Palm Pre – Historical Phone?
The hottest thing of CES so far is the Palm Pre. Besides the slightly awkward name, it’s a very slick device. It’s got enough features to be mistaken for a tricorder (WiFi, GPS, 3G, Touchscreen, QWERTY, 3.0mp camera) and a design that sets it apart from the mob of wannabe iPhone-killers. It’s even got a new trick in regards to charging by induction with a magnetic charging station..
But the most enjoyable to see is that after iPhoneOS and Android, there’s another OS of which the developers seem to be getting it. It being the fact that a mobile phone is not a very small desktop, with specific applications, but a device, used on the go, that serves certain functions.
While Microsoft thinks a cellular phone is just another platform for people to use Office (thank you, but we’ve got laptops for that, and those laptops run OS X), the rest of the industry is doing very well in their approach to move from a way to simply ‘keep in touch’ to ‘providing relevant information’. And in that respect, I think Palm came up with a killer.
A dark shadow over all of this is that the company is in bad financial shape and the economy might not be ideal to launch new-fangled luxury advanced consumer electronics. Then again, of all the must-succeed products they could’ve launched, they pretty much seem to have nailed it. And if the company does go down, at least they’re doing it in style.
