I found this article by CNET’s Tom Krazit totally spot on. He really ‘gets’ the importance of the ‘little’ things that make a mobile experience useful and productive. One of Apple’s failings with the iPhone (And something they promise to address any day now) is the inability to allow third parties to run apps in the background. Palm seem set on not only providing a pleasing aesthetic and user experience but have also had a keen look at user functionality.
Check any Symbian Smartphone and you’ll find holding down the menu key brings up all your open apps. Use your D pad to flick between them, copy and paste between apps with ease…and then you start to see how basic the iPhone is. Everyone wants an iPhone because they’re cool – if you turn up with your ‘smartphone’ to a board meeting you risk being laughed at if it’s not an iPhone or Blackberry…depending upon your corporate status (Are you biz (blackberry) or creative ‘cool’ biz (iphone). I just don’t buy it. Yet.
Remember the Palm Pilot? It had a cult following and even saw Sony launch their popular ‘Clie’ range of Palm OS powered products. That time has come and gone but the Pre looks good, provides interesting functionality and more importantly for Palm, seems to address many of the business failings of other handsets – multitasking and notifications.
By using a ‘card’ system users on the Pre can flick between apps in a neat and intuitive way. Similarly notifications have their own special space without obscuring content. A mobile device should surely be something you can use on the move as opposed to having to stop, use both hands and then shut down apps to launch others? If you check the online video demos at Palm’s website you’ll be impressed – the Pre seems to flick between a host of Apps with ease and better still with realworld functionality. Palm have a strong sell here – they have concentrated on communication rather than hype and have addressed realworld situations and social media to drive the phone’s notification system and messaging.
The Pre launch is very close to the new iPhone launch so it will be interesting to see how far Apple has gone in the way of letting background apps run and whether software and hardware have now been redesigned enough to deal with the new breed of supersmartphones.
