Consumer Electronics Show 2009
Consumer Electronics Show 2009
Matias Duarte of Palm demonstrates the Web OS platform on the new Palm Pre smartphone, which will be sold by Sprint later this year.
(By Ronda Churchill -- Associated Press)
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The Palm in Your Hand
The Consumer Electronics Show continues in Las Vegas, and technology columnist Rob Pegoraro is reporting the action on washingtonpost.com's Faster Forward blog. Here's an excerpt:
Remember the company named Palm that made handheld organizers and smartphones that people used to anticipate and covet, before it stopped putting any effort into its software and started leaving its users to wonder if it would ever get its act together again?
That company may be back. Palm introduced a new operating system and smartphone that looks nothing like its current, aging software and hardware and seems ready to compete with such sleek, Internet-savvy devices as Apple's iPhone and the Android-powered T-Mobile G1.
The new Pre smartphone -- to be sold by Sprint sometime in the first half of this year at a price not yet announced -- is about the size and shape of an iPhone, but it conceals a slide-out QWERTY keyboard beneath a 3.1-inch touchscreen. . . . Palm executive chairman Jon Rubinstein -- who used to head up Apple's hardware engineering before joining Palm -- quoted its weight as 4.8 ounces.
The Pre runs a new operating system called Web OS that relies on simple one- and two-finger gestures for most actions -- yes, like an iPhone. But unlike Apple's smartphone, the Pre allows you to run multiple applications at once, using a deck-of-cards metaphor to shuffle among them.
Like the iPhone (when synced with Apple's MobileMe service) and the G1, the Pre is designed to sync not to your desktop or laptop, but to the Web. That includes not just whatever service Palm will offer (the Web OS developer sitting behind me during Palm's demonstration wouldn't say what that might be), but also such popular Web services as Google and Facebook.
A "Synergy" feature pulls down data from these different sites to mingle it together -- for example, an address-book entry will include a friend's Facebook profile photo, while your calendar can list events stored in Google Calendar and on Facebook. If it works as advertised, this could be an elegant solution to the problem of separate online address books I noted last year . . .
So that's what Palm's been up to.
