Palm Adds 13 New Apps to the Catalog

Not as weak as the Pre's specs & WebOS itself.
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->?

These piddly little updates are amusing! This was definitely some clever guerilla marketing on Palm's part, what with Apple's big week coming up.

I don't care about apps OR an App Store app that process credit card transactions. Like Palm OS and the iPhone, 90%+ of these apps will be junk. I keep my machines lean & mean. What I DO want is enhanced out of the box functionality! I use these things for organization and as a backup/ancillary brain, not as a conversation starter at parties with fart/fog apps etc..

That is: superb PIM capabilities (at least as good as Garnet if not better), full DTG support, no tedious gesture/swipe interface, a simple alarm app, BT tethering & keyboard capability, multiple email selection/deletion, native voice dialing + voice commands over BT, video recoding/voice memos and at least the option of an onscreen keyboard. And that doesn't even touch on the hardware shortcomings.

Most of the features missing above are *gasp* present in the ancient Treo 600/650. And let's not even get started on how much value/functionality is present on a "free" EOL Centro in comparison to the Pre. WebOS & the Pre are flashy but they're just not that USABLE in comparison with their predecessors. And that's what irks me so much--Palm doesn't care about the usability (or lack thereof). They just want to razzle dazzle everyone with smoke'n mirrors.

Let's face it, folks. Palm isn't out to improve on the usability and convenience of Garnet. The "new" Palm doesn't care about simplicity, ease of data entry, or intuitive functionality. Nor do they employ a tap counter. They're only out to have an OS that makes it as convenient to nickel & dime their users to death while making their "partners" a few more $ in the process. And for the icing on the cake, they'll track their customers' usage habits and turn that into a few more $. How ya like them apples?
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->?

hkklife wrote:
How ya like them apples?

Pun intended? :-)

Re: Android vs. iPhone, here's a fun jab:
"There are no plans to sell the iPhone in the UK. With Android, we don't need the iPhone." Nicola Shenton (T-Mobile UK)

Hey Palm! Where's my PDA with Wifi and phone capabilities?

All of that lovely hardware (320x480 screen & 3.5mm jack) is great & all, don't get me wrong--but what good does it do you if the battery craps out on you mid-whatever. And, more distressingly, 8GB fills up awfully fast.

BTW, Tim, have you been following the saga of whether or not Palm is going to lift the size limit (or at least increase the partition size) for 3rd party apps on the Pre once the App Store is out of beta? I'm reading more and more (and more!) comments from folks who keep getting out of memory errors.

Well, my main point was that Palm no longer cares about EFFICIENCY---again, the tired but oh-so-timely tap counter story. I've played with plenty of Pre, Tim, and that gesture area gets tiresome after a while. And as nifty as "Synergy" is, the entire process of sliding down the keyboard, typing/swiping etc cannot match the blazing speed with which I bang through stuff on my trusty ol' 755p (despite its slightly wobbly d-pad). I just cannot help but think that the entire gesture area + single button area could have been put to better use for a larger screen or a few programmable hard buttons & a small d-pad (or even an optical trackpad or something).

@ Ron;
Cringe if you may, but my current plan is kinda/sorta hope that Motorola rises like Lazarus from the mobile phone grave on the back of an Android on Verizon. Maybe then I'll finally have a smartphone with honest to goodness top notch voice quality & solid reception! Well said, as always! I STILL have my trusty 755p and two TX (among other Palm OS devices). If necessary, I'll continue to haul around two bloody devices! In fact, I may make a lateral move to a Centro just to have something lighter/smaller for my PDA purposes!

P.S. Again, as Apple is set to unleash a camera-totin' iPod Touch next week, let me berate Palm for not being savvy enough to release a "Pre Touch" device! This would have been the ideal opportunity to give people like myself, Tim, and Mike Cane and all of the poor souls overseas waiting for a GSM Pre a chance to dip a toe into the WebOS waters without signing their lives away to Sprint and/or a $100 monthly plan. AND it would've done quite some good as far as encouraging app development. Wouldn't the Pre DevCamps have had a better turnout & interest level if Palm had sent out a hundred or so "Pre Touch" devices to raffle off? Or do like Creative and have a nice bundle of the SDK + a Pre Touch so poor Tim can fumble with the gesture area firsthand instead of keyboard shortcuts! This is one area where I dearly wish Palm would've been bold enough to copy Apple!
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->?

