Pres and Cons
Posted by: Rowan in Personal Blog, tags: Apple, Blackberry, Design, iPhone, Palm, Tech
I’m starting this post with about 5 ideas in my head of what I want to talk about, and they’re only loosely connected. This is probably not a good way to write an engaging and well structured post, so I apologise now if it’s a bit rambling and rubbish. But bear with me; hopefully I have some interesting things to say, and I definately have some interesting links to share.
This week at CES, Palm announced the Pre and webOS, a new touch-screen smart phone and its associated operating system. Cue much media hype, cries of “iPhone Killer” etc etc. I got dragged in to the story a bit and my initial impressions were very favourable, however after a bit of reflection the story is a lot more complex than it looks, and interesting not just because of the Pre itself, but what it tells us about the iPhone, Blackberry and even media coverage of technology.
So first Palm’s new baby itself. It’s a touch-screen smartphone in the mould of the iPhone which eschews PalmOS, Windows Mobile et al for a custom designed operating system and interface which is newly developed by Palm. Point 1 to Palm then, as we’ve seen time and time again that warming up an old operating system and trying to customise it to work on a touch screen device for which it was never designed is a bad idea, and the beautiful interface of Apple’s iPhone, custom designed from scratch while running on rock-solid OS X underpinnings has trumped all comers so far. The Pre has multi-touch functionality on its touch-screen and gesture control. Point 2 to Palm as well, because so far I can’t think of any other phone which has multi-touch except the iPhone. Simply put, a basic touch-screen and a multi-touch screen are worlds apart in terms of usability and functionality. As one simple example, on the iPhone and Pre you can zoom a photo using the now famous ‘pinch’ motion which is tactile and responsive while taking no screen space for zoom buttons, whereas on the T-Mobile/Google G1 or various Windows Mobile phones, you can only select between a number of pre-defined zoom increments by tapping zoom in/out buttons on a toolbar. Both systems work, but the multi-touch approach is more intuitive, more precise and quicker to use. The Pre’s screen resolution, by the way, is the same as the iPhone, but the display is smaller, so despite the bigger device size you won’t get quite as much space for playing back those videos or viewing webpages.
Then we move to the features where Palm attempts to differentiate itself from Apple. The crowd at CES cheered at the inclusion of a removable battery, which the iPhone doesn’t have, relying instead on an integrated power cell. I guess I can see why some people like the idea of a removable battery, but then you pay a severe price. The Pre is over twice as thick as an iPhone! The slender, sleek profile of the iPhone looks like Brad Pitt compared to the Pre’s Johnny Vegas. Of course, you do also get a slide-out keyboard, but unlike the Google G1 it’s tiny, and unlike the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard it has no ability to re-configure itself for the task at hand. The iPhone provides, for example, a ‘.com’ button when you’re typing a web address and an @ symbol when entering an email address, removing the need to use shift keys and speeding up your workflow.
The Pre has an API based on web technologies like HTML and Javascript, with custom extensions dubbed ‘Mojo’ which allow developers to access certain device features. This has widely been lauded as a wonderful idea which will make it really easy to develop apps for the device, which is interesting considering when Apple offered the same solution to iPhone developers they were derided for not offering a “real” development environment. Now there were some crucial differences, like the fact that iPhone apps had to run within the browser and be hosted on a web server, whereas Pre apps are packaged as local apps stored on the device. This is definately better than the old iPhone solution, and bears a remarkable resemblence to an idea suggested by myself and others over a year ago! Yet that still was not enough for many developers, who demanded nothing short of a full native API. They later got what they wanted, leading to the phenomenal success that is today’s App Store. So what of Palm’s web-style API? Will it be any good? Well, for writing basic widget style apps sure, it will be quick and easy to use. But HTML and Javascript require interpreters, which slow them down. And while Mojo promises access to hardware features, I’m not sure how they’ll manage things like graphics acceleration; I susepct it simply won’t be available. Without the speed of native code execution and the ability to use modern graphics languages like OpenGL, I simply don’t see any possibility of producing games of the caliber seen on the iPhone. Super Monkey Ball just ain’t gonna happen…
Some of the built-in features look promising, like ‘Palm Synergy’, which allows you to link contacts in your address book to Facebook accounts, Outlook contacts and IM buddies, meaning you can get all their information in one place. However the bigest stab at the iPhone came from Palm’s announcement that the pre allows multiple applications to run simultaneously. Now of course the iPhone runs apps concurrently, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to automatically check your email, alert you of incoming calls, listen to music and play a game all at once. But what it doesn’t allow is multiple 3rd party apps to run at once. If I’m in the Facebook application and want to switch over to my RSS feed reader and then back again, I have to quit Facebook, open NewsGator, quit NewsGator and re-open Facebook. Palm’s webOS on the other hand would allow me to run both at once and just flip between the two. Here’s a question though…. why?
