Our sibling site PreCentral.net has their usually full review of the AT&T Palm Pre Plus, and with today's launch it becomes a second full, capacitive multitouch device being offered on the exclusive US iPhone carrier. What does that mean?

Up until today AT&T's top level consumer smartphone lineup was iPhone -- iPhone 3G on the low end and iPhone 3GS on the high end. There were BlackBerry's to be sure, but not touchscreen or particularly consumer appealing. And don't even get us -- or our buddies from Android Central -- started about AT&T's Android efforts thus far.

But now consumers who must have internationally friendly GSM can choose the Palm Pre Plus, and perhaps a full screen, multitouch BlackBerry Bold 9800 slider come this summer. You know, when the 4th generation iPhone (iPhone HD/iPhone 4G) usually has that market, and marketing all to itself.

We'll ask again, without the faintest trace of Verizon in our question, what does that mean for AT&T and the iPhone? And who'll be picking up the Palm Pre Plus over the iPhone?

It seems like Palm's new webOS PDK (plug-in development kit) can be used to port over iPhone games in a matter of days -- or even hours. Given how fast some iPhone games have turned up on the Palm Pre we've kind of suspect there was a little something something going on behind the screen, and our sibling site PreCentral.net confirmed it by way of Digital Daily's pre-GDC coverage.

As just mentioned, I'll be at GDC to have a look at what they're doing. If it's really just that easy to get your iPhone games onto webOS, then Palm has once again made their platform as frictionless as possible for developers (on top of the web technology SDK and Classic PalmOS emulation). Smart.

Windows Phone 7 Series looks to be packing Xbox Live gaming muscle, so they likely won't go the same route as Palm... but could Android and BlackBerry? And if developers can keep making great iPhone games and get webOS (and maybe others) as a bonus, is that ultimately better for iPhone gamers, or does it weaken the uniqueness of the platform? If it does, will there eventually be "exclusives" like there are on Xbox and Playstation, or will Apple do more first-party games like the console makers -- especially Nintendo -- do?

My first smartphone was a Palm Treo 600 and so my last 2009 Smartphone Round Robin "away" review focusing on Palm's new webOS platform as embodied by the Palm Pre and Palm Pix does not lack for symmetry. Between the two, last year I reviewed the Palm Treo Pro which I quipped was more HTC than Palm, ran Windows Mobile and not a Palm-made OS, and had a keyboard that was hard to consider "pro" level. 3 years of round robin, three totally different platforms from Palm, and only this review for me to try and make my own sense out of it.

Luckily I had the mobile accomplisher himself, our editor-in-chief Dieter Bohn to show me Palm's new platform and their new devices, and the truly exceptional community over at PreCentral.net Forums to help understand where it's at and where it's going.

(And just a reminder, every day you post on that PreCentral.net thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you're entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Now let's get this on...

Previously on Palm

First, this is where Palm stood last year, without a PalmOS device in the competition, represented instead by the HTC-built, Windows Mobile running, Treo Pro:

And now, just one year later Dieter was kind enough to show me the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi running the all new, all different, all Palm webOS:

CrackBerry Kevin and I also stopped by Palm at CES 2010 to check out the new Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus for Verizon:

And here are the rest of the contextual links:

• PreCentral's Dieter Bohn and Rene (and Phil!) on the iPhone Live! Podcast.
• PreCentral.net Palm Pre review (and all-new Palm Pre Plus review)
• PreCentral.net Palm Pixi review (and all-new updated Palm Pixi Plus review)
• 2008 TiPb Smartphone Round Robin Palm Treo Pro review

Hardware Design

I'm starting with hardware only because every other review started with hardware, and I'm telling you that because I really wish for this one review I didn't have to start with hardware. But I'm a sucker for consistency.

And the Palm Pre Hardware Just...

Well, it isn't great. The concept is killer, don't get me wrong. The river-stone ergonomics are beautiful. The execution, however, especially on the early units, was really unfortunate given how much else Palm got right.

After using the iPhone's glass screen for years, using the plastic screen on the Pre just feels... not good. The first Pre I tried at a local Best Buy had a screen protector over the plastic, and I found it almost unusable. If I was Kevin I could figure out some witty, spot-on analogy about layers of prophylactics between me and my multitouch but I'm not and I can't and so I won't. I'll just say Palm needs to switch to glass and now.

The Pre is also a vertical slider. It looks like an iPhone slab but pull down and a full physical keyboard is revealed. While this could be a best-of-both-worlds compromise, the lack of an official, built-in virtual keyboard means (unlike the Motorola Android Droid) you have to use the physical keyboard and... it's not great. A couple of Pre devices I've tried didn't have very solid feeling sliders and all of them had cramped quarters that made the physical keyboard not that enjoyable for me. I had to use the tips of my fingers/nails and still watch out on the top ridge of the display and the sharp edges of the sides.

I'm not sure what they could do to fix it, though Dieter says the new Palm Pre Plus is an improvement in the feel of the keys itself. That, combined with the better build quality control could be part of the answer. I look forward to spending more time with it in the future to find out.

Palm Pixi By Contrast...

Eschewing the slider for their second webOS device, Palm returned to their roots with the front-facing QWERTY. They also returned to the form factor of the Palm Centro, which saw high sales if low margins during the final year of PalmOS.

The device is tiny. It's deceptively tiny. It's so tiny that, like in the Dark Knight movie, you half-expect that if Dieter's Pre ever broke at the mechanism, he'd pull a release, a full Pixi would eject, and he'd just keep on typing. Actually, he'd likely type better because, counter-intutively, the Palm Pixi keyboard feels better than the Pre's. I don't know if it's crazy Pixi magic, or just the better Feng Shui of not having to type inside the Pre's cavity, but the tiny keys worked well.

The huge problem here, however, is that Palm reduced the screen size to fit in that keyboard. This isn't the Treo 240x240 or 320x320 of yesteryear. In 2009, never mind 2010, screen size matters. Aspect ratio matters. In a post-iPhone, capacitive era how we interact with our device is more screen-dependant than anything else. There are times you won't need a physical keyboard (watching video, playing games, reading e-books). There's almost no time when you won't want the full screen. Sure, it's only a few pixels shorter, but on a screen that small, the difference is noticeable. It's like having a 16:9 HDTV for a year or so, then suddenly getting a 4:3 SDTV again. You know what you're missing.

There's no easy fix for that easy, unless they jettison the physical keyboard and go with a fullscreen Pixi with a virtual keyboard. Many would hate that, but it's something I've been increasingly considering as of late...

Is the Era of Physical Keyboards Over?

Originally this section was going to be called "the era of physical keyboards is over" but a funny thing happened on the way to writing this review -- I kind of changed my mind.

Physical keyboards on smartphones are a strange beast. That a QWERTY button layout originally intended to prevent jamming on ancient IBM typewriters still exists on some of the most modern gadgets today is... either stupefying or a testament to the intractability of consumer typists.

Interestingly, Palm didn't start off with physical keyboards. The Palm Pilot had no keyboard and used a proprietary form of handwriting recognition. The iPhone doesn't have a physical keyboard either, and does offer recognition for Chinese character input, but uses virtual keys for most other languages, and sticks to QWERTY for English.

Rumor has it, physical vs. virtual keyboard was a huge area of contention between Apple CEO, Steve Jobs and then-Apple VP and head of iPod, Jon Rubinstein. Jobs didn't want a physical keyboard, Rubinstein did. And we all know how that turned out -- we have the iPhone sans-physical keyboard and Rubinstein has a new job as CEO of Palm.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when the Palm Pre debuted and looked a lot like an iPhone with a physical keyboard, many (and yours truly included) figured it was the iPhone Rubinstein always wanted to build.

He wanted the keyboard so much, as mentioned, he sacrificed screen real-estate on the Palm Pixi for it. I find that absurd. I would have removed the keys and made it an iPhone-nano-esque slab. As I said, until this review, I would have whole-heartedly exclaimed "the era of physical keyboards is over".

But then I started thinking about the BlackBerry and how the Storm2 is no replacement for the 9700 for their user-base. Just like it took a long time to transition from CLI (command line interface, the text-only days of DOS prompts and UNIX terminals) to GUI (graphical user interface, the windows, mouse, pointer paradigm we see today), it will take a while to transition from physical keyboards to virtual ones. And just like some people (not gonna say neckbeards!) still turn off the GUI on Linux, go pure Terminal on Mac OS X, and ignore WIndows completely, some people have been so raised on physical keyboards, even on tiny little devices, that they wouldn't transition to virtual even if, from an overall usability standpoint, they could or should.

BlackBerry is the easy example because they're essentially messaging devices. The iPhone is essentially a big screen you fill with media and apps, so that's an easy example of where the virtual keyboard fits best (especially Apple's still unequalled implementation thereof).

And that brought me to the crux of this long, rambling, tangent -- what's the Palm Pre (and webOS in general)? I had the same question about Android and pretty much determined it was Google's mobile insurance policy. But Palm is a mobile company. It's not an "also have" like Microsoft. It's their sole reason for being, and they're one of the original innovators in the space.

So I wondered again, what's the Palm Pre? And then I realized Palm told us from the beginning -- it's the fat middle. Where the Treo converged three devices into one, the Palm Pre bridges the traditional, keyboard-centric mobile messaging device with the new, screen-centric mobile platform device.

It's likely not keyboard enough for a BlackBerry addict, and it's not screen enough for an iPhone user, but it's a compromise form factor for those who want the okay-of-both-worlds.

I'm so happy with the iPhone keyboard that I'll never go back to a physical one. I use my iPhone keyboard far more than I ever used the physical keyboards on my Treo 600 or 680 because it works better for me. Not having to engage forearm muscles to depress tiny keys and hold the rest of the phone stable while I do so is a huge advantage in my book. It's just effortless and it just works. I won't be writing novel-length compositions on a BlackBerry anyway, so no argument about volume of typing impresses me. Likewise, I see enough physical keyboarders glancing constantly at their screens that muscle-memory no longer resonates with me as a deal-breaker either. New devices are about consuming information as much as creating it, and even glance-ability requires -- you guessed it -- glances.

One day haptics may be sufficiently advanced enough that mighty-morphin', there-and-gone-again virtual-that-feel-like-physical keyboards are enough for everybody. But right now, today, you have legacy keyboarders who'll never abandon their keys, and devices on Android that still haven't gotten their software right, and there needs to be a middle ground.

Or to be more succinct -- Smartphones are evolving beyond priority messaging devices to priority (data/media/etc.) consumption devices and hardware keyboards are legacy, bolted-on technology comforting for the former but waiting to be obsoleted when technology allows virtual keyboards to better serve the latter (and we're part of the way there with the iPhone).

(hat Palm didn't have hardware keyboards when the Pilot was priority PIM device is interesting as an aside. And no, Dieter, I won't take that back )

Inductive Charging

Palm debuted it with their Touchstone accessory. Cool. Future. Let's me leave this section on a positive note.

