A correction was made to this story. Read below for details.
One of the biggest surprises of CES was Palm's Pre smartphone that some are calling an iPhone killer. While I don't expect this or anything else to kill the iPhone, it does appear that Palm could again become a major player in the smart phone market.
As a product reviewer I will reserve final judgment until I can carry one around and put it through its paces, but based on the few minutes I got to use the phone at the Consumer Electronics Show, I am very impressed.
Palm's new Pre smartphone
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)Until now the iPhone was the only mobile device with a decent browser, but it looks like Palm might break that stronghold. Like the iPhone, the Pre has a touch screen with a "multi-touch" feature that lets you pinch two fingers to zoom in or out of a Web page. There is also a gesture that lets you see a single column of text, which will make it easier to read news sites. You can also use the pinching gesture on photos and, like the iPhone, you can use a finger to flick a picture or other object to move it on or off the center of the screen.
One thing I like better than the iPhone interface is Palm's use of "cards," which are like windows for applications and tasks. A Web page would appear as a card as would an e-mail message, an instant-messaging session, or any other application. You can have as many cards as you want and easily flick from one to another with a finger. This avoids cluttering up that little 3-inch screen with overlapping windows while still providing a multitasking environment. Nice touch.
Like the iPhone, the Pre has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and 3G cellular data service. It will come only in an 8-gigabyte model. The good news is that the battery is removable, but unfortunately there's no card slot for additional memory. The phone also has a 3-megapixel camera with an LED flash.
A big difference between the Pre and the iPhone is that the Pre has a pull-out physical QWERTY keyboard below the touch screen. The keys appear to be pretty small and close together but they are rounded in such a way as to make it pretty easy to avoid making mistakes--at least based on the one paragraph of text that I typed. Palm has a lot of experience building mobile devices and they know something about sculpting little keyboards. You can dial the phone with the keyboard or bring up an onscreen dial-pad. There is no optional on-screen QWERTY keyboard. It seems as if that would have been an easy thing to offer for people who want it.
What I like most about the Pre is the way it synchronizes data between the device and your various online profiles. Although you can plug in a USB cable to copy media and other files to the Pre, you don't use a cable to sync it to Outlook or other software as you would with the iPhone and most other smartphones. Instead, you give it your profile information for Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, and other "cloud" services and let it automatically gather information to populate your contact list and calendar.
If you change data on the Web or on the phone it automatically updates and it can assemble information from different sources. For example, it may grab a contact's business phone number from your Gmail contact list and that person's cell phone from his or her Facebook profile. If that person changes or adds contact information to his or her profile, the Pre gets it right away. Ultimately this could greatly simplify the way we keep up with our friends and associates by letting them update and maintain their own contact information that you access on your device.
As Apple proved with its application store, the ability to run third-party programs is important to a lot of smartphone users. Palm is working with third-party developers to create applications based on standard Web development tools including HTML and CSS. Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora, told me that his company was able to develop a Pre application in three days compared with the "three month process" it took to develop a similar application for the iPhone.
Palm has signed an exclusive deal with Sprint whose 3G network, from my experience, is quite good. For heavy users, Sprint offers a $99 per month "Simply Everything" plan. AT&T has a $99 unlimited voice plan but charges an extra $30 for a data plan.
The phone is expected to be available "in the first half of 2009" but pricing wasn't disclosed. I'm guessing it will cost about $199 to compete with Apple's 8GB iPhone.
Correction: This article was corrected to indicate that the Pre has a 3-megapixel camera, not 2-megapixel as originally stated.
Based on some of the things I've seen so far at the Consumer Electronics Show, 2009 might be remembered as the year of the gimmick. If gimmick is too strong a word, perhaps we can settle for "incredible technology in search of a practical purpose."
(Credit:
Casio)
Take Casio's new EX-FS10 compact camera. The camera itself is marvelous, but the use case seems a little weird. Like a couple of larger SLR cameras Casio introduced at last year's show, this smaller consumer camera is capable of taking still pictures at up to 30 frames per second.
Now, that can be very practical, if you're using the camera to shoot a picture of your kid running across a soccer field, but that's not how Casio CEO and co-founder Kazuo Kashio positioned the new camera. Instead, he made a very big deal about Casio's clever "Dynamic Photography," which lets you superimpose a moving image over another image to put a subject into a different background.
Kashio demonstrated the feature by photographing a model handing him a gift. Then--totally within the camera--he added that moving image to an illustration of a birthday cake to produce a picture of the cake with a moving image of the model offering the gift. Another example had a little girl running up to Neil Armstrong as he planted a flag on the moon.
The camera does by itself what used to require post processing on a PC or a Mac. That's certainly a marvel of technology, but I'm not convinced whether people will actually want to use it.
3D TV may turn out to be a major theme of this year's show. Panasonic announced plans to have 3D sets on the market by next year. The company is reportedly also working with studios and Blu-ray Disc manufacturers to agree on standards for 3D programming. Graphics card maker Nvidia also announced its $200 GeForce 3D Vision card, which brings 3D graphics to PC gamers.
