Tags: palm

Plenty of people who have blogs are doing their year-end round-ups, and this one is no different. Well, slightly different as I don't take everything so seriously... So without further ado, here is my most disappointing gadget of 2009 : Palm Pre.

The Palm Pre turned up at the beginning of 2009 with lots of rumour and expectations. It was going to be revolutionary type of phone with it's widely touted "synergy". But then then things started to unravel.

I first had my doubts when reports came in that demo of the Pre were very carefully stage managed by Palm. If its so great and wonderful then why were Palm engineers always hovering in the background...?

And then details about phone came out. It was CDMS with a GSM verision available some time soon. Real soon. About four months soon... And then "Synergy" was found out to be simply a sync with your favourite social networking site. And then it was limited to 8gb with no SD card slot, either mini or otherwise. The iPhone had 32gb but 8gb is as much as anyone wants, according to Palm.

There were revolutionary things about. It was the first mainstream phone to based on Linux. Pity it came after the iPhone with it's BSD unix routes. Then there was Web Os. Going to amazing that...! Again a pity. When it was discovered it was just a web application framework... Say goodbye to any kind of gaming. (There are hints now that there will be some type of native SDK coming out, but its about six months too late. Yet another opportunity missed.)

And then there was the soon to be released Palm Store. I heard (and read) the blog posts back in march which discussed it. So far it hasn't been launched outside the US. Opportunity : wasted...!

And the off / on status of iTunes syncing. Will work this week..? Maybe, maybe not. Why did Palm never just write a quick and dirty XML parser to read iTunes XML...? It would take me about a week to sign off a finished iTunes sync tool. Not Palm though.

(Interesting aside : their developer portal is based on Joomla. Not even Drupal. It's quick, dirty and cheap like everything the new Palm has done. Its not that I don't like Joomla – I think its great. But its telling when a Mobile Manufacturer uses the second most scalable CMS.)

I first saw my first Pre a few weeks after it was launched in the us. At the time I thought it felt "cheap" and won't rate it's reliability. But I kept my mouth shut. It was the second coming of palm. It was the Jesus phone. Kept my mouth shut because everyone (ie tech pundits) said it was great. Right. To disagree was to be an Apple fanboy or a Borg boy. Whichever Borg you wanted to be..

(Don't forget the real multitasking. More than one app at a time. Just don't mention the stuttering when you do it... There's a reason for not allowing multitasking..! And I bet you can guess the real reason for a webkit based development environment)

And now there are "mountains" of them at Carphone Warehouse. Really..? I have never been in a Carphone Warehouse and seen a Palm Pre demo unit. I've seen more Android phones...! And now even the most trenchent Palm fans have grown out of favour with it...

The moral of this tale..? If you release a under powered, obsolete at release phone that only geeks will wait for and don't aggressively market the s*!t out of it, don't expect to work. I'm just hoping Palm have thirdcoming, Jesus 2 phone waiting in the wings. I really do because for a moment it looked like there would be some real competition to the iPhone that wasn't Borg related...

Also ran : Apple iTablet / iSlate – widely rumoured to appear in 2009 this disappointed me because it simply didn't turn up. It might turn up in 2010 but now I really wonder if it will ever live up to the (impossible) expectations.