Software Experience

Okay, here's where webOS is interesting enough that any complaints about the hardware take a back seat. First let's get something out of the way. We've teased Palm about having the former head of Apple's iPod division as their CEO, and about bringing over a bunch of iPhone engineers to help create webOS. We've listed what webOS adopted from the iPhone (and we're far from the only ones), but it's important to remember the iPhone wasn't made in a vacuum. The icon grid as launcher, the tabbed phone app, and other paradigms existed in earlier Palm Pilots and Treos and Apple took them and put them together with a bunch of other stuff for iPhone OS. Likewise, some of the multitouch gestures in webOS are the same as the iPhone (and thank goodness), the way Cards works is greatly expanded from, but visually identical to how iPhone Safari Pages work, etc. In the end, they'll figure out the legal issues and we'll say the user benefits from a certain amount of consistency when it comes to these platforms. With that behind us...

HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Palm faced a huge problem when launching webOS. They couldn't really bring PalmOS developers forward because the platform was different and, unfortunately, the time it took between the decline of PalmOS and the rise of webOS meant a significant amount of developers had moved on. iPhone 2.0, meanwhile, had re-framed the mobile discussion for the second time, going from killer UI in 2007 to being all about apps in 2008, and Palm didn't have the money or mindshare of Google who was already offering the Android alternative. So what to do?

In a move I called brilliant at the time, they decided to make their UI layer, and hence development environment, out of web-standards -- HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While they would -- and did -- take a performance hit by essentially running localized web pages as apps, it meant anyone who knew how to make webApps could fairly easily develop for webOS. (That Palm named it webOS shows how seriously they take that concept).

Apple tried a non-localized version of this with iPhone 1.0 and it's "sweet" (TM, Steve Jobs, WWDC 2007) WebApp SDK. It failed. But 2009 brought far more robust web technologies, including HTML 5 with SQLite for local storage, CSS3 with animations, and a whole lot more maturity in WebApp development. While Palm hasn't succeeded with this to App Store levels, no one else has with interpreted SDK (Java) or native apps either. Palm has succeeded to some degree, however, and iPhone 3.0 is now supporting localized HTML 5 apps on the iPhone home screen, while RIM, Android, and others are embracing WebApps and widgets.

It was a gutsy gamble. I still think Google saw webOS, smacked themselves in the Android and raced to make Chrome OS in response. It's also clearly a first step for Palm. Just like Apple released a full, native SDK for iPhone 2.0, Palm is now offering native plug-ins for games like Need for Speed (something that WebApps can't do, and even WebGL might struggle to get them to do as well).

It's not perfect. webOS' lack of contrast in the UI still flabbergasts me. More practically, it's sluggish at times, especially on the anemic Palm Pix processor, and it can take far too long for built-in apps like the calendar to launch. It also presents problems for developers who want to hide their source code, although Palm now has a solution that doesn't involve limiting apps to onboard RAM (something Android and BlackBerry still suffer from). Full GPU support might (though I think likely not) improve that, but hardware is always getting faster and bandwidth is (hopefully) getting bigger. Palm will benefit from both. In a year or two, it will be buttery smooth and still enjoy the flexibility and future-proofing that is webOS' promise.

Synergy Contacts, Multitasking Cards, and Non-Modal Notifications

Three areas where webOS absolutely kills are their Synergy contact system, their Cards visualization for multitasking, and their non-modal notification system.

Synergy, as far as I can figure out, takes all of your online data points, sucks them in while maintaining them as separate silos, then aggregates them, filters out duplications, and presents you a unified view of the data. So, for example, you have Facebook friends, Gmail contacts, a couple of Exchange accounts, and an old Yahoo! setup. Synergy will take all that, figure out that 700 of them are the same, create a unified contact that has all the information for each of those 700 (while leaving each untouched on their own service), and present you a single contact list containing those 700 as well as all the other (unique to Yahoo! or Gmail, etc.) contacts. I can't explain it as elegantly as it works most of the time (on occasion it won't match and you'll have to do some work to help it), but it's the future of contact management as far as I'm concerned -- with a few caveats.

If I don't want Google's terrible, promiscuous email retention polluting my phone contacts (or Facebook messing up my Exchange) that needs to be easily managed (it might be on webOS, I didn't get into it but hope it is). Also, an easy way to export the final, Synergy-zed contact list for backup -- or replacement of other online contact data bases! -- would be nifty. That webOS' approach allows them to elegantly handle multiple Exchange accounts is testament enough.

Cards for multitasking is likewise the future. If you've used Pages on the iPhone Safari -- where you can keep several web sites available at the same time and easily zoom out, see all the pages, swipe across to change them, and then zoom back in -- then imagine that but taken to the ultimate, logical, extreme. That's webOS Cards. Instead of just web pages, every app including web pages gets its own Card and you can zoom out to see them all, swipe to change between them, and tap to zoom back in. Yes, that means webOS supports multitasking for 3rd party apps, something only Apple apps are allowed to do on the iPhone.

It works well on the Palm Pre. It works mind-bogglingly well on the Palm Pre Plus (Dieter had 50 apps up all at once). It works so well, in fact, it kind of makes me sad I can't drag and drop elements from one Card to another. Why give me that fantastic visualization, why make a windowed multitasking interface for a small screen, if the biggest advantage of doing it -- drag and drop -- isn't implemented. Unless, of course, that's the "next step". I'll keep my eyes peeled for webOS 2.0...

Notifications, in terms of webOS, means once again I have to complain about the iPhone's current, modal implementation. Modal, if you're not familiar with the term, means that once the notification pops up, you have to either "dismiss" (and lose it forever) or "view" (and interrupt whatever you're doing) immediately. There is no later. And if another notification comes in, it obliterates the previous one entirely. With webOS, like Android, you're told about a new notification but you're free to ignore it and the system will just keep track of them for you until you choose to take a look at them. That difference means everything, especially when you start getting a ton of notifications coming in.

Conclusion

It's not all rosy for Palm, webOS, the Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, and their mobile strategy going forward. Sprint exclusivity might have guaranteed Palm some money but it doesn't seem to have given them the sales they needed. They're hitting Verizon now, and AT&T soon, but if they'd gone on Verizon sooner (before the Droid) they could have had a much bigger impact. Unlike Apple, Google, or Microsoft, they don't have billions in the bank or other businesses to prop them up. Unlike RIM or Nokia, they don't have entrenched business or international market share to ride. It's going to be an uphill battle for Palm. That they've accomplished and innovated so much in just a year is an outstanding accomplishment, however, and means I'll be cheering as they battle up that hill.

For iPhone users, switching to webOS means you gain a physical keyboard and those nifty Synergy, Cards, and notifications. You'll also gain a more "open" system as Palm has treated hacking webOS in a way Apple almost certainly won't for the foreseeable future. We didn't really get into the whole homebrew (think jailbreak apps) and patching culture of webOS, or Palm's efforts to reach out and embrace developers, but kudos to them for doing it. If that's something that's important to you, and Android/Google is a non-starter, it's certainly another plus in Palm's column.

As I write this, however, Apple might just be on the verge of announcing iPhone 4.0, and that just might "invent" multitasking for iPhone users. Better contact and notifications might be on tap as well. Hey, maybe even an iPhone on Verizon. The soonest we'll know is this Wednesday's "Come see our latest creation" event, otherwise Apple usually shows off new software in March and new hardware at WWDC in June.

I'm not saying wait and see before you leap to webOS or another platform. I'm just saying... wait and see.

The biggest thing about this year's Round Robin is that every device-maker brought the competition. Apple is still ahead in some areas, but they've been overtaken in some others. Apple having to catch up... that's good for iPhone users, and it's good for everyone.

Things are exciting again!

When last I left Palm they had but the Centro and some HTC Windows Mobile device to offer, now webOS and the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi's inform Week 6 of the 2009 Smartphone Round Robin. Talk about night and day. Lucky I have the daywalker himself, our illustrious editor-in-chief and PreCentral.net's own Dieter Bohn to show me how the brand new generation of Palm devices work. And works well.

Remember, every day you post on my PreCentral.net Forums thread, you're entered for a chance to win a webOS device of your very own. (And there's a total of 6 smartphones up for grabs -- one per SPE site -- so check them all out!)

This week also brings mobile powerhouse Matt Miller of Nokia Experts to TiPb's own iPhone. He's on the TiPb iPhone Forums and needs your help! Give him a hand and get a chance to win an iPhone 3GS for your troubles!

Video hands-on with Palm Pre and Palm Pixi, after the break!

(And if you're confused by the intro to this year's video, you really need to go watch last year's Treo Pro video NOW!)

UPDATE: since Palm released the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi Plus at CES 2010, CrackBerry Kevin and I got Dieter to give us an updated look at the new hardware. (Which is a bit of a cheat, really, since they're not waiting for Apple's Jan. 27 event to do their iPhone reviews!)

So the suspiciously familiar Dieter Bohn of PreCentral.net got a guided tour (check out the video) from yours truly to catch him up on all things iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3.0 , and he shared his preliminary thoughts on Monday (same link). Of course, there was only so much help I could give him, so he went on over to TiPb's iPhone Forums for the real experts -- you, and boy have you given him some ninja-level instruction. He still needs you, however, so keep posting in that thread -- and remember every day you do you get another chance to WIN AN iPHONE 3GS! (smartphoneroundrobin.com has all the details on that).

As for me, I'm still struggling with Nokia, the S60 N97-mini, and N900. Yeah, wish me luck with that. (Or give me some help and maybe win a Nokia smartphone as well!)

As part of the commentary on Jamie Zawinski leaving the Palm Pre for the iPhone (linked in the previous post), Daring Fireball adds:

Apple had a similar idea to WebOS for the iPhone, where certain apps would run as Dashboard-style widgets, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Apple abandoned the idea in the six months between the iPhone’s January 2007 announcement and when it went on sale at the end of June, concluding that performance for such apps was unacceptable and that they should go native Cocoa across the board. And Apple was only going to do it for small apps, like Weather, Stocks, and Calculator, not the flagship apps like Calendar and Mail.

Of course, web technologies have improved since 2007, especially JavaScript rendering. Usability and performance complaints aside, Palm embracing web developers in order to incentivize adoption of their platform was a smart strategy. Still, it's interesting to see Apple's reaction to it back then, and their decision to go 100% native. (Especially considering they're now being criticized for not having widgets).

Did Apple make the right choice, do we still want widgets on the iPhone, or is HTML5 and SQLite in Safari making them redundant?