As I reported Wednesday, a British company, Promotions and Display Limited Technology, is showing off its $89 Minoru 3D Webcam, which can let people jump out at you during a video call. I hesitate using an old-fashioned 2D Webcam. I don't really want people to see me when I talk on the phone, so the last thing I need is the ability to lean in and scare the crap out of the person on the other end.
One stumbling block for 3D is that most products still require viewers to wear geeky-looking red-and-cyan glasses. Another problem is nausea. A lot of TV programming is nauseating enough without 3D, but with it, people may literally get sick to their stomach while watching. The big question is whether people will flock to 3D TV, given the rather limited uptake of 3D movies that have been around for decades.
Tiny Little Projectors
My jury is still out on pico projectors--some as small as cell phones--that let you project video or still images from a handheld device to a screen or a wall. Samsung and WoWee were among the companies showing off devices like Samsung's 5.6-ounce MBP200, which can throw off a 50-inch image, or WoWee's candy bar-shape Swivel projector ($299), which can bend in the middle to project at different angles.
These mini projectors connect to PCs, iPods and other portable media players to enable users to share the experience of watching video on what would otherwise be a personal viewing device. Texas Instruments, whose DLP chips power many of these projectors, showed off a prototype of a Samsung cell phone that had the projector built in.
I can understand the usefulness of these projectors, especially as devices get really small, but I'm not sure that most people really want to spend extra money or carry around an extra device to share their media. Huddling around an iPod or a cell phone brings people together and is perhaps the closest thing that some geeks will get to cuddling. Do we actually need to project our personal video on a screen?
And the No. 1 gimmick is...
My nomination for the top gimmick of the show so far is the much-hyped LG GD910 wrist watch phone. Sure, it's a neat trick to get a 3G touch-screen speaker phone, camera, and media player into a wrist watch (yes, it also tells time) but is that something people really want?
I suppose that it's possible--there was a time when people carried pocket watches instead of wearing them on their wrists--but a watch is something you glance at, while a phone requires a fair bit of user interaction.
Despite the screen's relatively small size (1.43 inches diagonally), the touch screen does appear to be at least somewhat usable, but many people have enough trouble working iPhones and BlackBerrys that are considerably larger. Of course, you could always connect the wrist watch to a pico projector.
The first event at the Consumer Electronics Show, called CES Unveiled, actually takes place a couple of days before the show officially opens. The press reception, which is sponsored by CES' host organization, the Consumer Electronics Association, is an opportunity for a small group of exhibitors to preview what they plan to show at CES.
As usual, products range from somewhat wacky to actually practical. One of the more unusual products was a 3D Webcam from Manchester, U.K.-based Promotion & Display Technology.
The Minoru 3D Webcam has two lenses, which makes it look a little like a cute creature from outer space. You mount it on your monitor, and it transmits moving images in 3D and, yes, your viewers need special glasses to see you in 3D. The software that comes with the Minoru has "stereoscopic anaglyphic processing," that creates the 3D effect.
The $89 price includes the camera, software, and five pairs of red and cyan 3D glasses. I have no idea if it will catch on with the public, but it did win the Fan Favorite award at the Consumer Electronics Association I-stage event in October. The folks behind this product had better hope that those fans, and plenty more like them, have the vision to turn into customers for this unique device.
Lenovo's ThinkPad W700ds has a second pull-out screen.
(Credit: Lenovo)Also on the wacky side, Lenovo showed off a notebook that definitely looks strange but might actually be practical. The ThinkPad W700ds has two screens (the "ds" stands for dual screen). The primary screen is 17 inches, but if you need extra screen real estate, you can slide out the 10.6 secondary screen from the right side of the unit, adding about 40 percent more screen space.
The secondary screen can be adjusted to your preferred viewing angle, "similarly to how a car's rear-view mirror tilts," according to Lenovo. The idea is to give you additional space while working with photographs, Web browsers, or other applications that might otherwise overwhelm the notebook's main screen.
Lenovo, which several years ago acquired IBM's personal-computer division, also introduced its first all-in-one integrated desktop PC, which features a remote control that gamers can use like the innovative controller of the Nintendo Wii. Its "motion drive" feature allows the user to use the remote as if it were a virtual tennis racket or other moving object.
The remote also doubles as a voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) handset that you can use to make Internet phone calls. The computer itself uses various flavors of Intel Core 2 Duo processors, an optional ATI Radeon graphics card, up to 4GB of memory, and as much as a terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) of hard-drive space.
And for anyone coveting the ultrathin MacBook Air whose wallet might be too thin to actually afford one, help is on the way from MSI, a Taipei-based company that showed off its X-Slim Series X320 "Super Slim" Notebook PC which, at its biggest point, is only .77 inches thick, which is pretty close to the thickness of the Apple MacBook Air.
Unlike the Air, which starts at $1,799, the MSI notebook is expected to sell for between $700 and $1,000 when it becomes available later this year.
After devouring plenty of finger food at the reception, I'm not sure how thin I'll be, considering that hard-working journalists like me will have to attend several more receptions before CES is over. But it's my duty to press on, so damn the calories, and pass the egg rolls.
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