These piddly little updates are amusing! This was definitely some clever guerilla marketing on Palm's part, what with Apple's big week coming up.

There's a lot of heat in this post but how much light?

I don't care about apps OR an App Store app that process credit card transactions. Like Palm OS and the iPhone, 90%+ of these apps will be junk. I keep my machines lean & mean. What I DO want is enhanced out of the box functionality! I use these things for organization and as a backup/ancillary brain, not as a conversation starter at parties with fart/fog apps etc..

Yawn. You may not care about apps but I do. It's not about the 90% that is crap but about the 10% that have a useful purpose (or are merely enjoyable). I use my smartphone for gathering and retrieving information and sometimes that information is stuff I've written down and at others it's something I've fetched from the Internet. I never kept my Treos particularly lean and they suffered from lag and numerous other problems.

Like having the data connection crap out on me on cold winter nights when downloading a bus tracker page can mean the difference between freezing my ass off on at a bus stop for an hour and relaxing at a nice, warm coffee shop. It took Palm years and numerous hardware revisions to fully address the lag problems on their Treo smartphones. With the Pre, they've addressed similar problems in a couple of months with software updates. And it wasn't just the old Palm which was mired in this perpetually slow update cycle. The Cupcake Android update was out for months before T-Mobile allowed it onto the G1 and it failed to solve the G1's lag problems.

That is: superb PIM capabilities (at least as good as Garnet if not better), full DTG support, no tedious gesture/swipe interface, a simple alarm app, BT tethering & keyboard capability, multiple email selection/deletion, native voice dialing + voice commands over BT, video recoding/voice memos and at least the option of an onscreen keyboard. And that doesn't even touch on the hardware shortcomings.

DTG was and is a bundled third party app not something that Palm actually owned. (You can tell by the way that Dataviz loved to nickel and dime people on updates and the way it kept improving without becoming almost unusable the way Versamail did after Palm bought it.) Calling the Pre's gestures tedious is just spitballing IMHO -- I've been using my Pre since June and have found the gestures to be efficient and intuitive.

I'd like to have seen the "simple alarm app" which shipped with my Treo 680 because I could have sorely used it. (There were plenty of simple Garnet alarm apps but you've already established that you don't do third-party apps -- despite your fondness for the relatively third-party-ish Docs to Go.) My Pre by contrast ships with a simple, attractive clock which does multiple alarms. Sure, it won't tell me what time it is in Tokyo but I can get that from the Garnet World Clock in Classic.

I get USB and wifi tethering from My Tether and could never bring myself to blow a wad of cash on a Bluetooth keyboard. Selecting multiple emails would be nice but I'm not so popular that I get so much email that I can't easily swipe my way to an empty Inbox fairly quickly. I might have used the voice memo app on my Treo 680 maybe twice and I did have voice dialing on my T-Mobile G1 -- it was useless. So it's all a matter of different strokes for different folks. Granted I miss the excellent Garnet calculator - wait, no I don't, I still have it with Classic. And btw, an onscreen keyboard is an option for Pre home brew users.

Let's face it, folks. Palm isn't out to improve on the usability and convenience of Garnet.

Right, all those updates that Palm keeps issuing for the Pre is just smoke and mirrors. It's just a coincidence that my Pre gets faster and more stable with every update.

The "new" Palm doesn't care about simplicity, ease of data entry, or intuitive functionality. Nor do they employ a tap counter.

Like complaints about the lack of stylus, there is a kernel of truth here but it also misses a point at the same time. Just as 70-90% of the time the greater accuracy of the stylus is worth giving up for the simplicity of multi-touch (too bad it's harder to control a drawing app but at least I don't have to dig out that plastic toothpick all the time), counting taps becomes less important on a multi-touch device. Is dragging up an icon really any more difficult than pressing the center of a d-pad when you want to unlock your phone's screen? I don't think so. Is dragging up the wave bar and selecting an icon really any more difficult than pressing Option+Phone? It might be a hundred of a second faster once you've memorized/tweaked the buttons but that's not a huge gulf. Is pressing a center button and selecting from a deck of cards which represents your open apps really any harder than holding down the home button and picking from a menu of recent apps? Not really and you gain the advantage that the former is switching among currently running apps and you don't have to worry about an app that might fail to save its state. You're also more likely to discover the former feature sooner than you discover the latter (I've encountered users who used their Treos for months before realizing that it had a recently used apps menu.