Acceleroto, makers of the iPhone apps Air Hockey [$0.99 - iTunes link] and Air Hockey Free [Free - iTunes link] have written an interesting post on the differences between developing their app for the iPhone App Store vs. the Palm Pre App Catalog. Some take away:

• They charge more for the webOS version due to lower volume expectations
• iPhone and Palm Pre are "remarkably similar" hardware-wise
• They already knew Objective-C, but Javascript wasn't difficult to pick up
• iPhone is native, webOS is interpreted, so there's a difference in execution speed (more important for game developers)
• Getting code onto the Pre is faster. Debugging is much more difficult than iPhone.
• Had to "skinny up" iPhone code to get 30-fps for webOS.
• Multitasking and garbage collection impacts performance
• Since webOS apps are "web pages", touch events are handled as mouse-clicks and aren't as smooth
• No sound yet, because the requisite timing isn't possible.

So, as we've heard before, development for non-intensive apps is likely quicker and easier for the Palm Pre, but more intensive apps, like games, are still a challenge. Doubtless Apple will continue to work on making casual apps easier to deploy, and Palm on making deeper apps run better.

The full post also includes the backstory of how and why Air Hockey was ported to webOS, and shown off as part of the Palm Pixi introduction. Give it a read, and then let us know what you think.

[Acceleroto via PreCentral.net]

UPDATE 2: Apple comments to Digital Daily:

“As we’ve said before, newer versions of Apple’s iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with unsupported digital media players.”

UPDATE 1: PreCentral.net is back with the low-down on how Palm re-enabled iTunes sync in webOS 1.2.1:

by setting its Manufacturer to Apple and also perhaps by changing the USB Product ID to the iPod Video's (they even changing the serial number that appears when you plug it in with Media Sync).

ORIGINAL: Palm has just updated their software to webOS 1.2.1, and according to PreCentral.net, the changelog reads "Resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with latest version of iTunes (9.0.1)"

Congrats Palm, just after we went and praised you for finally putting users ahead of your own ego, for spending your limited resources on solidifying your own software rather than hacking someone elses, after the USB-IF slapped the hand you yourself raised, you went ahead and showed your desire for blog press and whatever "daddy issues" exist between you and Apple, Rubinstein and Jobs, are what's most important to you. Kudos. Golf clap.

Bored now.

Pop-quiz: You're O2 and you just lost iPhone exclusivity in the UK, and now have to compete with both Orange and Vodafone for users' iPounds. What do you do? Why, tell them you still have the iPhone... and are getting the Palm Pre?!

We’re proud that we’ve been able to offer an exclusive iPhone deal to our 20 million customers for the last two years. We always knew that iPhone exclusivity was for a limited period of time, but our relationship with Apple continues and will be an ongoing success. We have over 1 million iPhone customers and they remain very important to us.

We aim to offer our customers the best devices on the market, including becoming the home of Smartphones and we are really pleased to now add another device in the Palm Pre. We also offer award-winning customer service and benefits, which is why more people choose O2 than any other network in the UK.

What say you UK readers, if you're thinking of taking your iPhone to another network, will offering you the Palm Pre change your mind?

[via Engadget Mobile]

According to PreCentral.net, the upcoming Palm webOS 1.2 update will NOT be re-hacking iTunes 9 sync. In other words, the cat and mouse game between Apple and Palm may soon be missing it's mouse. We'd heard Palm was in this for the long haul, even though we thought it was more ego than good sense, and at the expense of their own customers, so if true -- huge kudos to Palm (even if it took a little help from the USB-IF). And to Palm Pre users, our sibling site is:

suggesting people at least dip their toes into the non-iTunes-direct-sync waters. DoubleTwist, Salling Sync, Drag 'n Drop, The Missing Sync: learn them, love them, switch to them.

In the opposite of kudos department, it looks like Palm may be cloning one of least popular aspects of Apple 2-Billion download iTunes App Store -- developer alienation. According to JWZ, he's gone through dozens of emails, jumped through countless hoops, bended but refused to break, and now has faced an Apple-esque 2 weeks of silence.

Could it be that introducing, setting up, and running an app store is difficult, and until a few years from now, when all the bugs have been worked out, Apple, Palm, and almost every company will have their share of stumbles, falls, and face-plants?

Looks like the USB Implementers Forum has taken Apple's side over Palm's in their ongoing war of USB locking vs. USB spoofing. Digital Daily (via MacRumors) has the deets:

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that oversees the Universal Serial Bus standard, has finally responded to Palm’s (PALM) claim that Apple (AAPL) is “hampering competition” by repeatedly disabling the Palm Pre’s ability to sync with iTunes–and it’s not looking good for Palm. In a letter submitted to Apple and Palm today, the group dismissed Palm’s claim that Apple has violated its USB-IF Membership Agreement. Worse, it took issue with Palm’s alleged use of Apple’s Vendor Identification Number (VID), which it says violates USB-IF policy.

Palm's response?

“We engaged with the USB-IF because we believe consumers should have freedom and choice in how and where they use the non-rights managed media they already own. We are reviewing the letter from the USB-IF and will respond as appropriate.”

We've already weighed in on the situation in general (we think Palm has more important things to spend their limited funds and resources on), and PreCentral.net has posted up the whole sordid history along with their take, but what do you think? Is the USB-IF making the right call?

Sprint CEO Dan Hesse was put on Charlie Rose's hot seat and asked the pointed question: "Is the Palm Pre making a dent into the iPhone market?"

Hesse's response?

Aaah... It's-it's doing well, but you can almost put the iPhone, to be fair, in a separate category. The Apple brand and that device have done so well, it's almost not... it's like comparing someone to Michael Jordan.

Gizmodo figured they'd remind Hesse that it was, in fact, the same category and that Apple needs competition (the consumer needs competition). Engadget thinks it was a duly respectful and tactful acknowledgement of the iPhone's success.

We think it's nice to hear a wireless CEO who's not so bombastic and, frankly, disconnected as most of them seem to be, as evident by Hesse's answers on Android, Nextel, the price of touchscreen handsets, and battery life as an impediment to smartphone growth.

Palm rejected NaNplayer from their App Catalog. That's the first time that's happened for their new webOS platform, but it's something those who follow the iTunes App Store have seen happen with much more frequency.

Now, to be fair, the iTunes App Store currently sports 75,000 apps, and according to Apple's response to the FCC, handles 8,500 submissions a week. We're not sure the App Catalog has cracked 100 yet, so the comparison is apples to orchards at this point. We'd expect Apple to have flagged 1000x the apps Palm had. What makes for a clean break in the two case models, however, is how Palm handled the situation.

Chuq Von Rospach, developer community manager at Palm, jumped on the PreCentral.net forums and... communicated. Quickly, cleanly, and with an admirable degree of transparency.

Now, on the iPhone side we've seen Senior Marketing VP Phil Schiller fire off an email or two to high-profile blogs addressing their concerns about the App Store, and the aforementioned FCC response, but an actual, engaged individual whose sole focus is to work with the developer community, provide support, assuage concerns, and be a pseudo-public symbol of this intent to do better? And who says Palm is okay -- nay, happy -- for the app to continue life as homebrew (their version of jailbreak)

Can we have one?

Chuq, like Palm CEO Jon Rubinstien (slated to be the first guest on the new Engadget Show) and many Palm engineers and PR folks, used to work for Apple. Perhaps Palm is giving them a break from Apple's culture of secrecy and they're taking a liking too it. Perhaps Apple can give some current employees a break from that secrecy as well.

Right now disenchanted iPhone users are trying out Palm, Android, and even Nokia devices and not finding them up to Apple's usability and polish snuff, but that won't last long. Apple needs to get their App Store community perception problems fixed as fast or faster even. Better still, get developer satisfaction levels up to customer satisfaction levels.

Sure these aren't on the general consumer radar at all. Indeed, the amount of people given Apple's 50 million install base is almost statistically irrelevant. But as we've said before, these are the people who tend to influence others, and while the actual App Store problems are likely still going to take a while to crack, the perception problem is one far more easily -- if uncomfortably for Apple -- handled.

And it likely doesn't even need an open letter from Steve Jobs to do it.

Rhapsody [free - iTunes Link] is now available in the iTunes App Store. It was less than a month ago that we told you about the submission of RealNetwork's Rhapsody iPhone app, well Apple may have been scared straight by the FCC because it's been approved and is now available as a free download.

Now don't don't forget there is a $15/month subscription fee you must dish out if you want all of that music streaming goodness over AT&T's data network or Wi-Fi. Sorry folks, no off-line access like Spotify here.

In a strange twist of fate, PreCentral.net tells us Palm has rejected their first App Catalog app, NaNPlayer, a (superior according to PC) replacement for the built-in Pre music player. Why did they do this? The developer used an undocumented API and that violates the SDK agreement. Sound familiar, iPhone users? Will Palm now get the same grief Apple does?

Sound off in the comments!

Yes folks, given the release of iTunes 9 today, our sibling site PreCentral.net rushed out to check and surehawtdang, Palm Pre sync is deader than dead dead... again!

Will Palm, also again, pick up this latest, brick filled gauntlet from Apple and re-enable Pre Sync, maybe on the molecular level this time?

Sigh. We hope they don't. Their resources are better spent, you know, making the Pre and Pixi even more spectacular. But given the odd father/son issues between Jobso and Ruby -- and for the sake of fun internet soap opera everywhere -- they probably will.

Game. Back. On.

Did Apple CEO Steve Jobs approach former Palm CEO Ed Colligan back in 2007 with a gentleman's agreement to stop hiring each other's employees? (Similar to the agreement allegedly just terminated between Apple and Google?)

Bloomberg, based on communications revealed by Palm's Derick Mains, says indeed he did. The conversation reportedly took place in August 2007, after Apple unveiled the iPhone in January and shipped it in June -- and after Apple had hired 2% of Palm's workforce to do it. Palm then brought former Apple iPod executive Jon Rubinstein on board to reboot their smartphone efforts, and it's at this point Steve Jobs apparently stepped in:

Jobs, Apple’s CEO, told Colligan he was concerned that Rubinstein was recruiting Apple employees. “We must do whatever we can to stop this,” Jobs said in the communications. [...] Jobs said Apple had patents and more money than Palm if the companies ended up in a legal fight, according to the communications.

Palm's response?

“Your proposal that we agree that neither company will hire the other’s employees, regardless of the individual’s desires, is not only wrong, it is likely illegal,” Colligan said to Jobs, 54, according to the communications. Colligan said he thought about Jobs’s proposal and considered offering hiring concessions, before deciding against it, according to the exchanges.

Palm, of course, did go on to hire liberally from Apple's iPhone engineer ranks. Still, it's interesting to see Palm offering up this exchange on a silver platter during a time when tech companies in general, and Apple in particular, is coming under higher government scrutiny. It comes on the heels of other recent Palm vs. Apple scrapes, of course, including the ongoing jousting match over iTunes sync and USB access, the still simmering patent dispute Jobs hints at above and that Apple and Palm have played about in the media, and of course humorous comments from investor Roger McNamee and Colligan himself about how the iPhone is/was doomed.

[via Engadget]

UPDATE: MacRumors is saying they have good reason to believe these images are, indeed, fake...

