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After letting the initial dust Apple kicked towards HTC settle, my iPhone-toting compatriot Rene (I think you guys know him or something) and I had a discussion about the patent lawsuit and Apple in general. It was kicked off by this video dug up by the fine chaps at Gizmodo, and it made me realize, at least from my perspective atop my pile of defective Palm Pre phones, that Apple has changed as a company over the past year. Now before you go thinking that I’m so Apple-hating bozo from Cincinnati, be warned that I do like Apple products: I’ve been using and loving a MacBook Pro of one variety or another for the last six years, upgrade to the next version of OS X the day it’s available, and own both an Airport Extreme and an Apple TV. But I’m worried that Apple’s recent successes may be leading to a dark place. And that place is the land where innovation is forgotten.

Apple’s attack on HTC underscores two things for me. One: user interface patents are silly. It’s like patenting the chair and saying nobody else can make chairs and they’ll have to figure out different ways for people to sit. And no, couches and benches aren’t cool, they’re just big chairs. Two: Apple seems to have forgotten how to innovate and sees lawsuits as the only way to protect their business model.

It seems mighty silly to me to think that Apple is worried about HTC knocking off the iPhone as king of the smartphone hill. The iPhone is still relatively fresh (two and a half years on market) and the smartphone market itself is rapidly expanding. As Palm CEO Job Rubinstein says: there’s plenty of room for several large players. And I think I’d like it that way. Not just so Palm can stay around, but because having several large players ensures that there are multiple parties spurring innovation in each other and that the failing of one doesn’t result in the complete and utter dominance of the only other platform. In this case, the smartphone market is more like the automobile industry and less like the Windows-Mac duopoly that is desktop computing.

Either way, my fear is that Apple is instead going to rely on these sort of lawsuits as a way to maintain their fledgling dominance of the smartphone market. But it’s only going to result in really bad PR for Apple. The only claims that they can make are claims in principle that HTC is violating their patents, while HTC can argue in principle that those patents are a silly thing anyway. Apple certainly can’t argue that HTC’s alleged patent violations are cutting into Apple’s ridiculous profit margin – the people that buy Android or Windows phones aren’t the type that are out to buy an iPhone anyway, and it’s not like there’s a person on the planet that hasn’t heard of the iPhone.

But as I think of it, this whole lawsuit feels indicative of a new mindset at Apple. It’s been a large, but unnoticed, shift in the way they do business. Apple has move away from being the underdog innovator to being a defensive maintainer. Look back at the products Apple has unveiled in the past year and tell me what’s truly innovative:

• 3rd gen iPod Shuffle? We moved the controls to the earbuds just because. It doesn’t make any sense, but we’ll do it anyway.

• iPhone 3GS? Make it faster and give it more memory. Pack it all into the same package as before and let’s call it a day. Wait, no, let’s call it the 3GS – it’s much more hip that way.

• iPhone OS 3.0? MMS and tethering! And a whole tone of new APIs for unexplored niche products, just because we can. The iPhone user experience? No need to change that. It works, and it can’t possibly be made better.

• New MacBook Pros? We’re going to revolutionize the laptop computer by adding, wait for it, SD card readers! Yeah, that’s awesome and totally unlike anything anybody’s ever done before. We even did a study to see if that’s what people wanted. What they don’t want is Blu-ray or HDMI. Those are bags ‘o hurt, I say. People want iTunes.

• New iMac? Make it bigger and use a better screen. Also, a screen this big doesn’t need Blu-ray either. It’s far too good for that. Use iTunes instead; who even wants the option of 1080p video off a disc? Pfft.

• Magic Mouse? Okay, I’ll give Apple this one, adding multi-touch gestures to the mouse is a really different move. But if the mouse is the only cool thing you’ve done…

• iPad? It’s magical, it’s amazing, it’s beautiful, it’s a giant iPod Touch and fails to provide and real innovation above and beyond what you can already do on an iPhone and evel loses several features, it’s the iPad! (the tech media goes wild, soils themselves, and then thinks about how silly and underwhelming the whole thing is when they’ve got new pants).

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my MBP (ExpressCard slot and all) and OS X. But Apple’s competitors are threatening to out-innovate Apple at every turn. Android 2.0 (with HTC’s help) and Palm webOS have far outpaced the iPhone OS user experience, so much so that the only thing the iPhone has going for it is all the apps and iTunes (which itself in need of something more than major innovation). Windows Phone 7 Series has turned my idea of how a mobile OS should work completely on its head, and honestly, Windows 7 ain’t that bad. I no longer dread booting up Parallels.

