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 engad­get:

Think you’ll have to wait until June 6^th for all the Pre sur­prises to emerge? Think again. A break­ing Reuters report has just dropped one of the biggest cel­lu­lar bomb­shells of the year: Ver­i­zon Wire­less, America’s largest mobile oper­a­tor, will soon be car­ry­ing Palm’s Pre. Oh, that’s not enough? No wor­ries — it’ll also be sell­ing a “new ver­sion of the touch­screen Black­Berry Storm,” which is obvi­ously the Storm 2 that we’ve been toy­ing around with. The report makes clear that both phones would be cleared for ship­ment in around six months, which cer­tainly jibes with whis­pers we’ve heard about Sprint’s mighty short exclu­siv­ity period. The news came from the company’s Low­ell McAdam, the top exec­u­tive for the ven­ture of Ver­i­zon Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Voda­fone. To quote: “Over the next six months or so you will see devices like Palm Pre and a sec­ond gen­er­a­tion Storm.” First Sprint, then AT&T, and now Ver­i­zon? T-​Mobile, where you at?
[Thanks, E]
Update: Seems Mr. McAdam con­tin­ued on by not­ing that VZW would get the Palm Pre “and a cousin.” Hmm, Eos, any­one?

So Ver­i­zon is get­ting the Palm Pre, the Palm Eos, the Black­berry Storm 2 (now with­out inher­ently lim­it­ing click screen) and we keep hear­ing rumors from trusted sources about Ver­i­zon get­ting some vari­ant of the iPhone. Prob­a­bly not just a CDMA ver­sion of the 3G, as that would poten­tially vio­late their con­tract with AT&T, but I’ve heard rumors that Ver­i­zon may be get­ting either or both the iPad tablet and the iPhone Mini.

Admit­tedly, this is all spec­u­la­tion, but I’ve pointed out before that each major US car­rier seemed to have a stan­dard bearer smart­phone plat­form. Ver­i­zon pushed Black­berry, Sprint had the Pre, AT&T had the iPhone and T-​Mobile had the Android G1. Now it seems Ver­i­zon might be mov­ing to con­sol­i­date every­one else’s mar­quee phones under their own ban­ner. Any­one got any good Android on Ver­i­zon rumors?

I’ve had it. You’ve failed me for the last time, Win­dows Mobile. My Touch Pro is stripped down to just about stock. Noth­ing more installed on it than GPS Today, WMWiFiRouter and Ever­note. And still, it’s slower than my iPod Touch, freezes more than my iPod Touch, and using the touch­screen is less respon­sive and pre­cise than my iPod Touch. In fact, since get­ting my iPod Touch, I’ve been con­sis­tently amazed at how much I put up with from Win­dows Mobile, how much I just accepted as “the way things work” because I didn’t know any better.

Well, I’m done. Win­dows Mobile, even with HTC’s Touch­Flo 3D or even the new Spb Mobile Shell 3.0, isn’t good enough com­pared to the com­pe­ti­tion. 6.5 won’t be appre­cia­bly bet­ter, because they didn’t fix the right things (a shinier UI doesn’t mean squat over the same crappy mem­ory man­age­ment) and Win­dows Mobile 7, due in late 2010 maybe, brings a whole new set of issues. If I’m going to switch plat­forms, I may as well do it now.

iPhone 3G 16GB for $150, an offer I can’t refuse?

AT&T has a pretty sweet deal going on right now. I can get a refur­bished 16GB iPhone 3G for only $150, deliv­ered 2-​day right to my door (which, now that I’m liv­ing in a house, I actu­ally have). Order it Mon­day, and I could be set­ting it up when I get home from work Wednes­day night, give me some­thing to do while I’m installing Win­dows 7 RC (which comes out on the 5^th). That’s really not a bad deal at all, and I still have an iPod Touch I could sell and recoup some of that (or just give it to my 13-​year-​old niece who has already cracked the screen on the net­book she got for xmas). And word on the street is that you can even get AT&T to credit your account to off­set any early ter­mi­na­tion fee from the car­rier you’re leav­ing. I really can’t see a down­side to this. I even like the fact that it’s a refurb, mean­ing an actual human being has gone over it and said, “Yes, this is okay to sell.”

