm on Ver­i­zon and G1 on T-​Mobile, they’re rid­ing the Fail Whale.

Don’t get me wrong. Palm’s keynote at CES was impres­sive (I wasn’t there, but thanks to live­blog­ging from gdgt, Tre­o­Cen­tral and cnet, I feel like I was). Palm’s webOS plat­form and Pre smart­phone take the best of the iPhone and Google Android, mix them together and fix all their flaws. It’s an excel­lent smartphone.

And a year ago, maybe even six months ago, that might have mattered.

The mobile mar­ket is crowded and get­ting more crowded. The line between smart­phones and fea­ture phones is blur­rier than ever, and might be erad­i­cated entirely if Android ful­fills its promise to become the dom­i­nant “fea­ture phone” OS. Here in the US, the bat­tle lines are drawn, with each major car­rier hav­ing a pre­ferred smart plat­form. Ver­i­zon has Black­berry, T-​Mobile has Android, AT&T has the iPhone, and now Sprint has the Pre. And even there, Palm is snatch­ing defeat from the jaws of vic­tory, hitch­ing their wagon to a car­rier that is best known in the last few years for hem­or­rhag­ing cus­tomers and money alike. The Pre doesn’t even sup­port Wimax.

See, here’s the prob­lem. The Pre doesn’t fit. It’s a great smart­phone, but that’s not enough any­more. You have to plug into a whole ecosys­tem to make it work. Palm’s intent is for the Pre (which comes with Exchange OTA sync out of the box) to plug into any­thing, and it might work, but it’s a longshot.

I’ll be stick­ing with Win­dows Mobile for my smart­phone needs at least for another year or so. Because I use Microsoft Office on my other PCs, sync my files with Live Mesh, man­age my media with Win­dows Media Player, email with Exchange, man­age my pho­tos with Live Pho­tos, etc. I use a Microsoft smart­phone because I’ve already bought in to Microsoft ser­vices. And ser­vices are com­ing to drive device selec­tion, not the other way around. And Palm, as cool as their new plat­form is, doesn’t sup­ply services.

Maybe this is where their part­ner announce­ments will pay off. Face­book fea­tured promi­nently in their keynote, as did Google. But can some­one other than Google make a bet­ter Android than Android? I wouldn’t put money on it. Palm’s last fight will be a good one, they’ll go down swing­ing, but the end­ing is not in doubt.

I remem­ber vividly read­ing the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of great Hous­ton Rock­ets cen­ter Hakeem Ola­juwan. He recounted how the Rock­ets orga­ni­za­tion passed on sev­eral trades they could have made in the late 1980s and early 90s that would have given the Rock­ets the fol­low­ing rook­ies devel­op­ing together as a team:

• Hakeem at center
• Karl Mal­one at power forward
• Clyde Drexler at small forward
• Michael Jor­dan at shoot­ing guard

You could have added my grand­mother at point guard and still had team that would have put the clas­sic Lak­ers and Celtics dynas­ties to shame. But the Rock­ets didn’t pull the trig­ger on those trades and the rest is history.

Now we find out that some­thing sim­i­lar went down 11 years ago in the mobile tech­nol­ogy indus­try. Accord­ing to Jean-​Louis Gassee, for­merly of Be and run­ner up to revive Apple after John Scully’s reign (a job he lost to Steve Jobs):

A per­haps lit­tle known fact: in the Sum­mer of 1997, Steve Jobs called Eric Ben­hamou, 3Com’s CEO (the com­pany owned Palm). “Give me the Palm and come and join my Board of Direc­tors. Only Apple can make Palm a true con­sumer brand.” Noth­ing hap­pened. Apple’s foray into the prod­uct seg­ment had to wait ten more years.

http://www.mondaynote.com/2008/10/26/android-first-impressions/

As it turns out, Jobs’s arro­gance was, as it often is, mis­placed. Palm was able to become a potent con­sumer brand on their own, hav­ing a mar­ket val­u­a­tion at the peak of the dot­com bub­ble higher than Gen­eral Motors. But even so, imag­ine what Apple, work­ing with all the Palmies for­merly of Apple now brought back into the fold, could have done with the suc­ces­sors to the Palm Pilot. With a ready-​made Apple-​branded replace­ment for John Scully’s ill-​fated New­ton, Apple could have been a leader in hand­held com­put­ing for the last decade, lead­ing to devices like the iPhone and iPod touch years sooner. I’m no fan of Apple, but I have to mar­vel at what might have been.

I’ve been think­ing a lot about some­thing Palm CEO Ed Col­li­gan has said a few times now. He said that the new devices based on Nova, the code­name for Palm’s new OS, will fea­ture “game chang­ing hardware.”

This is an inter­est­ing phrase. New devices that rad­i­cally change the direc­tion of their mar­ket don’t come along all that often. In the PDA/​smartphone field, it’s only hap­pened three times in the last 15 years: the orig­i­nal Palm Pilot, the Treo 600 and the iPhone. And of those, Ed Col­li­gan was instru­men­tal in the first two. You could even argue that the Foleo, some­thing he described as rev­o­lu­tion­ary, was the pre­cur­sor to the cur­rent net­book craze. So he knows “game chang­ing hard­ware” when he sees it. If he thinks the new Nova devices are going to rock the indus­try, I’m inclined to believe him.

So what could it be? It won’t be any­thing like the Treo or Cen­tro, bar-​shaped devices with rel­a­tively small screens and front-​facing key­boards. So what else?

A lot of peo­ple have spec­u­lated that the new Nova devices will be slate, all-​screen devices like the iPhone. This isn’t an unrea­son­able guess, given that we know that Nova will be tar­geted at the “pro­sumer” seg­ment of the mar­ket, flashy high per­for­mance devices pur­chased by indi­vid­u­als, dif­fer­en­ti­ated from the cor­po­rate fleet Treos and entry level con­sumer Centros.

But the iPhone is already out there. How can Yet Another Black Slab be game changing?

By chang­ing the size, not the shape.

Big is the new small

What if the new Nova devices are like the ubiq­ui­tous PADDs in Star Trek, hand­held ter­mi­nals that took the place of paper? I think the new Palm Nova line will be a cross­breed of the iPhone and Amazon’s Kin­dle, a cellular-​enabled Linux tablet about the size of a Steno pad.

There’s some cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence to back this up. We know, for exam­ple, that one of the rea­sons the Foleo was shelved was that it was run­ning a dif­fer­ent vari­ant of Linux than Nova, and they didn’t want to split their effort. If Nova scales well to a 6 to 7 inch screen slate, it would work sim­i­larly well on a 10 inch clamshell like the Foleo. It also leans up against the new Intel mobile slate that should be announced tomorrow.

Is there a mar­ket for a 7 inch slate, with or with­out a Kindle-​style thumb­board? Could this be the game changer Palm has in mind, some­thing to fit between smart­phones and net­books? We’ll find out early next year.