Now, we may very well be in a lull when it comes to Apple’s innovative progress, but these are the kind of lulls that can kill a company. Technological development is moving faster than ever and the multi-year lulls that struck Palm circa 2006 and Apple circa 1994 are the kind of lulls that can kill a company today. The market has changed so dramatically that even with arguably the most innovative mobile OS out there Palm is struggling to recover from a few years of uninspired products.

This new defensive, offensive, and numbers-touting (look at how many apps we have!) Apple worries me. Apple’s innovations have kicked the industry in the head multiple times before, but now it looks like the tables have been turned.

Of course, I could be completely wrong and be blown out of the water by iPhone OS 4.0 and OS X 10.7. But the bitter pill that the iPad, and now this lawsuit, have left me with has me concerned for Apple’s foresight. Maybe they’ve gotten too big and lost touch with what made Apple the success that it is today. But in the end, getting all defensive and trying to sue their way out of a problem is only going to hurt Apple and the industry as a whole.

Derek Kessler is editor of TiPb’s sibling site, PreCentral.net.

Guest Editorial: Forget about innovation is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Y Combinator’s sixth request for startups (RFS) is more than a little provocative, stating that they think Apple’s upcoming iPad is meant to be a Windows [and Mac OS X?] killer:

Most people think the important thing about the iPad is its form factor: that it’s fundamentally a tablet computer. We think Apple has bigger ambitions. We think the iPad is meant to be a Windows killer. Or more precisely, a Windows transcender. We think Apple foresees a future in which the iPad is the default way people do what they now do with computers (and some other new things).

They think that while developers won’t like Apple’s control, users will love the price and that it “just works”. Further, the opportunity is there for devs (and their investors, ‘natch) to provide the apps people will want — and more interestingly — create apps no one has even thought of yet. (To do for the iPad what spreadsheets and web browsers did for the desktop).

Oh, and then there’s business:

One particularly interesting subproblem is how to introduce iPads into big companies. This will probably have to be done by stealth initially, as happened with microcomputers. They’ll have to be introduced as something individuals use, and which doesn’t really count as a computer and thus can’t be vetoed by the IT department. Don’t worry about this; it’s just a little tablet computer.

Y Combinator does seed funding for startups, so they’re going to be putting people’s money where their mouths are on this. While there’s likely a good deal of purposeful hyperbole injected in the “Windows killer” line, could there also be some truth in it?

[Y Combinator via Daring Fireball]

Y Combinator: We Think the iPad is Meant to be a Windows Killer is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Product Reviews (blog)

Mike Elgan: 15 iPad mysteries remain Computerworld Of course, the most recent iPhone announcement promised tethering for the iPhone, and AT&T just never delivered it. Will the carrier fail again? … Newer, Cheaper iPhone(s) To Debut In JuneInformationWeek (blog) Morgan Stanley analyst: Apple may introduce low-cost iPhone models in JuneTopNews United States Inside Apple's iPad: iPhone OS vs Mac OS XApple Insider CNET -tuaw.com (blog) -TMC Net all 131 news articles »

A little while ago TiPb asked if the Apple TV should be switched over to the iPhone OS, but what about the Mac? Coincidentally, a recent Apple job offering was discovered by ComputerWorld that hinted Apple was seriously considering pushing the iPhone OS from phone, MP3-player iPod touch, and tablet iPad to further devices:

The Core Platform team within Apple’s Core OS organization is looking for a talented and inspired manager to lead a team focused on bring-up of iPhone OS on new platforms. The team is responsible for low level platform architecture, firmware, core drivers and bring-up of new hardware platforms. The team consists of talented engineers with experience in hardware, firmware, IOKit drivers, security and platform architecture.

Now the New York Times blogs quotes a former Apple engineer musing about whether or not the iPhone OS could be implemented as a special layer on top of Mac OS X, the way Front Row or Dashboard work today. Push a button, the multi-touch iPhone OS screen zooms in, you flick and swipe and pinch though what you want to do, then tap and go back to your mouse and keyboard.

We’re all fans of the iPhone OS here, do we want to see it everywhere else as well?