Boy Genius received some more screen shots of what's alleged to be iTunes 9, showing a Samsung YH-J70JL Black -- of all things -- purportedly syncing with the front end of Apple's media management empire. PreCentral.net jumped on this to ponder out-loud if Apple was having a change of heart regarding locking out Palm's previous attempts to spoof an iPod ID and sync with iTunes on the down-low, and will now allow non-Apple devices access. TiPb, however, can see this playing out in only 3 ways:

1. The screen shots, or that specific feature at least, isn't real
2. The 'verse gets rebooted, Star Trek-style, and Steve Jobs ain't in it.
3. Jobs is going nu-cu-lar and will allow every device except the Palm Pre to sync with iTunes.

Option 3 looking the most likely at this point?

Our sibling site, PreCentral.net has put together something we're openly and admittedly jealous of -- a brand-spanking new Homebrew Apps gallery for the Palm Pre. For those unfamiliar with Homebrew, think of it as something akin to the iPhone's Jailbreak ecosystem, where apps are developed outside "official" SDK channels and installed without the built in App Store (or App Catalog in this case).

Jailbreak, of course, is and has always been one of the brightest, most creative and vibrant parts of the iPhone (and TiPb!) community, and it looks like Homebrew is every bit the same for the Palm Pre (and likely future webOS devices).

What makes this particularly interesting is that Jailbreak sprang up initially because Apple didn't provide an SDK or App Store for 3rd party apps at all with the original iPhone 2G and iPhone OS 1.0. Jailbreak continued after the official SDK shipped and the App Store appeared with iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0, however, because Apple took a very hard editorial line on approval (and rejection), creating a gap in functionality and leaving out whole classes of applications. And this has continued to be the case well after iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0 (See Jeremy's most recent Top 5 Must-Have Jailbreak Apps Post-iPhone 3.0 Edition for examples).

Palm Pre and webOS, however, had an SDK (in limited beta) before launch, was built on web-standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, shipped with an App Catalog in place, and seems to be aiming for a far more open, encompassing approval process than the iPhone or Apple would ever allow. So why Homebrew?

The webOS SDK wasn't generally available to everyone who wanted it, when they wanted it, and the App Catalog didn't have tons and tons of apps available when it shipped. Palm enthusiasts saw gaining dev access and developing Homebrew as a highly desirable mountain in their back yard that just demanded to be climbed. And now there are all sorts of wonderful Homebrew apps appearing and -- here's the kicker -- Palm thus far seems to be okay with it. They didn't lock down the system to the extent exploits are needed to Jailbreak (just the most awesome Konami code), and they're not petitioning to prevent any exemptions from the DMCA... yet.

It's easy to see the upside. You get super-passionate, uber-talented developers buying into your platform and building apps some of which will no-doubt end up in the official App Catalog, and some of which might just fill gaps that carrier or corporate policy require be filled unofficially.

Apple will likely never go the same route as Palm -- despite the overlapping executives and engineers, the cultures are different and need to be to compete. Looking at the Homebrew community, however, it's hard not to believe that even if Apple pulled a 180 and cracked the giant stone gates of the App Store well and truly open, Jailbreaking wouldn't continue as well, a test bed for new ideas, fringe cases, and future development of the platform (oh, and carrier unlock, of course...).

In the meantime -- we can't resist -- check out PreCentral.net and smellellellell what the Homebrew community is cooking!

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• Apple and China Unicom Finally Maybe Potentially Have an iPhone Deal. Possibly.

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• Palm Re-Hacks iTunes Sync, Shows They Care More About Ego and Press Than Pre Users, and files a complaint against Apple
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Dieter did some digging over at PreCentral.net and goes through how Palm re-hacked the iTunes sync. It looks pretty much like what we figured. Palm is spoofing the Apple USB Vendor ID so as to present as an iPod. This is one step deeper than last time, where they still ID'd themselves as a Pre. In a further display of chutzpah, while violating the prohibition against misuse of USB vendor IDs themselves, Palm has filed a complaint against "another company" (we're guessing Apple) for improper use of same.

So let's follow the logic here. Palm is seemingly objecting to Apple using the USB vendor ID to filter out non-Apple devices. Palm doesn't feel that filtering is in keeping with the openness of the USB standard.

What's the alternative, however? For Apple to maintain control over their own software by putting an authentication chip in every iPod/iPhone that handshakes with iTunes before syncing? Or to agree to freely license iTunes interoperability to every device maker on the planet?

That iTunes has achieved a high enough market penetration to be considered a platform, and that scripts for iTunes could be considered "software" on that platform is certainly a legitimate point of view. However, Apple historically takes advantage of only writing software for their own hardware, which means they can change things whenever they want without worrying about breaking third party hardware. Opening up iTunes brings headaches for Apple.

For Palm, we still find it an odd fight to pick. Is it really what Palm wants to spend their time -- and Elevation Partner's -- money on.

webOS was supposed to be a next-generation platform in its own right, something not tied down with a desktop heritage like Apple. Palm, arguably more than even Google in the mobile space at the time, made a point to talk about the cloud, not the desktop -- Synergy, not some USB tether, is how it manages personal information.

And yet they're fixated on iTunes desktop, something even Apple has left entirely behind on iPhone 3.0 except for firmware updates and third-party media transfer.

We'll say it again -- iTunes. Desktop. From a cloud-focused company?

We've already given our theory -- Palm's Apple heritage, Jon Rubinstein's desire to stretch beyond Steve Jobs' shadow, and the press fallout are more important to Palm than webOS or its users. Still, we can't help thinking of the end of Batman Begins...

Palm broke into iTunes. Apple dressed up in the Batsuit and shut them down. Now Palm's got the white warpaint and crazy-wide smile on, and have just flipped over the Joker card.

Escalation.

Palm Pre got webOS 1.1 today and the surprise feature was that it re-hacks iTunes sync, once and for all proving Palm's new management -- in this area -- cares more about thumbing their nose at Apple and strutting in front of the press than they do about Palm and the Pre user base.

Yeah, this will be an editorial of the scathing variety. You've been warned...

Palm got an astounding and impressive number of things right with webOS. The multitasking is great, the notifications sublime, the SDK a stroke of genius, and the Classic emulator smart, smart, smart. Palm's done so much so right, it's flabbergasting that they've handled iTunes sync so boneheadedly wrong.

What's so wrong about it? It doesn't serve the webOS/Palm Pre user. Bottom line, no company should ever base a user experience on something they don't own or license. Regardless of caveats like version numbers, Palm telling Pre users they can sync with iTunes when Palm can't guarantee it will work going forward is irresponsible.

RIM/BlackBerry and Nokia, by contrast, sync with the iTunes XML file which won't break if iTunes updates. Sure, it's not the way an iPod syncs, but then they aren't -- and the Palm Pre isn't -- and iPod.

We've spoken before about user confusion. Stick a Palm Pre into iTunes and it pretends to be an iPod, but it can't sync iTunes movies, can't sync App Store apps. That breaks the user experience (my mother has no idea what DRM is, but she sure knows what "not working" is). And if iTunes is updated and, even if purely by accident, Palm Pre can no longer sync, it shatters the user experience. ("No, see mom, Apple and Palm are like rivals and-- yes, I know you can't get your ABBA to play. Sigh. Again--")

See, we're not talking about pro level users here. This isn't DVD Jon hacking iTunes DRM and experts going in to set up the sync themselves. That's closer to Jailbreak, you roll your own dice and takes your own chances.

We're talking about average users who go in thinking they can sync with iTunes just like an iPod. That's incredibly unfair to them.

So why is Palm doing it? First, it's important to remember current Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein was formerly head of the iPod division at Apple, and brought a lot of iPod and iPhone engineers (and PR people) with him to work on webOS and the Pre. That's reportedly caused some animosity between Palm and Apple. Second, look at all the press it generates for them.

Even putting aside whether Palm, with all that iPod brain trust, could prove reverse-engineering in a clean room, it comes off as looking like they did it to show they could, and to get the required action from Apple to generate buzz and attention.

The original hack was just a USB masquerade and was easy for Apple to stop. This hack, while currently unidentified, is likely deeper and perhaps not as trivial. That makes the first hack look like a sacrificial pawn in a chess gambit, with the second (and third, fourth?) more like Bishops and Queens lined up, ready and waiting.

But Palm isn't playing with game pieces, they're playing with that average user who just wants a reliable sync solution for his or her (or moms!) media. Palm is putting that user behind their own ego -- to show up former big boss Apple -- and attention seeking -- to hook the blogsphere in riveting rounds of cat and mouse posts.

And that's not right. It's not right for Apple, who'll get blamed for Palm's manipulations. It's not right for Palm who is better than this, and has created an otherwise exemplary new platform. It's not right for the engineers on both sides who waste time hacking and patching unlicensed sync rather than working on great new features. And it's absolutely not right for Palm Pre users who deserve that BlackBerry or Nokia quality sync experience, legitimately for their very own.

How about it Palm, how about we re-task those engineers into making a great iTunes Library XML sync for all the users who stuck by the original Palm, through the years in the desert, and into the clouds?

iPhone vs. Palm Pre combat and comparison is nothing new, but is the latest rivalry in smartphones ready to take to the skies? Ars Technica certainly thinks so:

Ultimately, traveling with the Pre made me want my iPhone back

Though user-changeable, battery life on the Palm Pre was cited as one of the biggest disadvantages, draining rapidly under the onslaught of the famed Synergy and Card systems, and an estimated death in just 30 min. of Sprint TV viewing(?!). Lack of Apps was another.

Far from negative, however, the article gives Palm lots of suggestions to help the troubled Pre traveller out. (Ours, of course, would be actually getting that iPhone back...)

If you have any travel tips of your own to share, drop them in the comments!

[Thanks to Icebike for the tip!]

With the return of Steve Jobs to Apple comes the return of Fake Steve to the interwebs. Fake Steve also returns to being bitingly satirical, something that had been lacking before its own hiatus. Recent gems include the excoriation of the New York Times, and lambasting Palm (twice) for focusing on Apple rather than the Pre in their own advertisements:

Do you remember what the ads for the original iPhone looked like? You remember seeing anything in those ads about the BlackBerry or the Treo? No. It was a whole new thing -- sui generis, as the French say. It had to be. If all we could do was to make a slightly less s****y BlackBerry, and offer it for a few bucks less than what RIM was charging, we would not have bothered to make the product.

(Though he may be reaching in his claims of just how far Jon Rubinstein will go to be like "him".)

If you're easily offended, stay clear. Otherwise, enjoy it while it lasts...

Sprint and the Palm Pre just decided to bring it to Apple's iPhone via a perfectly nifty, if factually inaccurate(1), little ad-esque banner posted on Facebook. PreCentral.net already pipped us to the relevant quote post, citing McNamee's infamous CEOh-snap moment from the past:

You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone, [...] Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.