On the iPhone, quitting an app is as simple as pressing the home button, and starting a new one is just a tap away, so it takes no more effort than switching apps on other smart phones. All well written iPhone apps save their state before quitting, so in my example above, when I return to Facebook it will still show the profile, photo or message that I was viewing when I last left it, and quitting and starting most apps is super-quick. So what’s the problem? If I could run lots of apps at the same time, I would eat up my device’s memory and CPU power, meaning worse performance in each application. If I left them running when I wasn’t using them, I’d be eating up my device’s battery life which is always at a premium on large-screen small-form devices. So I’d have lots and lots of negative for very little positive. Now there are some reasons which might cause me to want background apps. The key one is notifications; I’d like Facebook to let me know with a beep or an icon badge when I have new notifications, and my RSS reader to tell me when there’s new stories. I’d like to be able to stay signed in to MSN/AIM/Yahoo even when my chat program isn’t running and then be told when I get a new message. So Apple’s answer to this is a background notifications syetem, not background applications. Basically, when something happens on the web which I’d like to know about, Facebook, NewsGator, AIM or whoever the message originates from sends an alert to an Apple server, which then tells my phone to alert me. If I want to open the application to view the details I can, if not I just dismiss the notification. Simple, right? It saves my battery life, gives me better performance, and still allows me to know when new things happen. Great! Now in reality, Apple said this would be available in September and we’ve still not had an update to make this work. But Apple’s tardiness doesn’t explain Palm’s decision (and that of Windows Mobile) to stick with an alternative solution which cripples my device for little appreciable benefit. I’d really love to know why this decision got such applause.
I’ve mentioned the media coverage a bit, and how perplexed I am that Palm are being praised for the same things some have criticised Apple for in the past. So just to emphasise the other side of the coin, I’ll point you to Roughly Drafted. Read Daniel’s post if you have the time, it’s amusing and makes some excellent observations, but please don’t think that all Apple fans are like this… He seems to feel the need to turn everything into an argument filled with bile. He won’t accept any criticism of Apple at all, and seems reluctant to admit that anything done by anyone else can ever be good. I’d like to think I support Apple because I like their products and attempt to maintain a realistic viewpoint. Yes I’m an Apple fan, but hopefully I’m not a deluded fanatic. That’s up to you to decide of course, but if you’d like a more balanced set of information about the Pre, I’ll choose another Apple focussed site just to prove that some Apple fans can be balanced and fair – take a look at AppleInsider. Or to go straight to the horse’s mouth, see what Palm themselves say.
The final interesting thing to note is of course that the Pre won’t be available in America for months, and not in Europe until towards the end of the year. In that time Apple is quite likely to release a 3rd generation of iPhone, or at least be well on its way to do so early next year. So lets hope Apple learn some lessons from the good elements of the Pre, and lets see whether what they come up with blows the Pre out of the water. Because just like the Blackberry Storm and T-Mobile G1 before it, this new phone is another attempt to knock the iPhone off its spot as the market leading touch phone, and like those other contenders it looks like it will comes very close to its target, but misses the mark. We’ll see…