They do obviously have hooks into the device for phone access, etc. but they’re not compiled code and they don’t run as close to the metal.

This means they can look great and run great to a certain extent, but won’t ever have the same true performance until Palm Pre releases a native SDK, like Apple did for the iPhone.

(And they likely will at some point, even if just for them game developers )

The Pre is actually smaller than the iPhone in all dimensions except being 2 mm deeper. The curve slider is the farthest thing from “klunky” I have ever seeen – I don’t understand where you are getting that description.

I actually I do know where, your iPhone worshiping convoluted mind!

FYI

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/item/9225ShockhorrorMultitaskinghas_.php

The Pre will so include Flash Player technology, making the development of subsequent 3rd party apps that much more robust and dynamic.

So you can’t really diss ‘web-apps’ because they are easier to produce and appear to be just as refined as any other mobile app.

Andrea

The only things I can see that were directly copied from the iphone are the pinch to zoom( which was first seen on the Microsoft Surface ), that spring back thing it does when you reach the bottom of a window and the way it ignores left and right movement when scrolling vertically and viesi versa. Swipes, gestures, app stores and various other “iphone first” were around on other smart phones first.

Why?

Because they’d rather being spending their time developing other important features. Lots of things the iPhone team copied:

Cut and paste, just like the Pre Universal search, just like the Pre MMS, just like the Pre

Sure, it uses a capacative screen so some basic gestures are just the only way to do certain things without them being awkward.

On the other hand a platform built to work with the web in with much more flexible framework is going to be an interesting new competition for the iphone

Do myself a favor and check out the Pre? Uhh, no thanks… I have an iPhone.

They have done a nice job but i think the over emphasis on web based apps is a bit silly – people will want to be able to access some kind of native toolkit; and its current functionality seems similar to the web apps released for the v1 iPhone OS (providing JS handles for hardware and device functions), which weren’t terribly popular or good.

Pre wins.

The kool-aid is now truth serum.

Well done.

Are you gonna make a point by spelling out when the iPhone OS’s come out? I laugh to even call them different OS’s b/c they are really just firmware updates that add a little more of what the old OS should have already done (i.e. copy and paste, 3rd party push, device search). How odd that Apple announces these features as “Pre-like features” on March 16th when it unveiled “iPhone 3.0″!

I was a die hard Treo 650 user. All I wanted was for Palm to update their OS and give me a rockin PalmOS based, GSM phone. They failed to deliver for years. Apple finally came out with something that was everything I was hoping for and more. It was an easy call to jump from the Treo 650 to the original iPhone.

Icon moving is pretty standard, but I wonder if we all think that because that’s what we’re used to with the iPhone. It certainly isn’t anything like previous Palm OSs.

@doug

yes, definitely anticipated. it is nice to see a non-apple product get a cult like following! =)

@Steve Many folks complain the iphone is too wide when they “try” to talk on it. Do yourself a favor and search the dimensions of the Pre.

Well said! No wonder the Palm Pre won Engadget’s Most Anticipated Device of 2009 Award.

John Rubenstein resigned from Apple WAY before the iPhone was put into motion, before joining Palm in late 2008. Rubenstein helped design and manage THE IPOD, not the iPhone, in his last years at Apple. Some of the software engineers were integral in creating software for the iPhone, before leaving Apple soon before the iPhone launched in 2007.

Then the author tries to say Pre copied iPhone’s UI! He says, “You swipe horizontally to switch Home Screens, just like the iPhone (though you can scroll down vertically as well to jam more apps on each screen). You hold your finger down and then move to reposition apps, just like the iPhone (though they don’t do the jiggle dance).” Nice try! The author is referring to Pre’s LAUNCHER screen, but calls it the “home” screen, purposely, no doubt. Pre’s launcher screen is clearly NOT its home screen!! But if you want to equate Pre’s launcher to iPhone’s entire UI, I guess you could! Pre’s “home” screen consists of LIVE, OPEN, APPLICATION CARDS, for truely simultaneously running apps! You can keep these “cards” open all the time; you never have to hit a “home” button to go from app to app; you can simply long swipe in the gesture area to go from live app to live app, or hit the center button to go to the live app card view! THIS IS NOTHING LIKE IPHONE’S UI!! Pre’s UI is a whole another world away from iPhone’s! The only reason an iPhone user would say that the Pre “felt more like a branch of the iPhone sometimes than a linear descendant of PalmOS” is because they haven’t used past Palm devices much (which were made before iPhone), they are completely disregarding the QWERTY keyboard utility and navigation, and completely disregarding Pre’s gesture area, true multitasking, and SYNERGY!

Give Palm their credit for creating a completely new OS, UI, and device hardware, and inductive-wireless charging.

Its progression. Let it go, apple will have something new for you soon enough…but for now, the Pre is the most talked about gadget these days.

Good work Palm.

There will be a day when I have multiple iPhones just as I have multiple PCs to compensate for speed, storage & flexibility.

I’m pleased with my iphone & occassionally I will play with the iPhone that my wife has for the variety of apps on it.

Same game, different era.

For organisation, mobile finder would be nice with the option to not show a shortcut to every single app on the home screens as you can now find them via spotlight.

Apple can learn from the prw but honestly, that keyboard is too small. The iphone’s virtual keyboard is bigger. That’s pathetic.

Everyone has a big hard on for this Pre but this is a copy of the iPhone. Yes, Palms had touchscreens in the past. Resistive. They never had anything like the iPhone. In all the Treo’s I’ve ever owned, I never was able to “swipe” screens or drag applications to new areas of a screen. Some of you iPhone haters are stating that “it’s only logical to do it that way… how else would you do it”…. Well, it’s Apples logic and innovation that made it happen. NOT PALM.

And all this excitement over “web apps” has me confused. Isn’t that what the original iPhone had before the App Store? I think the web apps were okay, but nothing like what Apple and the 3rd party app developers are producing now.

On top of that, Palm went with the bottom of the barrel when it comes to providers…

Is anyone on record disputing Apple’s claims of severely diminished battery life with background apps enabled? See Gruber’s latest posting on complexity for a decent point or two on this subject.

This thing is a fat, bulky piece ‘o sh!t!

Being able to run apps in the background is very big avantage over the iPhone’s lack of multitasking. Their is a case against palm for a little bit of the “me too” syndrome, but none the less it does have a lot of things that apple can learn from, for example multitasking, their implimentation of notifications, the unified & synergised messaging system etc. Until apple decide to bring exposè+multitasking and all the pre’s afore mentioned features, the ore will continue to show up the iPhones weaknesses.

And yes, the Pre looks slow. I was a bit baffled by the way Dieter kept saying “wow” because I actually thought the thing looked like a pain in the backside.

Looking less and less attractive every day!

taking something good and working to perfect it is also important. not that i’m saying the pre is perfect, but it does seem to possess a sense of refinement that the iphone does not.

How about categories like PalmOS had? How about a more advanced managing system like that iPhone concept video from YouTube? I’m nowhere near as smart as anyone at Palm or Apple and even I suspect “er… do what they did” isn’t the answer in a space as ripe for continued development as Mobile.

WIMP/GUI this isn’t.

This webapp phone is set to fail. Palm OS = POS