(ComputerWorld and New York Times blogs via MacRumors, twice)

More iPhone OS on Mac and Apple TV Talk is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Should Apple TV switch to the iPhone OS? The Apple TV was introduced in late 2006 but debuted alongside the iPhone at the Macworld 2007 keynote. Since then, the iPhone has become a huge, mainstream success and the Apple TV… well it reamins just a “hobby”.

Technically, Apple TV is included under Apple’s iTunes + iPod offerings, and it’s been referred to as a big iPod for your TV. While low end iPods continue to run their embedded OS, the iPod touch and upcoming iPad run versions of the iPhone OS, Apple TV, by stark contrast, originally used a special version of Mac OS X Tiger. Though it has been updated to 2.x and 3.x over the years (and gotten a price cut to boot!), it remains in a sort of no-mans land, with more functionality than an iPod nano but far less than a proper Mac OS X machine like the Mac Mini.

The set-top box market is nebulous at best, but Apple chose to engage it — much as it has the equally nebulous tablet market with the iPad, so we wonder if they wouldn’t do better engaging it on the same terms — with the iPhone OS and its 150,000 apps.

There would be problems to be sure. Right away the Apple TV’s 1280×720 screen resolution is much greater than the iPhone’s 480×320, and wider if shorter than the iPad’s 1024×768. Ideally, the Apple TV should go to 1920×1080 to match other, modern display resolutions as well.

Apple is using optional pixel-doubling to let iPhone apps run “full-screen” on the iPad, and these were reportedly blurry and jaggy in early demos. Pixel-quadruplers would likely be even less kind. True resolution independence could be an answer to this, but we’ll have to wait and here if Apple addresses that with iPhone 4.0 (perhaps in March).

The bigger problem would be control. The iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad all handle interactions via capacitive multitouch input — you use your finger on the screen. I don’t think there’s a single 52″ multitouch capacitive HDTV on the market. Apple has patents for Wii-mote style motion controllers that could fake fingers (if not touch) but they also have the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad — all of which could (and already do via the Apple Remote app) serve as pretty good controllers. Hey, if your house has multiple devices, it could even handle multiple controllers…

So where does that leave us? Right now the Apple TV is an okay bridge to iTunes Store media — music, movies, and TV content — but leverages not at all the massive App Store ecosystem. Right now the Apple TV can do the equivalent of the iPod and YouTube apps on the iPhone, but can’t show you your Calendar or Contacts, doesn’t have Safari or Email, doesn’t even have widgets like Stocks or Weather. And it doesn’t have 150,000 other apps — including games! — that running the iPhone OS could bring it. Really, it’s little more than a souped-up iPod classic tethered to your TV.

Sure there would be problems implementing the iPhone OS on the Apple TV, but there would be benefits as well.

So what do you think, should Apple TV be switched to the iPhone OS?

Should Apple TV Switch to the iPhone OS? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Eugene Shimalsky is the Founder and CEO of Treebune, the company behind Pushme.to. He shared his opinion on the iPad with us this week and since we’re particularly interested about how developers reacted to the announcement, we thought we would share it with you.

*****

Yesterday, Apple got all of the geeks glued to their screens waiting for the “Jesus Tablet,” iPad. An hour later, they were twittering that it did not come. Or maybe it just wasn’t their Jesus?

My idea is that even if the iPad might not be the next step in the computer technology, it’s bringing in a new usage pattern, that is already around the corner, and may be hugely successful.

Before you start throwing tomatoes, I have to tell you that I was completely disappointed when I saw the keynote yesterday. While I understand that media partnerships can come later and transform the way the device can be used, I didn’t appreciate Apple’s laziness and lack of imagination when it came to interface and functionality.

Same iPhone OS, and not even a major tweak for 10 inches? An empty lock screen, no multitasking, no video chat? They can keep the giant iPod Touch they didn’t even bother to think of a decent name for, unless they put Android on it and sell for $400, that is.

Still, an hour later, I got a call from my mom, who, among other things asked me, if I’ve heard about the new cute portable computer Apple announced. Of course I did, I answered. Moreover, the iPhone app we developed will work on it, and we plan to support it. Wow, she said, this is great. And that’s when something clicked for me about the iPad.

First, my mother is by no means a computer addict, and can barely use her Mac. Second, just like my dad, she makes heavy use of her iPhone as a standalone device – to search the web, watch YouTube, take photos and videos without ever transferring them to the computer.

Now what does she find so exciting about this device and us having our app on it, while she never got as excited about iPhone or OS X apps?

