I wondered at the time how long it would take Apple's lawyers or engineers to put an end to that practice. Turns out the engineers won. The latest upgrade to Apple's iTunes software no longer recognizes the Pre as if it were an iPod.
Pre users can still synchronize their device to a computer, but not with the newest version of iTunes.
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The Palm Pre is probably the most highly anticipated tech product of the year, and, finally, people are starting to get their hands on it. A few days before the launch, I spoke with Paul Cousineau, Palm's director of product management for WebOS. Listen to what he had to say.
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CARLSBAD, Calif.-- Palm is fortunate that the Nokia doesn't yet have any U.S. carrier partners for its N97 smart phone. The phone, which was unveiled on stage at D: All Things Digital conference has some very impressive features. But, because the phone isn't subsidized by a carrier, anyone who wants one will have to pay $699. The soon-to-be-released Palm Pre will cost $199 with a two-year cell phone contract. The 8 GB iPhone also sells for $199.
On stage demo of Nokia N97 at "D"
(Credit: Larry Magid)At the moment, Palm is getting a lot of attention ahead of its June 6 release of the Pre, which impressed me and a lot of other people when it was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January. If the N97 was competitively priced, it might have put a damper on early Palm sales but at three and a half times the price, the new N97 is a nonstarter.
Nokia didn't allow D attendees to try out the phone so all I know is what I saw during the demo. My impression could change once I actually get my hands on one but--based on what I saw--it looked quite good. The GSM phone is likely to work on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks in the U.S. as well as most networks in Europe and other parts of the world.
Like the Palm Pre, there is both a touchscreen and a QWERTY keyboard. The iPhone only has a touchscreen. The N97 comes with a whopping 32 gigabytes of internal memory plus a microSD slot for those who want even more memory. The Palm Pre has only 8 GB while the current iPhone maxes out at 16 GB.
The N97 has a 5 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeis lens. Most important, the lens has a cover to protect it from being scratched or soiled by coins, keys and pocket lint.
Nokia, which acquired Navteq in 2007, incorporates Navteq's mapping technology which includes turn-by-turn directions and a point of interest data base that's dynamically updated with such things as gas prices.
One possibly useful feature is a text to speech engine that can read your e-mail out loud. Like most text-to-speech software, it speaks in a robotic voice that many people find annoying but it does make it possible to listen to your e-mail while driving. Of course, you still have to configure it, which could require you to take your eyes off the road, but once you press the play button it can read all of your recent messages.
It also has a built-in FM transmitter to stream audio to a car radio.
This post was edited to correct the error that originally said that the iPhone maxes out at 16 MB. It is, of course, 16 GB.
LAS VEGAS--There are millions of people who use Twitter--the microblogging site where all messages must be 140 or fewer characters long--but I can't think of anyone more active on the service than self-proclaimed "tech geek blogger" Robert Scoble.
Not only does he have nearly 48,000 people who follow him (read his Twitter posts which are called "tweets") but he follows nearly 21,000 people. I ran into Robert at the Showstoppers reception at CES where I asked him how he can possibly keep up with that many people on Twitter. After that I asked him what he liked at CES and, like a lot of other people, he raved about the Palm Pre.
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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.
From the Consumer Electronics Show, Larry Magid talks with Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg about Palm's new Pre cell phone and Yahoo's new Internet TV. Both Mossberg and Magid were impressed by the Palm phone, and Mossberg had some good things to say about Yahoo's TV initiative.
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Today's stories:
LAS VEGAS--Palm, the pioneer in personal digital assistants and the developer of the once popular Treo smartphone, has fallen behind Apple and Research in Motion in recent years. But its new product, the Palm Pre, could bring the company back to life.
The new phone, introduced Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show, is at first glance extremely impressive. Like the iPhone, it features a touch screen with a multitouch interface that lets you move from screen to screen by flicking your finger, or zoom into a picture or Web page by pinching. But it also has a pull-out keyboard. And instead of having to synchronize it with a personal computer, it will sync over the air with your existing contacts and calendars at Google, Yahoo, and even social-networking sites like Facebook. Palm says that developers can create programs for the Pre with common tools used by most Web developers. The phone, which will run exclusively on the Sprint network, will come out later this year. Pricing has not been announced.
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Today's stories:
Palm calls it a comeback with the Palm Pre
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