Wait­ing for Godot, er, iPhone HD

My orig­i­nal plan, such as it was, was to use the iPod in con­junc­tion with my Touch Pro until June 8^th, the first day of WWDC, Apple’s World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence. This is when they’re expected to offi­cially release iPhone OS 3.0 to the unwashed masses, and every­one expects them to unveil shiny new hard­ware as well. Both gen­er­a­tions of iPhones were released at WWDC and went on sale shortly there­after, in late June or early July. For a while now, the spec­u­la­tion has been that they were going to release a new, HD-​capable and maybe even HD screened iPhone, some­thing to com­pete more directly with the newer 800×480 HTC devices. But in the last week or so, that rumor has lost steam.

Look, I have no idea what Apple’s going to do. Nei­ther, frankly, does any­one else out­side of Cuper­tino. And maybe Kevin Rose. But any­one else, it’s just edu­cated guesses. Some­times you can get a long way on edu­cated guesses, but they’re still guesses (see: dif­fi­culty in actu­ally mak­ing any accu­rate pre­dic­tions in cli­mate sci­ence). We just don’t know, and bas­ing my pur­chas­ing deci­sions on what I think Apple might do isn’t the best way to go. For what it’s worth, I think we’ll see only minor changes at best to the iPhone 3G, maybe col­ored backs. The HD stuff will go into a new Apple iPad a lit­tle smaller than the Kin­dle, but all screen. Nice, but not a phone. So for my money, a cheap iPhone 3G is as good now as in July.

Wither Pre?

Of course, the other rea­son to wait was to see the Palm Pre in per­son, to pon­der it’s pock­etable per­fec­tion (I’m a sucker for allit­er­a­tion, sue me). But the more I learn about the Pre, espe­cially in rela­tion to what I’m learn­ing about the iPhone, the less inter­ested I become. For one thing, I have come to loathe and despise slid­ers. The Pre is a ver­ti­cal slider, so it’s slightly less oner­ous than my Touch Pro in that you don’t have to wait for the screen to rotate, but lack­ing an on-​screen key­board you still have to pop it open even for triv­ial text entry, like pass­words. Ask any G1 owner how long that takes to get old.

The uncer­tainty about appli­ca­tion avail­abil­ity is another stick­ing point for me. I know what’s avail­able for the iPhone, and have made lots of pur­chases from the iPhone App Store already (includ­ing spend­ing at least $50 already in soft­ware I’ve since replaced with alter­na­tives, but that’s all part of explor­ing a new plat­form). The webOS App Cat­a­log, how­ever, is still a mys­tery. We know some of the play­ers that will have apps ready for launch, but a lot of the really impor­tant ones for me are still ques­tion marks. Will eReader have their reader app ready for launch? How about Ever­note? We don’t know.

So between dis­com­fort with the hard­ware and uncer­tainty with the soft­ware, I’m more and more inclined to give the Pre a pass. And I’m def­i­nitely ready to leave Sprint, so that’s another point in the “no Pre for me” col­umn. Which brings me back to get­ting an iPhone 3G, and the sooner the better.

The Palm Eos, my other smartphone

Of course, we also got some news this week that allows me to hedge my bets. I’m the kind of guy who ran out of fin­gers hold­ing “undo” places in Choose Your Own Adven­ture nov­els back in the 80s. I like to keep my options open, have an escape hatch. And Palm may pro­vide me just that. We got a leaked ren­der of another webOS device this week, what many are call­ing the Palm Eos. This front fac­ing QWERTY can­dy­bar phone is clearly the replace­ment for the Cen­tro, and should retail at $350 before car­rier dis­count­ing, putting it some­where between $100 – 200 with con­tract. It’s taller than the Pre but much thin­ner, very sim­i­lar in form fac­tor to the iPhone. It kind of looks like a Treo Pro with longer screen (320×400, shorter than the iPhone or Pre, but longer than the Treo). And it’s a GSM device using the AT&T UMTS bands.

So, in the­ory, I could buy an iPhone 3G now, upgrade it to the 3.0 firmware in June, and then down the line buy an Eos for $350 off con­tract. Then I could swap my SIM card (it will be nice to be back on a net­work that uses them again, CDMA ESN swaps just aren’t the same) back and forth between them depend­ing on whether I want the all touch screen expe­ri­ence of the iPhone or the mix of capac­i­tive touch and always avail­able QWERTY of the Eos. Best of both worlds, and on the same account. Both sync with Google, so my data’s the same either way, espe­cially if I have Ever­note on both as well.

And I’ll finally be rid of Win­dows Mobile and all the annoy­ances it’s brought me. And that’s a good deal no mat­ter which way you slice it.

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.