Slashdot Mirror
Palm Announces Killer New Phone
Barence writes "At CES, Palm announced what promises to be the product that finally matches and even betters the Apple iPhone, and certainly looks to be the most important product announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show. It's called the Palm Pre and it's based on a completely new operating system, called Palm webOS. Its key specs include a 3.1in 320x 480 touchscreen, 8GB of storage, UMTS HDSPA support (in the UK version of the phone), 802.11b/g WLAN, Bluetooth, and GPS. It also includes a slide-out Qwerty keyboard, 3.5mm headphone jack, and what Palm described as the 'fastest ever' Texas Instruments OMAP processor."
I am in full agreement. Sure, the Iphone is a nice phone, but it's just one of many. To be fair, the fault is with PC Pro rather than Slashdot who are just quoting this nonsensical statement ("finally matches and even betters the Apple iPhone").
Although in a way, it's a cunning statement - whilst fans would want to accept PC Pro's belief that the Iphone is the Best Phone Ever, they can't agree with this statement without admitting that the Palm is better than the Iphone. For the rest of us, who have been using phones long before the Iphone joined the market late, we'll just ignore the statement and judge the Palm against the market as a whole.
The OS is the only real potential gamechanger here, and I'm not so sure about it. Engadget( http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/08/palm-announces-web-os-platform/ ) claims that WebOS is designed to be simple for programmers and is based on HTML, XML, and CSS. Don't know about you, but I just can't wait for another feature limited mobile OS. Also, the prospect of a data breach on an OS designed around a write-up language and online functionality ruins my day.
I absolutely loved my Palm Pilot Pro and gladly paid for the Palm III upgrade module for it. I eagerly bought a Palm V but I was disappointed when I got a Tungsten E and even more disappointed to discover that the 802.11 add in card simply wouldn't work with the Tungsten E.
My Palm TX is a huge disappointment and I would have returned it (or never bought it in the first place) except that I have a major need for one specific specialized application that uses 802.11.
I've heard awful things from people with Palm based phones.
Palm has bungled one generation after another. I've just lost any confidence in them being able to do anything competent.
After purchasing two of Palm's high end smart phones in the past, I've learned my lesson. They *DO NOT* support their phones. As soon as there's even an idea of a newer phone coming out, they drop all support for existing platforms and no more updates are ever seen for yours.
For example, they're currently releasing updates for the Centro series (a $99 phone) but not their 750series (a $500 phone) that are just over a year old. Way to reward your business customers palm.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
Geez. Get over yourself. Objective-C isn't that difficult to get your head around if you've done any Java/C++/Smalltalk/Ruby/other OO development. They have some pretty good reasons for using it (the underlying OS uses it), and the tools and documentation that they give you to work with it (XCode/apple developer site) are excellent. As someone who develops software for a living (in Java) I'd be *THRILLED* if the docs that I had to work with from vendors that we deal with were a quarter as good as Apple's.
As for having to buy a Mac - do you think it's possible to develop for windows mobile without having a windows-based PC? I can totally understand Apple's point-of-view here - their time would be much better spent making the tools work, and work well rather than porting them to and testing them on other platforms.