You know, I was excited by the Palm Pre when I first saw the pictures of it from CES, but now that I’ve learned a little bit more about it, I’ve decided that there is no way that this will be competition for the iPhone… which does not make me happy.
Palm tried to make a phone that would be as simple and as intuitive as the iPhone, and they ended up with a device that’s needlessly complex and overly designed. This is surprising, because Palm has always shared Apple’s philosophy as far as User Interface simplicity goes. They are famous for hiring people to count the number of ‘taps’ that it took to accomplish a task on their devices in order to ensure complete simplicity (Apple does something similar, they try to make it so that it only takes 3 clicks to do do anything in the OS).
This video demonstrates how they tried really hard to make a phone just like the iPhone, but at the same time, distance it as greatly as they could within a device that has very a very similar design (not just talking about the physical form). They use gestures and unfamiliar actions (which they claim to be natural actions) in order to perform simple tasks (such as swiping something off the screen rather than just tapping an ‘x’ to make it go away). Also, they made the UI so nonuniform, that developers are probably not going to enjoy making apps for it, but we’ll see about that.
The Pre’s biggest plus is also it’s biggest problem. Unlike Apple, Palm has designed a device that allows the user to have multiple applications open at the same time. The phone has an interesting application switching interface, but I think ultimately it will become annoying. You’ll forget something is open or you’ll wonder why the phone is slowing down randomly, and it will be because you have 30 applications open that you thought you quit, but now you have to go and swipe them off the screen. The iPhone doesn’t allow for background processes, this is because too many things going at the same time would kill the battery life and slow down the phone. They iPhone is designed to have to user focus on whatever the active app is at a given time. Most apps remember their last positions so you can leave them when you need to do something else, or something else needs your attention. It’s a much simpler and more efficient way of doing things.
I think I should actually get my hands on one before I pass judgement.
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