The relative thriftiness of constraining their marketing budget to a Facebook fan-base aside, does it really behoove Palm to remind iPhone 2G owners that their contracts are up, right after 1,000,000 people jumped on the iPhone 3GS last weekend alone?

How does that compare to Palm Pre numbers to date?

(utter silence)

That's what we thought...

1. The iPhone multitasks iPod, Mail, Phone, Safari iTunes, and App Store, phenomenally well -- the iPhone 3GS more snappily than the arguably laggy Palm Pre. Apple simply chooses not to allow 3rd party multitasking at this point, something that admittedly chaffs, but is still a far cry from what's insinuated in the "ad".

Once again validating Dieter's iPhone 3GS vs. Palm Pre web rendering smackdown, MacRumors reports on Medialets' latest Sunspider Javascript tests pitting the iPhone 3GS against the iPhone 3G (both on 3.0 and 2.2.1), Palm Pre, and Google Android G1.

As MacRumors points out, not only is iPhone 3GS' clear, current speed advantage impressive, but the 3x improvement iPhone 3.0 gives the iPhone 3G is most impressive as well.

Bill Gates' "power of software" indeed...

Update: Engadget re-did the math and it looks like the iPhone 3G S is actually 21% faster than the Palm Pre (for now).

According to Anandtech, Dieter was spot on in his iPhone 3G S vs. Palm Pre browser speed test video. (as was our iPhone 3G S vs. iPhone 3G smackdown video)

The bigger story, of course, is not only do we have several great devices pushing competition and better serving users these days, but Mobile WebKit (the rendering engine behind Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome Lite, Palm Pre's browser, and Nokia S60 (tip of the hat to Sascha Segan) has become the mobile internet platform.

That it's relentlessly standards based, scales elegantly from desktop (where it ironically holds minimal share) to handset, and is continually being improved upon makes us especially happy for all concerned devices.

We're not surprised. Obviously. Apple plays the product cycle and media hype engines to perfection. Still, it's interesting to see Electronista's take, based on ChangeWave data:

A mid-June study from the research group has 14.4 percent of those tracked looking to buy some kind of smartphone within the next 90 days, a record high and a large jump from 11.2 percent in March. Of these, a full 44 percent now plan to buy an iPhone compared to 30 percent just three months earlier.

As the above graph shows, Palm went from 4% to 8%, BlackBerry from 37% to 23%. Android, Nokia, and Windows Mobile weren't shown

Other device makers likely know this, explaining why we're seeing so many iPhone-style devices hitting the market. TiPb still thinks it's more than a set of features, however. Sure, iPod halo and Apple brand help, but in the end the iPhone is all about usability and user experience for the consumer market, and that's not as easy a task to duplicate.

UPDATED: Icebike makes and interesting and opposite argument in the comments:

If you ask me that wording amounts to tacit approval to use third party devices, without Apple assuming any liability for their continued operation.

ORIGINAL: Not quite "get off our lawn", yet clearly a sign post warning that the lawn might on day get a tad hostile if you choose to linger there without leave. Here it is, via Daring Fireball, Apple's latest Knowledge Base Article: iTunes: About unsupported third-party digital media players, aka the Palm Pre syncing saga:

This article is about iTunes and unsupported third-party digital media players.

Products Affected iTunes

Apple designs the hardware and software to provide seamless integration of the iPhone and iPod with iTunes, the iTunes Store, and tens of thousands of apps on the App Store. Apple is aware that some third-parties claim that their digital media players are able to sync with Apple software. However, Apple does not provide support for, or test for compatibility with, non-Apple digital media players and, because software changes over time, newer versions of Apple's iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players.

So, if/when iTunes breaks compatibility with the Palm Pre -- intentionally, incidentally, or otherwise, does this cover Apple?

I joined Leif Iverson on yesterday's Digital Trends Podcast, and since Dieter wasn't available, I was put in the untenable position of having to champion both the iPhone 3G S for TiPb and the Palm Pre for our sibling site, PreCentral.net. Somehow, I survived. (And had a lot of fun -- thanks Leif!)

Check it out, and let us know what you think about the upcoming rumble in the smartphone jungle!

Attack of the Show co-host, Olivia Munn, offered her professional opinion on the Palm Pre with regards to the iPhone today, via Twitter.

• yeah, if you pre-switched to pre from iphone, you'll be upset on monday. [Link]
• you got the pre? does it suck to know you should've just got the iphone? it's okay. we all make mistakes. [Link]
• **** the Palm Pre. If you have an iPhone, stick with it. If you have a Blackberry, like me, omg dontyoujustlove it? [Link]

What. Up. Indeed.

[via @philnickinson]

Remember that brouhaha over the Palm Pre syncing with iTunes? (Check out PreCentral.net's massive Palm Pre review for more on it from a functional perspective.)

Well, DVD Jon's nanocr.eu site (via Engadget Mobile) says he's confirmed that:

the way [Palm Pre] hooks to iTunes is very shady indeed. Turns out that the Pre identifies itself as an iPod when it's in Media Sync mode, but only on the system's mass storage interface; the root USB node still comes through as a Palm Pre.

This leads them to believe it might be something Apple could more easily block, if Apple so chooses to. We've already gone over the reasons why we think Palm's decision to sync directly with iTunes (as opposed to with the iTunes library XML file like RIM and Nokia do) is ballsy but ultimately bad for Apple (since they'll get blamed for problems by consumers who don't understand the hacky nature and limitations), Palm (since they will have to work at maintaining unlicensed compatibility), but most importantly consumers (because the experience is flawed and unreliable).

Here's hoping Palm finishes their strut around the launch-day press lines and the next update contains something closer akin to a non-shady, yet still iTunes and user friendly solution for everyone...

We've had a lot to say about the Palm Pre over the last few months, but it pales to insignificance compared to the epic monster of a Palm Pre review our noble Editor-in-Chief, Dieter Bohn, has just dropped on sibling site PreCentral.net:

There are Pre Reviews & then there are huge Pre Reviews with 12 videos and photo galleries w/ 200 images for companions

Well. Done. Sir.

If you're tired of the sizzle and want some steak, if you've seen smoke but question if there's fire, get thee over to PreCentral.net and read the Palm Pre review.

Then hurry back here and tell us what you think of it, and how you think it'll compare with the iPhone!

Palm faithful rejoice, Gizmodo -- via an unnamed source -- claims that Palm Pre still syncs with iTunes 8.2 release, same as it reportedly did with the pre-release version.

Meanwhile, Daring Fireball weighs in on the situation again, this time wondering if what Palm is doing is illegal, and if Apple stops it, whether that would be illegal. PreCentral.net, for their part, looks beyond the what to the why:

we're increasingly getting the feeling that Palm is either trying to goad Apple into a legal showdown or they are so confident in their patent portfolio that they feel they can throw these features in Apple's face.

To which Gruber aptly footnotes:

And, when judging the likelihood of Apple filing such a lawsuit, consider the perspective of a certain highly-competitive quasi-paranoid Apple founder and CEO who is famously sensitive to what he perceives as being “ripped off”. The one and only company to ship a product that successfully masquerades as an iPod via USB is the company whose engineering division is run by a former Apple senior VP and has hired a slew of former Apple engineers.

In -- as they say -- deed.

Jeremy already passed along the warning from the iPhone Dev-Team on iTunes 8.2. In case you missed it, they told jailbreakers and potential jailbreakers NOT to install Apple's just-released iTunes update.

According to their latest Dev-Team Blog post, the reason seems to be:

It breaks your ability to use QuickPwn, PwnageTool, and iPhone Tunneling Suite (ssh over usb). We don’t think this is a deliberate breakage of these tools. It’s just that Apple has updated a low-level USB protocol that normally only Apple cares about (but jailbreakers care about).

Is Dev-Team working on a fix? Youbetcha, but they don't want to release anything further until iPhone OS 3.0 is final. This may annoy people who have the 3.0 beta, but legit developers probably have more pressing concerns than jailbreaking at the moment, and why would the Dev-Team waste their energy and tip their hand to Apple when the betas will likely keep changing every couple of weeks before release anyway?

Of course, the blogsphere now has another concern, since last week's announcement that the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes, likely by faking Apple's USB protocols to disguise itself as an iPod (see Daring Fireball's take on this as well). There have been two pre-release versions of iTunes 8.2, going back over a month, but the obvious question still becomes: will the iTunes 8.2 final release also effect the Palm Pre sync?

Dev-Team thinks it's possible:

It may actually break Palm Pre’s connection to the device (please give us feedback on this).

We think Palm's Jon Rubinstein -- who used to head the iPod division at Apple -- may just have compromising pictures of the iPhone taken during it's "bachelor" party the night before Macworld 2007 ... We mean, it's got to be something, right?

nanocr.eu (via MacRumors) has a theory on how the Palm Pre is managing to sync so seamlessly with iTunes. Read the full post for details, but their conclusion is a tad concerning:

• When you select “Media Sync” on the Pre, it will switch its USB interface to use Apple’s Vendor Id and the Product Id for a specific iPod model
• The Pre exposes a filesystem through Mass Storage Class that mimics the structure of an iPod
• The Pre responds to Apple’s custom USB command and returns XML info about the device

They warn -- like we have -- that this will be pretty simple for Apple to intentionally prevent, uncaringly break, or accidentally bug up (they've done all three to jailbreakers in the past, after all, and expecting Apple to devote time and engineers to maintaining compatibility for unlicensed devices is just this side of silly).

Their advice? Anticipate Palm Pre iTunes sync to go the way of the dodo and fast. Then get a copy of DVD Jon's DoubleTwist and sync your hearts out that way...

As Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak paid rapt attention (via Engadget), Palm's new dynamic duo, Jon Rubinstein and Roger McNamee took turns amazing, informing, and stupefying the crowd at All-Things Digital's D7 conference. Our sibling site, PreCentral.net has complete coverage, but from an iPhone perspective there were a few things worth drawing attention to...

The good: Ruby and Mac, straight and funny man respectively, were an awesome combination in the best, most comedic sense of the term. Palm should make sure their contracts say they need to co-host all future events. Presentation Gold. Ruby controlled the message and acted the responsible corporate governor while Mac was left to make outrageous claims and obfuscate the tough questions. And it worked brilliantly. Their opening video alone, which self-deprecatingly poked at Mac's history of grandiose statements all the while letting him slip in even more jabs, such as the terminal "[Palm Pre] eats iPhone's for breakfast."

The bad: when demonstrating the previously mentioned Palm Pre iTunes sync, comments were made about Apple being "monopolistic". Puh-leeze. Palm has an absolute right to make their own desktop client (they already make Palm Desktop for example). They don't have the right to hook into Apple's without license, even if Apple has the most popular media client on the planet. To make it simple for them, no matter how popular McDonald's is, they have the right to serve their own fries with their Big Macs. Burger King DOES NOT have the right to set up a stall inside McDonald's and hook up Whoppers next to the MacFries machine -- unless McDonald's says it's okay.

