Palm Pre Plus On Verizon

The best smartphone may be the one that hasn’t been on your wish list. With all the upcoming Android devices, the onslaught of Droid media oversaturation, the expectation of a new iPhone and iPhone OS, has anything outside Google and Apple been on your mind when it comes to smartphones?

Probably not. For myself, I was just waiting for an Android device with a form factor I liked and a fast processor. Until this week I thought that phone was the Nexus One. I’ve been running Android via the SDK since November, so I knew what to expect from an Android phone. My feelings were that Google wasn’t really enforcing any rules on interface guidelines, and Android was an ugly mess, but despite that it did some things an iPhone couldn’t pull off. That, and there’s no denying a nice 800×480 screen on a smartphone is a big draw.

So it was pretty much a foregone conclusion what would be ending up in my pocket. Until this week.

The announcement that Palm’s Pre and Pixi were getting slight improvements and coming to Verizon got my attention for some reason. Like I did last fall with Android, I downloaded the Palm WebOS SDK on Monday and had an emulated Palm Pre up and running shortly thereafter. I do this sort of thing all the time. I’ve always been an operating system hobbyist, and the advent of the virtual machine has made that itch all the easier to scratch.

So I am playing with WebOS on a whim, and pretty much right away I am sitting up in my chair and paying attention.

wait a second, this is really nice

this interface is so much cleaner than Android

hang on a minute, look at how this os handles multitasking….holy sh*t that is brilliant

So now I’m a little rattled. Palm has not been on my radar at all, but this os is phenomenal. I mean just awesome. It is like the difference between using some linux distro and using Mac OS X. The user experience provided by Palm’s WebOS is just on some other level than Android.

So I’m obsessively reading, playing with the emulator, reading some more, playing with the emulator some more….

Ok, so I quit smoking on Monday and I pretty much needed an obsession to help me ride out the first few days. I’ll get to the point: my wife and I now have Palm phones on Verizon. I got myself the Palm Pre Plus, and she got the Palm Pixi Plus. We are both thrilled. These phones are killer.

I feel that Palm has the best smartphone platform in the world with their WebOS. Getting on Verizon was a good step after being exclusive to Sprint since last June when the Pre launched. Hopefully Palm delivers next month and WebOS 1.4 brings Flash support and video recording as promised. That will make WebOS the first smartphone platform with official Flash support.

No device is perfect. Here are my concerns about the Palm phones and some things I would like to see changed:

• App Catalog is really small compared to Android and iPhone with around 1200 official apps. Not as worried about that as I could be because the platform is less than 12 months old. The app catalog doesn’t need to be as big as Android, but Palm does need to see to it that the apps that people want on their phones are getting created.
• Because the app landscape on WebOS is sparsely populated, some of these app developers are charging for apps that should be free. I would rather pay $1 for an app that doesn’t have ads running in it (ad supported apps seem to be the rule on Android) than use a free one with ads, but I’m pretty sure I saw a flashlight app on the App Catalog that was going for $3-$4. You are killing me.
• Create that brand and sell it. Palm doesn’t need to have a dozen different devices running their os. Two is fine. Update the software frequently, and offer users new devices annually. Nothing wrong with that model. Just promote your product. Palm and Verizon have not done a good job letting people know that this was launch week for Palm devices on Verizon. Shame on you.
• Palm: see to it that the carrier’s sales drones know your product. People are going to go into B&M stores familiar with Blackberry and Android. They aren’t going to know anything about WebOS. You have a killer product here, and people that get their hands on WebOS are going to see that. You need to make sure that the name badges out there have the tools they need to give your product a chance at retail, because the customer does not have you in mind when they walk in the door.
• Palm is right. Real is better than fake. I was one who didn’t care if my phone had a real keyboard because I thought the virtual keyboards were fine. Despite how tiny the keyboards on the Pre and Pixi are, they’re great and you’re blasting out texts and emails with no errors in no time. My one concern: since these phones have vertical QWERTY keyboards, Palm needs to add a virtual keyboard to the os for when these phones are running in landscape mode. Right now, no virtual keyboard, and it’s an oversight that would be easy to correct.
• Leave the developers alone if you aren’t helping them. In other words, provide WebOS developers the tools they need to make world class smartphone apps on your platform. Open it up a little. So far so good, I think it’s great that Palm does not officially discourage the homebrew community. Many of the official apps started as homebrew apps, and if Palm keeps this hands-off approach to the unofficial development community it will benefit them more than trying to shut it down. Keep it up.

So in the end it wasn’t the Nexus One that won me over, it was Palm’s Pre Plus. Surprised? Not any more than I am, trust me. Do yourself a favor. If you are a total geek like me, download the WebOS SDK and install PreWare (the homebrew app installer), and play around with WebOS. Walk into a Verizon or Sprint B&M store and play with a Pre or a Pixi. They are both brilliant phones, and I guarantee you that you will be blown away by WebOS. Palm definitely deserves to be compared to whatever Android or iPhone you’re thinking about. You might be surprised at how the Palm phones exceed those devices in user experience and multitasking. I was, and now their phone is in my pocket.

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