They're only out to have an OS that makes it as convenient to nickel & dime their users to death while making their "partners" a few more $ in the process.

This must be why they keep charging me for updates -- oh wait, they don't do that. Oh, I'm sure that they would love to nickel and dime people to death just like Dataviz has to charge $30 for every minor update to DTG on Garnet. But it would be dishonest to pretend that this is some relatively new phenomenon.

And for the icing on the cake, they'll track their customers' usage habits and turn that into a few more $. How ya like them apples?

Right, because it's not like Verizon can track you with your Treo 755p. It's not like they have some sort of "towers" which send a "signal" to your phone which they could use to "triangulate" your "position."
Screw convergence
Palm III->Visor Deluxe->Visor Platinum->Visor Prism->Tungsten E->Palm LifeDrive->Palm TX->Palm Pre
Visor Pro+VisorPhone->Treo 180g->Treo 270->Treo 600->Treo 680->T-Mobile G1->Palm Pre
http://mind-grapes.blogspot.com/

All of that lovely hardware (320x480 screen & 3.5mm jack) is great & all, don't get me wrong--but what good does it do you if the battery craps out on you mid-whatever. And, more distressingly, 8GB fills up awfully fast.

I just do the same thing that a lot of Treo users do. Carry a spare battery and swap it in when the original craps out. And lately, I've been finding an alternative to doing that. If I can get through the day with as little as 10% juice left, I can attach my Pre to my netbook's USB port and recharge it while I surf the web over on my netbook over the Pre's data EVDO connection. Usually by the time I get home, my Pre has risen by about ten percentage points.

Well, my main point was that Palm no longer cares about EFFICIENCY---again, the tired but oh-so-timely tap counter story. I've played with plenty of Pre, Tim, and that gesture area gets tiresome after a while. And as nifty as "Synergy" is, the entire process of sliding down the keyboard, typing/swiping etc cannot match the blazing speed with which I bang through stuff on my trusty ol' 755p (despite its slightly wobbly d-pad). I just cannot help but think that the entire gesture area + single button area could have been put to better use for a larger screen or a few programmable hard buttons & a small d-pad (or even an optical trackpad or something).

I'll have to take your word for it. Like I said in another post, different strokes for different folks. My own experience is that can pound just as fast though stuff on my Pre as I ever could on my 680. And my Pre is also far, more stable, does real web browsing, runs Garnet apps, takes better pictures, and I no longer accidentally page up while trying to press select on the 680's flattened d-pad (and don't get me started on the Palm TX's, it's d-pad was even worse). If that's Palm not caring about efficiency, then they are doing an amazing job of faking it.

I'm not saying that there is nothing I miss about my 680. I've cursed Palm more than once for its failure make the Memo app sync to anything. I miss floating events from Datebk5 which no longer work under Classic. And there is no excuse for the Pre's poor copy and paste functionality. But there is nothing that would turn me into a geek version of Glenn Beck, hysterically crying about the loss of my handset maker.
Screw convergence
Palm III->Visor Deluxe->Visor Platinum->Visor Prism->Tungsten E->Palm LifeDrive->Palm TX->Palm Pre
Visor Pro+VisorPhone->Treo 180g->Treo 270->Treo 600->Treo 680->T-Mobile G1->Palm Pre
http://mind-grapes.blogspot.com/

I think it's easy to misunderstand hkk. The hate comes from love.

Group hug, everyone! :D

The only thing from Palm I ever HATED was my LifeDrive. And if you'll active your way-back machine, you'll recall that I still had some nice things to say about it back then (good software bundle, phenomenal build quality, hard screen rotate button, versatile storage options).

The 700p was a close 2nd and if I had continued to use it as my primary telephone, it might surpass the LD. But nothing will ever approach the stunning mediocrity of the LifeDrive with the 1.0 ROM. Nothin'.

(Tim, check your email)

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->?

I think my main point of contention, Pre particulars aside, is that there was absolutely no gradual transition from Garnet to WebOS. Palm was pushing toothpick styli & Hotsync cables one day and--BOOM--come CES 2009, they were in the clouds and mimicing Apple for all it was worth.

