Published: Palm Pre Plus, Pixi Plus Specs

Meanwhile, the 2010 fourth generation iPhone will probably come with 64 GB of storage, and the iPod Touch with 128 GB. Meanwhile, Palm adds Wifi and calls it the Pixi Plus. What is this, 2004? This isn't enough to compete.

It appears that the main thrust of the CES announcement will be improvements to WebOS and/or the development model (e.g., the ability to run native Linux apps, the ability to run Flash, the SDL support, etc.). Hopefully, they'll demo some new apps and new possibilities for the platform. I don't think it's reasonable to be pessimistic just because we find out there won't be a completely new phone at CES. Palm has already said that they were going to focus on the Pre and the Pixi for the immediate future. It looks like the effort's being put into improving the OS and apps, rather than putting out brand new hardware. Certainly, that's not a strategy that will appeal to everyone, but for some, that will be enough. Not everyone has the need for a 32GB phone.

The biggest downer is no support for video recording, I think. It's not surprising, given that the problem of dividing the video stream hasn't been solved yet, but it does stand out as an omission. Hopefully, they'll find a way to incorporate V4L into the mix sooner, rather than later.

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/info.html

When supporting MPEG-4, H.263/264, you pretty much support any recent video encoding format.

As I don't have a WebOS device, I don't know if it works properly... I don't know what compression method you used for your videos either... but from the spec sheet, you can't complain about video playback support.

After a long, faithful run, this looks like the definite end of the road for me and Palm devices once my current 755p craps out for good. It's easier to just slowly transition from Palm OS to Android than sit here fretting over where to buy another VZW 755p or Centro, how to get a reg code from a defunct publisher etc etc.

Damn shame really, as I was just musing on the upcoming 14th anniversary of the purchase of my original Pilot 1000 at Egghead software in May of 1996!

I am far from pleased with the Moto Droid on Verizon but have basically come to the following conclusions over the past 2 months:

All smartphones are still rather shitty as converged devices (and especially as telephones for voice use), there is no single "best" device/platform, Verizon's selection of handsets is improving rapidly, and Palm's offerings are looking increasingly weaker against the competition. Oh yeah, let me add that while I'm not a huge Google fanboy,I really do hope they can shake up the tired old carrier + subsidy business model with their new "phone store"...even though the Nexus One isn't much to get excited over in its current form.
Pilot 1000->Pilot 5000->PalmPilot Pro->IIIe->Vx->m505->T|T->T|T2->T|C->T|T3->T|T5->Zodiac 2->TX->Verizon Treo 700P->Verizon Treo 755p->Verizon Moto Droid

The Pre and Pixi, in enhanced form, are coming very soon to both Verizon and AT&T. No statement yet on the AT&T configuration, but according to the leaked document the Verizon Pre get a memory increase to 16GB and the Verizon Pixi gets the addition of WiFi, compared to the versions currently available from Sprint.

The USB drive capability on webOS works very well, so quit worrying about SD cards! SD cards are history.

The big news is going to be on the software front. There are now over 1,000 applications in the webOS App Catalog and Palm have finally announced support of paid applications for Europe.

Palm continues to pump out OS releases and upgrades. 1.3.5 is just released and apparently solves the memory limitations on application storage so you can download many and bigger applications, such as graphic intensive games. Compared to the PalmOS days, we are now seeing problems fixed quickly, sometimes in a few weeks and the OTA update process has worked extremely well for me.

I think we will see an explosion in application availability on webOS over the next few months.

The pre may not be the "Smartest" phone out there, but Lets give Palm a little credit here, they designed a work of art for those of us that are looking for a smartphone we actually want to carry around.

WTF? Did you count? That figure sounds low to me.

>>>Out of your 100,000 + apps how many do you use? I read a study that stated most people rarely use all of the apps they download more than once.

Oh come come. To be serious, there are MANY iPhone apps I'd get and use. You don't have to use them EVERY DAY to find them of value. iPhone has more useful apps than PalmOS ever had. And I'm including any of the eleventeen jillion damned fart apps in there, either.

And abosco is being unfair, throwing WinMob in there. It's what? 3-4x the age of even the iPhone OS? Probably more!

Devs are jumping on Android because it's Google-backed. Wait til they have the rug pulled out from under them or discover how many damned variants they must create to *really* scale sales.