That’s where the second billion comes in. Hundreds of thousand of newbie users of all ages harness the power of web, email, and online video every day. And their usage is very different from yours. They don’t need to surf while chatting on IRC, they don’t know that it’s so good to stream Pandora in background.

What they do is consume the media, search for information and communicate in a very basic way. They are happy to quickly find the right Wikipedia entry, because “the internet answered their question,” consult a dictionary using the iPhone, or watch a YouTube video.

For these users, an iPad-like device, easy to use and fast to perform their tasks, is sure to catch on. And they are many.

Now, I don’t know when exactly the large-screen internet device will jump off your desk onto your couch, and what it will look like, and whether or not Apple or someone else will have put more effort into their product to make it happen.

But I’m absolutely sure that we’re moving towards easier to use and more suitable for everyday life computers, and that Pandora radio is going to make its way into your bathroom and YouTube on your kitchen table really soon now.

And, after all, that’s what we, developers, want to happen.

P.S. Our iPhone app and homonymous web service, that soon will be ported to iPad is http://pushme.to.

Eugene Shimalsky

http://pushme.to

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Update: So there is a bit more to this story than once thought.  Apparently Delicious Library, a media manager for Mac OS X created by Delicious Monster, was the first known piece of software to use a virtual bookshelf to display content.  According to TechCrunch, Wil Shipley, the founder of Delicious Monster, believes Apple borrowed the idea for iBooks without licensing it.  This is fairly believable considering some of Delicious Monster’s original employees actually work for Apple.

As one of our readers, izdale, has highlighted in the comments section below, the Classics developers have stated their design was inspired by Delicious Library, and they apparently asked for approval before releasing the app.

It’s possible that Apple took the design from Delicious Monster, but in the end it’s a difficult argument to make.  I mean, where would you put your virtual books?  On a virtual bookshelf, right?

–

During yesterday’s iPad presentation, it became apparent that Apple’s iBooks UI designers were at least somewhat influenced by iPhone developers Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu’s Classics eBook reader design.  But honestly, how couldn’t they be?  Classics has a simple and elegant UI that makes it a joy to use.  Instead of getting upset over the similarities, Andrew Kaz and Phill Ryu are actually proud to have influenced Apple’s iBooks design, and have decided to thank all of their supporters by allowing everyone to download their app for free for a limited time.

Classics‘ bookshelf design looks a lot like Apple’s iBooks‘ and it acts pretty much the same as well.  You can view all of the books on your virtual bookshelf with a simple flick up or down, tap on a book to open it, and tap and hold to drag and sort your books.

Classics also features an intuitive  interface that allows you to flip virtual 3D pages by dragging your finger across the screen.  The pages track your finger’s movements, so you are able to peek at the next page while finishing a sentence if you wish.  You can also view how far along you are in a book via a progress bar at the top of the page, and the app is able to remember your place in a book when you close out of it and marks it with a satin bookmark.

The app contains a wide variety of classic books, such as The Time Machine, Gulliver’s Travels, Dracula, Pride and Prejudice, The Art of War, and many more.

Classics is normally available in the App Store for $2.99, but you can download it right now for free.

Related Posts

• Apple Takes On Amazon With iBooks, iPad’s New eBook App
• TrailerSpy Mobile – Trailers For Movies, Games, TV Shows, And Books All In One App
• Which Write is Right? A Comparison Between eBooks and Their Prehistoric Cousins
• Apple Rejecting e-Book Apps Due To Third Party Rights Infringements
• iPhone eBook App Rejected For Displaying Kama Sutra Now Approved

My first smartphone was a Palm Treo 600 and so my last 2009 Smartphone Round Robin “away” review focusing on Palm’s new webOS platform as embodied by the Palm Pre and Palm Pix does not lack for symmetry. Between the two, last year I reviewed the Palm Treo Pro which I quipped was more HTC than Palm, ran Windows Mobile and not a Palm-made OS, and had a keyboard that was hard to consider “pro” level. 3 years of round robin, three totally different platforms from Palm, and only this review for me to try and make my own sense out of it.

Luckily I had the mobile accomplisher himself, our editor-in-chief Dieter Bohn to show me Palm’s new platform and their new devices, and the truly exceptional community over at PreCentral.net Forums to help understand where it’s at and where it’s going.