One could argue that it was too late for a gradual transition by then. Once an appendage has turned gangrenous, it's time to cut it off. I'd already jumped ship to a certain extent as of November 2008. That was when I bought my T-Mobile G1. While it wasn't good enough to completely replace my Palm devices (I continued to carry my Palm TX), it prepared me for the transition far better than anything Palm could have come up with.

Palm could have taken whatever Linux kernel distro it was running in 2008 when it came out with the Foleo and put it into a Centro shell. They could have given it a flush screen and Graffiti/gesture area. They could have slapped a Classic style Garnet emulator on top of the Linux kernel with no other access to the underlying OS and released it as a Centro II with PalmOS Garnet 5.9, then that would have been the best transitional device they could make. And it still wouldn't have been enough to prepare people for webOS.

Kris may never have had gushing praise for the old Palm but he sure had (and HAS!) plenty of nice comments about the classic Palm OS PIM apps, the "Zen", and the original UI work. And by looking at the hardware history in his sig I think it's pretty obvious where his $ have gone over the years. And I'm not all that negative...just a wee bit cynnical when it comes to our favorite mobile company in Sunnyvale!

I've always felt that the old maxim that you should never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by incompetence is true. I think that Palm is trying to create a new "Zen" and that they are still trying to figure out exactly how it should look. Frankly I'm amazed at how far along they are given that the jumped from the Centro to the Pre. That's like a tiny, little lizard-like creature laying an egg and having a full grown T-Rex hatch out of it instead of going through millions of years of evolution.

P.S. I don't exactly know how far back Ron is reaching but for me the "old" Palm died after the T3 was released. That device was a mild hardware & software refresh or two away from perfection. Unfortunately Palm absolutely crumpled amongst the distractions of the Palm--PalmSource--NVFS shenanigans and (IMHO) has yet to return to form.

If shenanigans are your benchmark, then I would say that the "old" Palm died when Hawkins, Dubinski, and Colligan left to form Handspring. That was when all of the wheeling and dealing began in earnest with Palm going independent, spinning off PalmSource, renaming itself PalmOne, fending off rival PDA makers, and ultimately turning to its original founders to save it when it ran out of ideas and its stock price collapsed.

This new Palm did the best it could with the cards it had been dealt and worked hard to get the "we don't own our own OS and the company that does has no idea what it's doing and we're being sued by Xerox" monkey off its back. But ultimately it was crushed by the ordeal and only survived long enough to give birth the "new new" Palm which freed from the old new Palm's burdens is trying to make itself into something different from its predecessors while still trying to remain true to its heritage. Right now it is succeeding in doing the former but is having trouble accomplishing the latter. Whether or not it manages to strike the right balance is something that individual users must decide for themselves.
Screw convergence
Palm III->Visor Deluxe->Visor Platinum->Visor Prism->Tungsten E->Palm LifeDrive->Palm TX->Palm Pre
Visor Pro+VisorPhone->Treo 180g->Treo 270->Treo 600->Treo 680->T-Mobile G1->Palm Pre
http://mind-grapes.blogspot.com/

hkklife wrote:
Again, as Apple is set to unleash a camera-totin' iPod Touch next week, let me berate Palm for not being savvy enough to release a "Pre Touch" device!

Palm worked overtime to kill the PDA. There was no market for it in any form. No one wanted anything like it. Palm did what they could to make that true, so it was true. The unfortunate aberration that is the iPod Touch should not be considered in any way to contradict that truth.

Hey Palm! Where's my PDA with Wifi and phone capabilities?

I hated the voice dial implementation on my T-Mobile G1 so I don't miss it on my Pre....
Screw convergence
Palm III->Visor Deluxe->Visor Platinum->Visor Prism->Tungsten E->Palm LifeDrive->Palm TX->Palm Pre
Visor Pro+VisorPhone->Treo 180g->Treo 270->Treo 600->Treo 680->T-Mobile G1->Palm Pre
http://mind-grapes.blogspot.com/

although it took the iphone almost two years (I think) to get it, and it didn't come to the 3G. This is one of those features that, I suspect, far fewer people use than ask for.

DarthRepublican's experience is probably typical--something which works badly is worse than nothing at all because you waste time trying to make it work and just end up frustrated. That's why, I suspect, Apple took their tiime to get it right, and why Palm shouldn't roll it out until it actually works.