Tangent: Telling Palm Pre users they can hook up and sync with iTunes, even if you specify "DRM free music, photos (?!), and videos" is all fun and games until a) users can't transfer their iPhone apps and blame Apple, b) a routine (or not so) update to iTunes breaks Pre compatibility and users blame Apple.

The ugly: Great as Ruby and Mac were together, Ruby couldn't stop Mac from fully inserting his foot into his mouth towards the end. In a painfully, painfully drawn-out exchange with Kara Swisher, Mac began by saying the Pre had a mirror for woman, which Swisher immediately took exception to. Unrelenting, Mac continued to press the point about women being an ignored segment of the market, then took exception to Swisher's exception, and basically ended up writing the title for this here blog post, casting the Palm Pre as the "iPhone for Ladies" -- insulting women and potentially turning off a segment of their male audience as well. Sad, given the great start to the show.

So that was likely the last big Palm song and dance before release, and it was a mixed bag and perhaps a changing of the guard as well. A lot was made of Ruby's Apple pedigree and experience -- and we couldn't help but notice that after Ruby's comments that he basically rescued the Pre from resistive hell, Palm founder Ed Colligan was nowhere to be seen. If the Palm Pre is Ruby's iPhone, maybe we've just met the new iPalm?

Fortune scoop'let'ed the story: the Palm Pre syncs with iTunes. No, not like a dumb USB disk. Not even like a 3rd party-enabled BlackBerry on the PC. Somehow, when Jon Rubinstein joined Palm, someone at Apple forgot to frisk him for iTunes keys.

Our friends over at PreCentral.net, of course, are all over this:

If the Pre does indeed just show up as a standard device on iTunes, it would be big news -- but it wouldn't be unprecedented.  Apple has allowed other OEMs to license the necessary APIs to talk directly to iTunes so they can show up as a device.  If you take a gander at the list of compatible players on Apple's support site, you'll see that Rio players, Nomad Players, and others will all work with iTunes directly (not to mention various Motorola phones).

Still, the level of integration purportedly available to the Pre makes us feel more than a little violated. Did Apple really license them that deep a hook into the system? Given the existence of one Steven P. Jobs, we somehow doubt that. But if not, which 3rd party hook did Palm embed, is it all nice and legal, and how -- if at all -- will Apple react?

We know! At WWDC Phil Schiller will announce -- iPhone compatibility with Palm Desktop!!

Ahem

Yeah, provocative headline, but we've lamented in that past that the Palm Pre was too iPhone-like for us -- based on the involvement of transplanted Apple brain trust -- and how we'd have loved to have seen a truly next generation Palm device. Could it be, however, that the former have saved us from being tragically wrong about the latter?

We'd heard before how the previous Apple iPod-lead Jon Rubinstein argued and lost with Steve Jobs over a hardware keyboard on the iPhone (much as Tony Fadell, "father of the iPod" and another former Apple exec, argued and lost over using Linux rather than OS X on the iPhone). Flash forward and Rubenstein is recruited by new Palm backers, Elevation Partners, to help oversee the development of Palm's next generation handset -- and potential company-saving gadget -- the Palm Pre. (And Rubinstein brought over iPhone engineers and Apple PR people to help).

So what's new? According to Fortune (via PreCentral.net) it turns out Rubenstein first had to save the Palm Pre from Palm:

Rubinstein started, in his words, "hanging out" with Palm people in late June. He didn't like what he saw. The hardware for the Pre needed to be scrapped and rebooted. For one thing, prototypes were using old "resistive" touchscreen technology that responds to a user physically pushing the screen, not the newer "capacitive" technology manipulated by the electricity in the user's body. Rubinstein tossed out the old phone's hardware and built a new one in about 15 months. "We were basically running a marathon and doing a heart transplant in the middle of it," says Rubinstein.

We've joked before that the device we all know and love is Steve Jobs' vision of the iPhone, and that the Palm Pre is Jon Rubinstein's vision of the iPhone, and guess what? We might have been exactly right.

(And does that mean if Rubinstein and Fadell had won their arguments, maybe the iPhone would have been the Palm Pre fully two years ago? We're ecstatic they didn't and it wasn't because now we get to have both visionary products to choose from -- and to compete for our choice.)

Only question is, where can we see that Palm-like Pre prototype?

To see the above image in all immenseness and glory, head on over to our sister site PreCentral.net. And yeah, AT&T did draw first blood a while back with their own internal comparison document, so we're really more amused than amazed by this one, even if the categories chosen for the above comparison are a little on the weighted side. (If they'd chosen desktop syncing, massive integrated media service, 35,000+ current-gen apps, etc. things might have ended up a little differently...). Beyond the talking points, more details have also emerged:

We can also confirm that until you set up your Palm Profile, the Pre won't work at all. You'll also need to accept Google Mobile's terms of service in order to get GPS services working properly. Multiple Exchange accounts are a go with full push support and the ability to search through Global Addresses on the server - but inviting attendees isn't up yet.

Also, DocsToGo will be built in but read-only. Full version, with editing will be available to those on the "Now Network" at some time that is "later"...

iPhone 3.0 (and maybe hardware version 3 as well?) vs. Palm Pre. This summer, that's the question many would-be-smartphone purchasers just might be asking themselves. Both have their pros and cons. The iPhone has a huge profile and market presence, but the Pre has the old-school Palm faithful who have been waiting a long time for their Next Big Thing. The iPhone has massive channels and even Sprint admits they won't be advertising the Palm Pre much due to low initial supply. But those most likely to want the Palm Pre already know it's coming, where to get, and may well be reading this while already standing in line.

But what about the consumer on the edge? The consumer who has an older iPhone or Palm, or the one who's about to move up from a feature phone for the first time. What about the dreaded "undecided"? This article is for them. And, yeah, we're an iPhone blog, so make sure you head on over to our sister-site PreCentral.net. They'll keep us honest and make sure you get a full, fair representation so you can make an informed decision.

Now let's get it on... after the break!

Keyboard

For some, the comparison will end right here. Palm Pre has a physical, hardware-based QWERTY keyboard while the iPhone has a virtual, software-based keyboard that can be QWERTY (or anything else).

For those who need to feel those keys, the Palm Pre is the obvious choice. However, the Pre's keyboard is reportedly somewhere between a Treo Pro and a Palm Centro: softer, more gummy keys with a narrow width overall. It might not be to everyone's liking. That said, at least the Pre has one, and it's a slider to boot, which means if you don't need it, you can just tuck it away back under the screen where it came from.

The iPhone, on the other hand, can draw any kind of keyboard it wants. So if you need to type occasionally (or often) in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, or most any language, you can easily switch between those exact keyboards. You can also automagically be presented with web-optimized, or video, audio -- any task at all -- specific keyboards. Versatile if not tactile. And if you have joint problems or repetitive stress injuries, being able to touch instead of press can be literally just what the doctor ordered.

Personally, I'm better with the iPhone keyboard than I've ever been with a Palm or any other physical keyboard. But I realize I'm in the minority on this one.

Advantage: Palm Pre

Network

In the US -- which is the only country with initial availability -- Sprint has exclusive rights to the Palm Pre, much as AT&T has a lock on the iPhone. If you don't get Sprint or AT&T in your neck of the woods, you're in for an easy choice. Likewise, if only one or the other provides high speed data -- EVDO Rev A for Sprint and HSPA for AT&T -- that might be a huge factor in your decision. Think of it like broadband vs. dial up. You want fast. And if you're international, well Canada/Bell is rumored for August and everyone else is waiting to see.

Assuming you're in the US and have roughly equal access to, and speed on, both networks, which one has the edge? (No pun intended!) Giving both carriers the customer service benefit of the doubt (you may have cause to hate either one, or both), there's still two factors to consider:

1. AT&T is a GSM network, which means you can theoretically pop out your SIM card and put it in another mobile phone. Great in emergencies and if you travel and don't want to deal with roaming charges (though the latter depends entirely on you being willing and able to unlock your iPhone -- not something everyone does or wants to do). Sprint is CDMA, so any phone switches involves a call to your carrier at the very least.

2. Sprint doesn't currently allow simultaneous voice and data. This means if you're talking on the Palm Pre, you can't use the web or email, and vice versa. If you're using an iPhone on AT&T's EDGE service, you'll have the same problem, but if you're on 3G, there are no worries at all. For the Palm Pre, you'd have to switch to Wi-Fi to do that.

Again, for me, using voice and data at the same time has become a must. Looking up information while out and about on a call is a frequent occurrence. If you're not accustomed to it, you may not miss it, but once you are, it's hard to go back. If everything else is a wash, that alone carries some weight.

Advantage: iPhone

Cloud Support

The "cloud", or online environment is the next big thing. We've only been told that going on a decade. Thing is, it might finally be coming true. Connectivity is ubiquitous enough, bandwidth fast enough, storage cheap enough, and social networking hot enough that everyone and their startup seems to be rolling out an online service.

Google, the undisputed king of the clouds, has their own Android platform, but they share their love equally around the mobile space. Pretty much every device is assured access to Google search, Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and the rest of their services.

Apple and the iPhone leverage Google well, add in basic business support for Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync, provide their own MobileMe service for the "rest of us", and support the FaceBooks, LinkedIns, Twitters, and other networks through well made WebApps and 3rd party native applications. Good stuff.

Palm calls the Pre's foundation webOS, however, and they mean it. The Palm Pre doesn't just hook into the above mentioned services and networks, it provides a feature called Synergy which is supposed to automagically pull all your data from them, merge it together seamlessly, and provide you with a single, unified view of your contacts, calendars, and messages. Great stuff.

If you prefer local apps and like to keep your data separate -- and some certainly do -- the iPhone might be the closest you can come to that rich client experience. If you want to live in the clouds, however, the Palm Pre is blazing your path.

Advantage: Palm Pre

Ecosystem

From the clouds back down to earth. No device exists in a vacuum. Most smartphone owners also have a computer. Maybe an MP3 player, an HD TV, and a variety other software and hardware. How do these factor in?

Palm once offered computer integration via Palm Desktop, which at this point could politely be considered abandonware, especially on the Mac side. 3rd parties have done an admirable job filling the void, but it's clear with the Pre that Palm is looking -- as we just described -- to the clouds. That's great for those aspects, but what if you have large music or video collections you want to carry around with you on your mobile? Pre will have Amazon MP3, and you'll be able to tether it via USB for disk-mode drag-and-drop, but we don't know yet what else -- if anything -- will round this out.

With the iPhone, you have Apple's 360 degree product integration to work with. You can produce or acquire content on the Mac, sync that content via iTunes on the Mac or PC, and move it -- with full bookmarking -- to the iPhone, iPods, or Apple TV. And you can go to the Apple Store if you need help learning how to do any of the above, and more. This means you can start watching a movie on your LCD, sync and keep watching it from that exact same moment on your iPhone, then get home, sync again, and finish it pretty much seamlessly on your PC.