(And just a reminder, every day you post on that PreCentral.net thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you’re entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Now let’s get this on…

Previously on Palm

First, this is where Palm stood last year, without a PalmOS device in the competition, represented instead by the HTC-built, Windows Mobile running, Treo Pro:

And now, just one year later Dieter was kind enough to show me the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi running the all new, all different, all Palm webOS:

CrackBerry Kevin and I also stopped by Palm at CES 2010 to check out the new Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus for Verizon:

And here are the rest of the contextual links:

• PreCentral’s Dieter Bohn and Rene (and Phil!) on the iPhone Live! Podcast.
• PreCentral.net Palm Pre review (and all-new Palm Pre Plus review)
• PreCentral.net Palm Pixi review (and all-new updated Palm Pixi Plus review)
• 2008 TiPb Smartphone Round Robin Palm Treo Pro review

Hardware Design

I’m starting with hardware only because every other review started with hardware, and I’m telling you that because I really wish for this one review I didn’t have to start with hardware. But I’m a sucker for consistency.

And the Palm Pre Hardware Just…

Well, it isn’t great. The concept is killer, don’t get me wrong. The river-stone ergonomics are beautiful. The execution, however, especially on the early units, was really unfortunate given how much else Palm got right.

After using the iPhone’s glass screen for years, using the plastic screen on the Pre just feels… not good. The first Pre I tried at a local Best Buy had a screen protector over the plastic, and I found it almost unusable. If I was Kevin I could figure out some witty, spot-on analogy about layers of prophylactics between me and my multitouch but I’m not and I can’t and so I won’t. I’ll just say Palm needs to switch to glass and now.

The Pre is also a vertical slider. It looks like an iPhone slab but pull down and a full physical keyboard is revealed. While this could be a best-of-both-worlds compromise, the lack of an official, built-in virtual keyboard means (unlike the Motorola Android Droid) you have to use the physical keyboard and… it’s not great. A couple of Pre devices I’ve tried didn’t have very solid feeling sliders and all of them had cramped quarters that made the physical keyboard not that enjoyable for me. I had to use the tips of my fingers/nails and still watch out on the top ridge of the display and the sharp edges of the sides.

I’m not sure what they could do to fix it, though Dieter says the new Palm Pre Plus is an improvement in the feel of the keys itself. That, combined with the better build quality control could be part of the answer. I look forward to spending more time with it in the future to find out.

Palm Pixi By Contrast…

Eschewing the slider for their second webOS device, Palm returned to their roots with the front-facing QWERTY. They also returned to the form factor of the Palm Centro, which saw high sales if low margins during the final year of PalmOS.

The device is tiny. It’s deceptively tiny. It’s so tiny that, like in the Dark Knight movie, you half-expect that if Dieter’s Pre ever broke at the mechanism, he’d pull a release, a full Pixi would eject, and he’d just keep on typing. Actually, he’d likely type better because, counter-intutively, the Palm Pixi keyboard feels better than the Pre’s. I don’t know if it’s crazy Pixi magic, or just the better Feng Shui of not having to type inside the Pre’s cavity, but the tiny keys worked well.

The huge problem here, however, is that Palm reduced the screen size to fit in that keyboard. This isn’t the Treo 240×240 or 320×320 of yesteryear. In 2009, never mind 2010, screen size matters. Aspect ratio matters. In a post-iPhone, capacitive era how we interact with our device is more screen-dependant than anything else. There are times you won’t need a physical keyboard (watching video, playing games, reading e-books). There’s almost no time when you won’t want the full screen. Sure, it’s only a few pixels shorter, but on a screen that small, the difference is noticeable. It’s like having a 16:9 HDTV for a year or so, then suddenly getting a 4:3 SDTV again. You know what you’re missing.

There’s no easy fix for that easy, unless they jettison the physical keyboard and go with a fullscreen Pixi with a virtual keyboard. Many would hate that, but it’s something I’ve been increasingly considering as of late…

Is the Era of Physical Keyboards Over?

Originally this section was going to be called “the era of physical keyboards is over” but a funny thing happened on the way to writing this review — I kind of changed my mind.

Physical keyboards on smartphones are a strange beast. That a QWERTY button layout originally intended to prevent jamming on ancient IBM typewriters still exists on some of the most modern gadgets today is… either stupefying or a testament to the intractability of consumer typists.

