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Palm Pre Is Out, Time For Discussion
caffiend666 writes "Palm Pre is out, let's discuss the status and compare stories. The first day seems to have gone as well as expected, with many selling out before noon. I bought the second at the local Sprint store, and so far I like it. Much more one-hand friendly than the iPhone. I haven't gotten the main apps to sync with Linux, but the media portion functions much like a thumb-drive with my Fedora-8 Linux system. For the Pre-verts out there, here's some Palm Pre dismantling pictures."
Well, considering that the entire OS is HTML/XML based, I'd say that they have a pretty efficient/good rendering engine. What I'd like to see though, are plugins or at least /etc/hosts modification so I can block ad-servers to make browsing fast on cell networks.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
... with a block of cheese?
On a serious note, I'd like to hear from some really picky (but sane) people about how the browser compares to Safari. Does it support iPhone optimizations (viewport) and handle CSS/JS well? If you go to facebook or google do you automatically get the iPhone version? How is the speed?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
This is what's going to make or break this platform. The promised accessibility and potential integration of WebOS development is too good to pass up, but it's only going places if Palm gets it out there in time and in one piece, documents it well, and we actually start seeing some good, original apps.
Also: Apple has a one-year head start and tens of thousands of apps, but 90% of them are absolutely useless, cluttering up the store. If Palm can build a better meritocracy for the App Catalog and promote quality (and maybe even offer an option to filter any app with "fart" in the name), they'll have a good thing going.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Take a closer look at that comment. They're talking about "the original iPhone situation", i.e. before the SDK existed for public use, when would-be developers were told that the way to extend the iPhone was to make a web site that could be accessed from the iPhone's browser.
Needless to say, no one was happy with that, and Apple eventually released a real SDK.
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All the applications and the GUI are running on Webkit and the OS's only real job is to handle the hardware and provide a nice platform for Webkit to run
No, not really.
WebOS is Linux, with a Web-kit based UI instead of a X.org-based UI. That means it can render web pages easily, and applications can be written in HTML (like some others can be written in XUL). the "card" based applications are going to be largely javascript + SQLlite + a custom JSON-based means to access the hardware, using modified webkit for display. (There are lower-level hooks, but Palm is going to make those harder to get -- which is a good thing IMO.)
Geekiest thing? The copy of the GPL that comes as a PDF.
I don't understand why anyone would buy a Pre today. With the new iPhone just around the corner (~30 days or less) I would hold off and see just what the iPhone 3.0 has in store, make my comparisons and then decide. Unless of course I've already made up my mind that I'm buying a Palm-anything and it makes no difference what else is out there. And people making comparisons between the Pre and the current iPhone -- I'd think this is a close enough race that the fair comparison would be to the new iPhone. Oh well, in 30 days that will be the case.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.