The Palm Pre is new and liberating in the sense that if you're starting fresh, with no ties to Apple, Microsoft's Xbox or Zune, Sony's system, or anyone else's it might be just what you wanted. Likewise if you have no love or interest in iTunes or iPods.

If you prefer integrated product lines, however, if you use iPods or have a media-centric life of any kind, then it's hard not to give the nod to Apple on this one.

Advantage: iPhone

Applications

This one is a slam dunk for Apple and the iPhone, right? Not so fast! Sure, the iPhone has 35,000+ applications in the App Store, brilliant and terrible both. 1 billion downloads is nothing to sneeze at either. After all, Apple re-invented mobile software by putting one little icon on their home screen that gave instant access to tens of thousands of additional icons for every single one of their 15 million+ users (30 million+ if we count iPod touch as well). That's a juggernaut by any stretch of the imagination. Based on the same, objective Cocoa superset of C, and using the same Xcode developer tools that Mac programmers are already familiar with, it gave the iPhone immediate access to just the type of design-conscious, experience-oriented developers Apple values. This has lead to great social network tools, awesome utilities, and games gorgeous enough to give Nintendo the night sweats. (And no, we're not mentioning fart apps) Sounds like it would be impossible for anyone to catch up?

Palm has legacy applications, however, and in a stroke of genius, they commissioned a Classic app that will virtuamulate (not sure of the exact technology at work there) the old PalmOS giving many (though not all) of those old apps new life. In a stroke of far greater genius, Palm based their new webOS on existing web-based technologies including HTML, CSS, and Javascript (AJAX if you prefer). Since the Palm Pre will run these locally rather than in the cloud the way WebApps do, they're closer akin to "widgets" (or "objects" for you Vista fans) but go one step further by hooking into many of the Pre-specific hardware features as well -- like the phone. Cocoa may be tasty but it's user base is tiny compared to how many people already know web application development. Combine the PalmOS back catalog with the ease of widget-style deployment and you just may have a contender.

One more thing: while the iPhone only allows Apple's apps to background multitask, Palm Pre's "card" feature allows for (around a dozen or so?) apps of all kinds -- 1st and 3rd party -- to stay open, live, and instantly accessible. Sure, iPhone 3.0 will mitigate this slightly with Push Notifications and rumors of next-generation hardware maybe supporting, but Palm Pre does it for real and does it now.

This one is tough to call. Already huge vs. potentially huge marketplace. The multitasking spear vs. the native app hammer. Which one has the advantage here will depend entirely on what's more important to you. We're wussing out.

Advantage: Tie

Conclusion

So there you have it. Two companies that both pride themselves on uber-tight hardware and software integration. One who's Newton spawned an industry that the other's Pilot defined and dominated, went on to converge with the Treo only to fall behind and get eclipsed by the iPhone, and is now poised to come back with the Pre. Apple's going on to the third version of their smartphone line while Palm is introducing the first version of their third act (Palm OS and Windows Mobile being the previous two).

If it seems like the only real deciding factors are where you live and work, what you want to do, and how you prefer to do it, well -- yeah. That's it. You're an adult and we're not going to butter your bread, thank you. (Though we've done our best to describe that bread to ya in advance).

Bottom line, the competition between iPhone and Pre is good for Apple and Palm -- it keeps them on their toes and on top of their games -- and it's better for us. We're lucky to live in a time and place where we have such increasingly awesome mobile options to choose between.

Come this summer, we'll have a few more choices as well. Which one will be yours?

It's here. Finally. The day everyone but iPhone users has been waiting for! No, not the release of the Palm Pre, silly. The release of the day it will finally be released! It's been a long, hard epoch in the desert for our Palm faithful friends, so with snark firmly holstered, our sibling site Precentral.net has your official Palm Pre launch day details:

June 6th. $199 after $100 mail in rebate and a 2 year contract. Believe it. It will be at Sprint Stores, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and Wal-Mart. The Touchstone dock will be available on the same day, $69.99 for the dock and battery door, or $49.99 for the dock alone and $19.99 for the battery door.

$100 mail-in rebate taken for granted (though we tend to forget those, or the checks seem to somehow get lost in the mail), the price is exactly the same for an 8GB Palm Pre as it was and is for an 8GB iPhone 3G. Sounds competitive. No doubt our friends at PreCentral.net are already lining up, camp gear packed and spirits high. (We'll send pizza!)

Of course, Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) kicks off just two days later on June 8, where last year Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 3G and this year anticipation is high that Phil Schiller will introduce the third generation iPhone.

So is Palm crazy to start selling the Pre right before WWDC, or crazy like a fox? Do they get a couple of days of peace before riding b-reel for the massive mainstream news blitz that comes with any new Apple hardware? Do Rubinstein and crew -- the folks who left Apple and the iPhone to work on the Pre -- get to pay a final, seasonal homage to their former employer? Or are they gambling that Apple won't announce a new iPhone, or that people won't want to wait the extra month or so for it to be released, and so in antici-pointment or impatience, jump on the already available Pre?

Should be a fun month, next!

Friday we linked to Business Insider and Daring Fireball both quoting sources that claimed Apple was considering allowing some form of limited background multi-tasking on the iPhone at some point in the future. Now TechCrunch is weighing in, having heard a similar rumor from its sources:

while this is in no way a done deal yet, Apple is definitely trying to come up with a way to offer background support for third-party apps. They went on to note that while Apple may have something to say about it at WWDC, it’s very unlikely that any solution would be ready at that time, and could be a situation similar to how Apple announced Push Notification at WWDC last year but said it was coming in a few months (which it later was delayed until iPhone 3.0).

TechCrunch cites processor power, user experience, and battery life as factors currently concerning Apple. They also suggest the soon-to-be released Palm Pre, with its webOS multi-tasking as a driving force behind all chatter we've been hearing about it all of a sudden.

You're the world champion, but some old-school commentators keep talking like maybe you're yesterday's news. They say you haven't faced any real challengers lately, that you're getting soft. They say that some new device is looking hungry.

But here's the thing: you know you've still got it. You know it and you want to prove it. You want to fight. You want to fight now!

But the challenger just ain't showing up. And worse, they ain't even saying when they will finally show up. Makes you so riled you just want to SCREAM!

That's the emotion TiPb's Rene tapped into to help out editor-in-chief Dieter, and our siblings over at PreCentral.net, video up a little demandment for Palm.

Release the release date. The Palm faithful want it to show what it can do, and dagnabit, we want to see what it can do. Bring it on!

Eye of the Jobs, baby!

Our sibling site PreCentral.net has gotten their mobile accomplishers on yet another (rumored to be) leaked internal document. This one supposedly comes from Sprint and details what, to PreCentral.net, are some interesting factoids. To us, however, they represent some far more interesting questions:

• The picture above shows what looks to be fairly user-toxic troubleshooting steps for Pre and memory management. While the iPhone has memory issues as well, you either reboot or restore. Here, steps are approaching the level of finicky task management and triage Apple has made fun of in previous iPhone keynotes.
• Tethering looks to be gone, which may be a bad sign for iPhone users hoping AT&T would throw it in when OS 3.0 -- which enables it -- rolls around this summer.
• Also, no cut and paste from web pages, which is interesting given that webOS is based on web 2.0 style pages. Shouldn't that one be a gimme?

For much, much more, check out the source blog and let us know how the Palm Pre is developing, competitively to the iPhone, from your point of view. (Of course, we won't know any final feature set or functionality levels until it actually ships... sometime before June 30).

Springtime, when videos turn their attention towards impending gadgets that are other than the iPhone. Samsung Instinct, BlackBerry Storm, Nokia... what was it again? This time it's the Palm Pre, with interactions lifted from the iPhone and a faux-Scottish accent taken from Scrooge McDuck, and it's dreaming of taking out the iPhone with a little 1960's Adam West Batman ZAP! POW! action, chum.

Only problem? The iPhone is the 2000's Christian Bale style goram Batman.

Best of luck with that little fight, then...

Dieter managed to score an awesome video walkthrough of the Palm Pre's app launching functionality and a look at some of the apps themselves. We've joked about how the Palm Pre, supervised by the guy who helped build the iPhone, developed by engineers who helped program the iPhone, felt more like a branch of the iPhone sometimes than a linear descendant of PalmOS.

Turns out we were wrong. To be joking. 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). They even seem to be a little bit laggy and slow to launch at times, just like iPhone 2.0 was! (Though these are widgets, not native apps, so that's really more of a concern at this point).

Also announced today was something that sounds an awful lot like Push Notification Services for the Pre.

Palm, I love ya. I had PDA's going back to the Visor, smartphones going back to the 600. You left me, I didn't leave you, remember? So now I found a new phone, and seriously, dressing up just like it isn't the way to win me back. You gotta be yourself, the new you not a new version of it.

Don't get me wrong, I really dig your Synergy, that touchstone charger, and that awesome alert system. Gold. But Apple didn't make that first big iPhone splash by holding up something that worked like a BlackBerry or a Treo. They didn't show off a Nokia-style experience. They made something new and instantly iconic. Copying the iPhone's UI and interactions to this degree isn't recognizing that Apple nailed the multi-touch paradigm for all time. It's not surrendering the default behavior. It's just copying Apple's experience when you should be creating the next generation Palm experience.

Maybe you should have stuck with Palm leadership, engineers, and innovation?

Ouch! According to PreCentral.net, Palm has just given uber-investor Roger McNamee the PR equivalent of the Price-is-Right FAIL buzzer. Bum-Bum-Ba-Bum-Bowwwwwwww...

Much of it is numbers and analyst based, but a few gems glare out, especially #5, #8, and #9. Words like "premature" and "withdrawn" are used. Double ouch.

Read the whole post for a great daily dose of schadenfreude.

Of course, it wasn't all bad news for Palm yesterday: Engadget editor-in-chief Josh Topolsky hit Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to show off the Pre, and show techies are comedy gold as well.

I wasn't at CES with CrackBerry Kevin and Smartphone Expert Dieter. I was at Macworld getting, you know, iPhone news. But even TiPb couldn't ignore the Pre and it's former-iPod/iPhone team designed goodness. So tempting is the Pre, in face, that we suspect iPhone and BlackBerry loyalists alike might stray from the fold to at least try it out come launch day (whenever that is). So, the question becomes, what to call them roving polygadetists? What matches up with CrackBerry or the Jesus Phone?

CrackBerry Kevin has been using Pre-Jects for a while now. TiPb has thrown around Pre-Verts. We've even carried the argument over to the Twitter (@reneritchie and @crackberrykevin -- just don't tell @backlon!)

Are we being Pre-Mature about the whole thing? Or Pre-sumptuous in not letting you, or much smarter and better looking commenters choose the name? We've even set up a handy, dandy poll in the forums.

UPDATE: Ah hellz ya! Dieter has got him a rebuttal going on over at PreCentral.net! Let's get it on!