Interestingly, Palm didn’t start off with physical keyboards. The Palm Pilot had no keyboard and used a proprietary form of handwriting recognition. The iPhone doesn’t have a physical keyboard either, and does offer recognition for Chinese character input, but uses virtual keys for most other languages, and sticks to QWERTY for English.

Rumor has it, physical vs. virtual keyboard was a huge area of contention between Apple CEO, Steve Jobs and then-Apple VP and head of iPod, Jon Rubinstein. Jobs didn’t want a physical keyboard, Rubinstein did. And we all know how that turned out — we have the iPhone sans-physical keyboard and Rubinstein has a new job as CEO of Palm.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when the Palm Pre debuted and looked a lot like an iPhone with a physical keyboard, many (and yours truly included) figured it was the iPhone Rubinstein always wanted to build.

He wanted the keyboard so much, as mentioned, he sacrificed screen real-estate on the Palm Pixi for it. I find that absurd. I would have removed the keys and made it an iPhone-nano-esque slab. As I said, until this review, I would have whole-heartedly exclaimed “the era of physical keyboards is over”.

But then I started thinking about the BlackBerry and how the Storm2 is no replacement for the 9700 for their user-base. Just like it took a long time to transition from CLI (command line interface, the text-only days of DOS prompts and UNIX terminals) to GUI (graphical user interface, the windows, mouse, pointer paradigm we see today), it will take a while to transition from physical keyboards to virtual ones. And just like some people (not gonna say neckbeards!) still turn off the GUI on Linux, go pure Terminal on Mac OS X, and ignore WIndows completely, some people have been so raised on physical keyboards, even on tiny little devices, that they wouldn’t transition to virtual even if, from an overall usability standpoint, they could or should.

BlackBerry is the easy example because they’re essentially messaging devices. The iPhone is essentially a big screen you fill with media and apps, so that’s an easy example of where the virtual keyboard fits best (especially Apple’s still unequalled implementation thereof).

And that brought me to the crux of this long, rambling, tangent — what’s the Palm Pre (and webOS in general)? I had the same question about Android and pretty much determined it was Google’s mobile insurance policy. But Palm is a mobile company. It’s not an “also have” like Microsoft. It’s their sole reason for being, and they’re one of the original innovators in the space.

So I wondered again, what’s the Palm Pre? And then I realized Palm told us from the beginning — it’s the fat middle. Where the Treo converged three devices into one, the Palm Pre bridges the traditional, keyboard-centric mobile messaging device with the new, screen-centric mobile platform device.

It’s likely not keyboard enough for a BlackBerry addict, and it’s not screen enough for an iPhone user, but it’s a compromise form factor for those who want the okay-of-both-worlds.

I’m so happy with the iPhone keyboard that I’ll never go back to a physical one. I use my iPhone keyboard far more than I ever used the physical keyboards on my Treo 600 or 680 because it works better for me. Not having to engage forearm muscles to depress tiny keys and hold the rest of the phone stable while I do so is a huge advantage in my book. It’s just effortless and it just works. I won’t be writing novel-length compositions on a BlackBerry anyway, so no argument about volume of typing impresses me. Likewise, I see enough physical keyboarders glancing constantly at their screens that muscle-memory no longer resonates with me as a deal-breaker either. New devices are about consuming information as much as creating it, and even glance-ability requires — you guessed it — glances.

One day haptics may be sufficiently advanced enough that mighty-morphin’, there-and-gone-again virtual-that-feel-like-physical keyboards are enough for everybody. But right now, today, you have legacy keyboarders who’ll never abandon their keys, and devices on Android that still haven’t gotten their software right, and there needs to be a middle ground.

Or to be more succinct — Smartphones are evolving beyond priority messaging devices to priority (data/media/etc.) consumption devices and hardware keyboards are legacy, bolted-on technology comforting for the former but waiting to be obsoleted when technology allows virtual keyboards to better serve the latter (and we’re part of the way there with the iPhone).

(hat Palm didn’t have hardware keyboards when the Pilot was priority PIM device is interesting as an aside. And no, Dieter, I won’t take that back )

Inductive Charging

Palm debuted it with their Touchstone accessory. Cool. Future. Let’s me leave this section on a positive note.

