Angus Kidman14 January 2009, 4:00 PM
Palm’s new WebOS operating system and forthcoming Pre are drawing cautious enthusiasm, but there are still roadblocks to overcome if Palm is to become a major smartphone player.
It’s been more than a decade since Palm first introduced the original PalmPilot (pictured below), and it feels like even longer since Palm has been a relevant player in that field. Increased competition, internal financial woes and an increasing concentration on the US market have reduced its one-time dominance and left it looking like an also-ran.
In recent years, Palm has churned out a slow dribble of devices based on its creaky old Palm OS which, although having a well designed interface, is minimally internet enabled and prone to system-wide crashes, alongside a selection of Windows Mobile-based handsets.
One of the most widely anticipated events of CES 2009 was Palm’s announcement of its new operating system and mobile phone plans. While most of the relevant information leaked prior to the official press conference, Palm’s plans for a new handheld (the Pre) and a revised operating system (webOS) have still attracted plenty of attention amongst the CES crowd in Las Vegas.
So what’s new and exciting in this bundle of announcements? Not heaps on a hardware technology level, to be honest. Palm has eagerly jumped on the multi-touch wagon, promising the same multi-finger drag-and-drop options which the iPhone seems to have established as an interface norm. According to research by the Consumer Electronics Association, 75% of users would like to make use of a touch-screen interface – so this is a sensible commercial decision, but hardly a major innovation.
The official Palm spin is that wireless connectivity means that “webOS is the first mobile platform to automatically bring your information from the many places it resides – on your phone, at your work or on the web – into one simple, integrated view”. In practice, achieving that goal with any platform is hard, though all the major mobile OS vendors have had a crack at it.
Palm has used the name Synergy for this approach, which aims to blend contacts from multiple sources such as Outlook and Facebook, allowing you to update details in one place and have that information reflected elsewhere.
Calendar details can be sub-categorised (for work and family commitments) and seen separately or collectively, and again, you can integrate a work calendar from Outlook, a home calendar from Google Calendar and a social or birthdays calendar from Facebook.
Messages to a single contact will also be placed in a threaded view, combining (for instance), IM, text and email responses. I genuinely can’t decide if this would be a massively helpful improvement or a context-scrambling nuisance.
Palm has also pledged to make notifications of incoming messages and tasks less intrusive. Again, this is in line with prevailing fashions on both handhelds and computers (one of the major selling points for Windows 7 is reducing intrusiveness for notifications). There’s support for integration with Exchange, along with built-in mail and IM clients.
The first webOS phone, the Pre, is similarly very much in line with current trends. While it supports the touch-screen interface, it also includes a pull-out QWERTY keyboard, which is good news for those of us who fancy writing more than a few characters at a time. Also on board: an accelerometer to do the expected screen reorientation, proximity sensors to switch off the touch screen when you’re making a call, a mini-USB connector, and built-in GPS.
Perhaps the most novel hardware aspect is a separate charger, the Touchstone (pictured below), which can wirelessly recharge the device whenever it is laid on top of it. Wireless charging has been a popular goal for power system manufacturers, but the Pre is the first mainstream phone to get that option out of the box. (Note, though, that the Touchstone charger is an optional accessory, and you'll also need the "Touchstone charging back" for the phone, which is another separate optional accessory -- so the wireless charging kit is unlikely to be cheap.)
Despite all those changes. Palm has a long way to go if it wants to recapture a meaningful share of the market. According to Gartner, it had just 2.1% of the worldwide smartphone OS market in the third quarter of 2008. Market leader Symbian had 49.8%, followed by BlackBerry, Mac OS X (via the iPhone), Windows Mobile and Linux. All those competitors also offer touch-screen options and most are available from multiple carriers, an advantage Palm doesn’t currently enjoy.
Rollout details are also painfully sketchy. Palm has said the phone will be available in the first half of 2009 for US customers via Sprint, but hasn’t disclosed what costs will be involved. A non-locked UMTS version for worldwide use is also promised, but details on that front are even hazier and there are some potential problems. For instance, Palm has promised that applications on the phone will be constantly connected to the Web, which sounds like an expensive proposition in markets like Australia where all-you-can-eat data plans are not the norm.