Simple numbers disagree with you. And like I've said before, any developer with a fresh idea for a mobile application develops it for the iPhone first. The big splash about webOS games is completely old news on the iPhone platform. The Sims 3 and Need For Speed? They've been out for YEARS already!

On a side note, I know why there are so many apps. I can do all of my banking from my phone. My computer usage at home is so rare these days. There's an app for Chase, Discover, E-Trade, Citi, ING, and Wachovia. There's also a webapp link on my home screen for AmEx. Every major corporation is piggybacking off the iPhone to generate interest. Thus, 100,000 apps.

Would give us a better idea of demand.

Depends I'd guess - even adding people to the review process means most apps. are approved within a week to two weeks.

Unless someone can port an iphone game in three days, this point of your argument is moot.

The beauty of Palm's SDL-based PDK is that it'll make porting apps from the iPhone a cinch. The two devices - iPhone & Pre - share extremely similar hardware specs, so why wouldn't developers make a webOS version too?

They might, but aide from cheerleading, let's see some metrics on how long it would actually take.

Also, with newer android and iphone os based devices on the horizon, I'd speculate that most developers might concentrate their resources on developing for those, then expending resources on a mostly DOA platform - webos.

Especially considering they can start selling it straight away with Palm's new web distribution model.

Not a great incentive when the iphone os generates cash several magnitudes greater then webos.

It's not like Android, where they'll have to cater for a million different OS versions, screen resolutions and inputs (keyboard or no keyboard? Trackball? D-Pad? Multitouch?)

Spreading FUD - I thought you were above that :)

ZOMG! iphone os has several different models - varying cpu and hardware specs - how do they handle it? lol

As WebOS Internals have demonstrated, for some games it's literally as simple as creating a new Pre-friendly keymap and recompiling the source for the OMAP processor...

*some games*

Yes, the market is still small potatoes. But if the investment's already been made in coding, art etc, you'd be a fool not to get it onto as many platforms as possible. EA said it only took a couple of weeks to port their games.

a couple of weeks - let's say it costs $5 grand to have a few members of their team work on the port...and the cost for a few webos devices to test their game on.

For the interest of it, here's how much money all those games that were announced at CES have made in three days:

[snipped for brevity]

That's not really all that much money.

From $4,000 - $40,000 - the real question would be to see how those sales sustain a month or two from now.

As we know, several iphone s/w developers have made enough money to retire from their jobs, etc.

The only thing that worries me is the Pixi. There's been no hint of gaming support for it yet, even though we know it has a decent graphics chip. If I was a Pixi owner (which I may well be in the future, 'cause I really like the form factor) I'd be pretty bummed right now.

Who's gonna play a game on such a tiny screen regardless.

Palm is a one-business company. If they expect to make it long-term, they need to be a market leader, not an also-ran. All other smartphone makers have other businesses that rake in huge profits (Apple, Google, Microsoft), except one, and that's RIM. And their lack of new developments has inspired a wave of short interest from Wall St.

All of the praise that is directed towards Palm has been coming in this form: "Palm recently introduced ABC feature for webOS, which only took X months to get to market compared to the same ABC feature for the iPhone, which took Y months to get to market." Sub in video recording, 3D gaming, third-party app development, and many others into this formula. What you end up with is a company playing second fiddle to the real market leader. Tiny market, tiny margins, tiny sales. But Engadget loves it, so it sounds awesome.

no different then the fragmentation in the iPhone market.  That doesn't appear to be hurting the iphone's app store at all.

I fully expect the Pixi to get some kind of SDL support in the future, too. I just think it might be a long wait.

Or it may never happen - if only to help sell the Pre - by giving it a feature set the Pixi doesn't have.

Yes, Palm are playing catch-up in some areas. (you yourself just made the point that they're doing it very, very quickly) In others - like the first sensible method of multitasking on a smartphone, and ease of development and distribution - they are most certainly leaders. And sure, tiny market. But it is still growing, nonetheless.

palm appear to be more followers than leaders.  android has much better support for multitasking - and had it much earlier than the Pre.  iPhone also had multitasking (of native apps) two years before the Pre.

nothing comes close to the app store for ease of distribution and deployment.

P.S. Please don't insult us by pretending Apple invented or "lead" in any way with video recording, of all things. They waited years to put it on their phones when it had been a standard feature for a very long time.

I'd argue that apple came up with a great implementation of video recording, editing, and distribution for a mobile platform.

they were certainly not first, but their implementation is the best.