No sooner did we report the outlandish statement from Palm backer Elevation Partners head-geek Roger McNamee that come June, every iPhone 2G owner would ditch the platform and AT&T to become Pre-verts on Sprint, than our sibling site PreCentral.net went and updated.

Seems McNamee thinks iPhone Mobile Safari ain't all that, compared to the Pre (even though the Pre uses Apple's open-source WebKit foundation -- which we know comes from KHTML/Konquerer...):

"Our product is just going to run rings around them on the web. If you want to go the web, it's going to be a million time faster, well, not a million times, several times faster and that's a huge deal for most people."

Really? And since Sprint can't do simultaneous voice and data, the minute you answer a call, your speed drops to zero. How much faster is that?

Apparently, however, McNamee's hurt turns to heart for Apple's Mac platform:

I've been an apple fan for years and I would never use any other kind of computer!

Bulletin: Some may just feel the same about the iPhone, b'okay Roger? See the whole crash-and-burn on video at Bloomberg...

Hey, it's nice to see Palm getting back into the game! No, not with their admittedly compelling -- if Apple inspired -- Palm Pre handset set to land sometime in the first half of 2008. But with their rhetoric. You know, the same rhetoric that had Palm CEO Ed Colligan, when asked about the iPhone before it's launch say, Apple wasn't just going to walk in and figure smartphones out.

This time time it's not Colligan however, but Palm uber-financier and Bono-buddy Roger McNamee, he of the coolest utility belt since Batman, who's firing the mouth-cannon Apple's way. McNamee tells Bloomberg (via Daring Fireball):

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two-year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee said today in an interview in San Francisco. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

Not one? Really? We're certain some die hard Palm faithful and curious technophiles will become Pre-verts come launch day (we even suspect an editor-in-chief we know might just be waiting in line already...) but not one?

Given Apple's statement that June is also iPhone product cycle, and that the Pre has fairly shamelessly glommed Apple's iPhone style -- and several high profile members of the iPhone development team -- we're certain Steve Jobs won't make it a point to have a shiny new iPhone 3.0 ready for just about the same time, so that original iPhone owners have an easier, maybe even moe compelling upgrade path available. Can't see that happening, can we...?

We've mentioned this in passing before, but the parallels, if any, are worth making more prominent.

Using webOS, which is a localized, almost widget-ized development environment (using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and enhanced local access), the Palm Pre can run many WebApps at the same time. The way it's visualized is with the "card" metaphor, where a touch of the Home-like button shrinks the current screen down to a thumbnail that's kept live and updated in real time. The interface also lets users shuffle the apps like cards in a fanned-out deck. You re-arrange the cards and can even terminate an app by "throwing it away".

While the iPhone doesn't keep them live or let you re-arrange them, and has an X to close rather than the throw-away gesture, going as far back as two years ago when Steve Jobs introduced it at Macworld 2007, it let you zoom out of the Mobile Safari web browser with an eerily similar thumbnail representation. (Though there doesn't seem to be any patent contention over that just yet...)

Actually, given Apple's recent obsession with Cover Flow in iTunes, OS X 10.5 Leopard's Finder and now Safari 4 Beta, we're surprised they didn't just default to that for Mobile Safari tabs from the get go as well...

Confession: it was a pretty boring call from Palm CEO Ed Colligan today. No Pre release date. No Pre feature update. No assault on Apple. Nothing and pretty much more nothing. We kinda wish Steve Jobs had crashed the event and gone all Christian Bale on Palm. At least that would have been interesting! Still, PreCentral caught this tidbit, for what it's worth:

On the issue of PATENTS, Colligan made sure to note that there are no pending legal actions with Apple right now. More pointedly, he noted that Palm has 15 years worth of patents (over 1500 of them in total) and that in patent fights often go like this:

The reason you do that is to have a defensive position. It's like two little porcupines going around, and you don't want to touch each other because you might get stung. You peacefully coexist and everything's OK and you keep working together. We're very respectful about people's intellectual property, we believe we're huge innovators and have been for a lot of years and that this product has an enormous number of innovations in it. If something does happen there, we do have the portfolio, we think to defend ourselves and to be successful doing that. But nothing's happened to date, so we're really just focused on getting the product out the door.

Note to Palm: while you fancy yourself a prickly little rodent, Apple's totems are the big cats, so either you'll bloody their mouth and run them off, or they'll use those quills to pick their teeth clean after they're done eating you.

We've heard whispers relating to this one for a while, but now VentureBeat (via MacRumors) is putting text-to-screen about it:

Apple, which of course makes the signature multi-touch mobile device, the iPhone, apparently asked Google not to implement it, and Google agreed, an Android team member tells us.

Apparently, Google didn't want to risk their relationship with Apple or the iPhone. Google's CEO is on Apple's board, and Google has been releasing iPhone initiative after iPhone initiative these days.

Same Android team members is said to pleased at how this has turned out, given the recent legal noise around the Palm Pre, which decidedly does use multi-touch in almost identical -- perhaps infringing-ly identical -- manner to the iPhone. Though many behind the Palm Pre, like former iPod czar Jon Rubinstein came from Apple, their relationship is not said to still be as strong.

Check out the full article for more.

So, should Google have agreed to Apple's request to remove multi-touch from the Android? Should Palm? We still don't know the strength of Apple's multi-touch patent portfolio, or portfolio's lined up against it in defense, but if the Pre suddenly ships without the functionality shown in the CES Keynote, will it be a deal breaker for anyone?

What's the one thing worse than bloggers offering opinions about the likelihood of an Apple vs. Palm patent fight? That's right! Analysts! (Where's our magic 8 ball for a dissenting view when we need it?!)

PreCentral.net picks up just such a story on how one analyst thinks Apple's IP claims against Palm just might be -- wait for it! -- fruitless:

Though the review of granted and filed patents shows that Apple has a "formidable arsenal of capacitive, multi-touch patents that constitute a nearly impenetrable barrier to entry for companies hoping to commercialize capacitive, multi-touch devices," Perez-Fernandez also noted that Apple’s key patents may be “invalidated based on prior art considerations if subjected to a review by the USPTO.”

Prior art can trump all, unless Apple's own early patents, or the ones it acquired from Fingerworks, are the most "prior" of relevant art in question.

Of course, Apple has $30 billion reasons more than Palm for just why it might press its case anyway, even if it's ultimately unsuccessful...

Our sibling-site PreCentral.net points us to an interesting developer commentary up on Ars Technica which provides this little golden spitball of insight:

he had a lot of good things to say about how Palm is handing the extremely nascent developer community and his hopes for the future of the platform. The developer told us that he has explored mobile development on Apple's iPhone SDK and found much of the company's position towards their community to be "developer-hostile"—an obvious reference to their insistence on enforcing a pointless NDA well past its expiration date and their strong hand in regulating what can and cannot be developed for its platform.

Apple, of course, is providing Cocoa Touch, an iPhone-optimized version of their Objective C frameworks that, while highly administrated by Apple, provides desktop-class power with a hefty of amount of access to developers. Palm, by contrast, is using Mojo as an open, web-standards based framework for the webOS, which we're guessing will be something similar to how Widgets work (half way between WebApps and native apps).

Every solution comes with compromises, so in the end it will be up to each developer to choose which platform(s) best suit their needs and the apps they want to build, but is the way in which Apple treats developers -- something entirely outside the SDK -- going to be a concern as competing alternatives like Android and webOS become increasingly available?

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Is the Pre better? Can it compete? How will Apple answer? Or will those multi-touch patents stop Palm dead in their tracks? Listen in the find out!

We also discuss the Case-Mate Barely There case for the iPhone 3G [store link], cover iPhone OS 2.2.1, what it might mean for Jailbreak/Unlock, and catch up on Apple's iPhone numbers from last week's conference call. All that, and your live chat questions.

Credits

Thanks to the the iPhone Blog Store for sponsoring the podcast, and to everyone who showed up for the live chat, or sent in questions!

Our music comes from the following sources:

• I Called You -- iPhone Remix by Pete Leidy
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We'll be talking about the iPhone vs. the Palm Pre tonight on iPhone Live! (Hopefully with some special guests!). In the meantime our editor-in-chief, Dieter Bohn, writing on behalf of our sibling site, PreCentral.net, points to Engadget's in-depth coverage. Dieter's conclusion on calls the "Potential Palm Pre Patent Portfolio Pugilism Puzzle"?

Do Apple and Palm (which is increasingly Apple-esque after their recent hires) have the kind of corporate attitude necessary to just swallow their pride and accept that there's space at the top of the hill for two smartphones, each licensing their patents to each other? If you take a look at the sorts of statements that Roger McNamee made in this Kara Swisher interview, you'll see that the answer for Palm is clearly yes. They've said for a long time that they expect that there will be plenty of space for everybody in the smartphone market, nobody needs to fail for them to succeed. Will Apple be able to play nice too?

Reads like the haughty days of cold war mutually assured destruction to us, so we have to ask: Will Chairman Jobs push the button?

(Any answer beginning with "you're goram right he will!" gets double comment points!)

What was once but an administrative possibility has become the most sublime of legal certainties: Apple has been granted the multi-touch patents.

Credited to the one, Steve Jobs, and the many, Scott Forstall and the iPhone team, the news patents are simultaneously as wide ranging as they are specifically crafted towards the implementation of one or many fingers interacting on the screen in a mobile device, with the most subtle of heuristic interpretations.

Apropos the heretofore mentioned anomaly; ergo Palm Pre's exacting duplication of the iPhone's multi-touch gestures and behavioral interactions and Apple's deliberately obscure threats in their direction, these new patents provide a single, potentially catastrophic result of a singular equation: Apple has grounds to sue.

Vis a vis Palm's own far-reaching patent portfolio in the mobile space: these remain a perplexing, perhaps equation changing variable. Through one door, a cross licensing agreement. Through the other, years if not decades of litigation.

In sum, the situation remains predictably uncertain.

(Thanks to David, Chad, and everyone who sent this in!)

Following up on Apple Chief Operating Officer, Tim Cook's comments during yesterday's Q1 conference call, and the supposition that he was hinting that Apple may just take legal action against the Palm Pre for violating Apple's intellectual property (i.e. patents), PC Mag quotes a reaction from Palm:

A spokeswoman at Palm said Thursday that the company has not been contacted by Apple's legal team, to her knowledge. "Palm has a long history of innovation, obviously reflected in our own products and our own robust apps portfolio," she said. "We have long been recognized for our fundamental patents in the mobile space. If we're faced with legal action, we're confident that we have the tools to defend ourselves."

When asked whether gestures like "pinching" were universal, or belonged to Apple, the Palm spokeswoman said that "our position is that multitouch has been around a long, long, long time before Apple introduced it."

We learned that Apple first began patenting multi-touch in 2004 and acquired additional patents when they bought Fingerworks in 2005, but is Palm hinting that -- as PreCentral.net pointed out -- they may have some patents of their own to fight back with?

Curiouser and curiouser...