Software Experience

Okay, here’s where webOS is interesting enough that any complaints about the hardware take a back seat. First let’s get something out of the way. We’ve teased Palm about having the former head of Apple’s iPod division as their CEO, and about bringing over a bunch of iPhone engineers to help create webOS. We’ve listed what webOS adopted from the iPhone (and we’re far from the only ones), but it’s important to remember the iPhone wasn’t made in a vacuum. The icon grid as launcher, the tabbed phone app, and other paradigms existed in earlier Palm Pilots and Treos and Apple took them and put them together with a bunch of other stuff for iPhone OS. Likewise, some of the multitouch gestures in webOS are the same as the iPhone (and thank goodness), the way Cards works is greatly expanded from, but visually identical to how iPhone Safari Pages work, etc. In the end, they’ll figure out the legal issues and we’ll say the user benefits from a certain amount of consistency when it comes to these platforms. With that behind us…

HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Palm faced a huge problem when launching webOS. They couldn’t really bring PalmOS developers forward because the platform was different and, unfortunately, the time it took between the decline of PalmOS and the rise of webOS meant a significant amount of developers had moved on. iPhone 2.0, meanwhile, had re-framed the mobile discussion for the second time, going from killer UI in 2007 to being all about apps in 2008, and Palm didn’t have the money or mindshare of Google who was already offering the Android alternative. So what to do?

In a move I called brilliant at the time, they decided to make their UI layer, and hence development environment, out of web-standards — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While they would — and did — take a performance hit by essentially running localized web pages as apps, it meant anyone who knew how to make webApps could fairly easily develop for webOS. (That Palm named it webOS shows how seriously they take that concept).

Apple tried a non-localized version of this with iPhone 1.0 and it’s “sweet” (TM, Steve Jobs, WWDC 2007) WebApp SDK. It failed. But 2009 brought far more robust web technologies, including HTML 5 with SQLite for local storage, CSS3 with animations, and a whole lot more maturity in WebApp development. While Palm hasn’t succeeded with this to App Store levels, no one else has with interpreted SDK (Java) or native apps either. Palm has succeeded to some degree, however, and iPhone 3.0 is now supporting localized HTML 5 apps on the iPhone home screen, while RIM, Android, and others are embracing WebApps and widgets.

It was a gutsy gamble. I still think Google saw webOS, smacked themselves in the Android and raced to make Chrome OS in response. It’s also clearly a first step for Palm. Just like Apple released a full, native SDK for iPhone 2.0, Palm is now offering native plug-ins for games like Need for Speed (something that WebApps can’t do, and even WebGL might struggle to get them to do as well).

It’s not perfect. webOS’ lack of contrast in the UI still flabbergasts me. More practically, it’s sluggish at times, especially on the anemic Palm Pix processor, and it can take far too long for built-in apps like the calendar to launch. It also presents problems for developers who want to hide their source code, although Palm now has a solution that doesn’t involve limiting apps to onboard RAM (something Android and BlackBerry still suffer from). Full GPU support might (though I think likely not) improve that, but hardware is always getting faster and bandwidth is (hopefully) getting bigger. Palm will benefit from both. In a year or two, it will be buttery smooth and still enjoy the flexibility and future-proofing that is webOS’ promise.

Synergy Contacts, Multitasking Cards, and Non-Modal Notifications

Three areas where webOS absolutely kills are their Synergy contact system, their Cards visualization for multitasking, and their non-modal notification system.

Synergy, as far as I can figure out, takes all of your online data points, sucks them in while maintaining them as separate silos, then aggregates them, filters out duplications, and presents you a unified view of the data. So, for example, you have Facebook friends, Gmail contacts, a couple of Exchange accounts, and an old Yahoo! setup. Synergy will take all that, figure out that 700 of them are the same, create a unified contact that has all the information for each of those 700 (while leaving each untouched on their own service), and present you a single contact list containing those 700 as well as all the other (unique to Yahoo! or Gmail, etc.) contacts. I can’t explain it as elegantly as it works most of the time (on occasion it won’t match and you’ll have to do some work to help it), but it’s the future of contact management as far as I’m concerned — with a few caveats.

If I don’t want Google’s terrible, promiscuous email retention polluting my phone contacts (or Facebook messing up my Exchange) that needs to be easily managed (it might be on webOS, I didn’t get into it but hope it is). Also, an easy way to export the final, Synergy-zed contact list for backup — or replacement of other online contact data bases! — would be nifty. That webOS’ approach allows them to elegantly handle multiple Exchange accounts is testament enough.

Cards for multitasking is likewise the future. If you’ve used Pages on the iPhone Safari — where you can keep several web sites available at the same time and easily zoom out, see all the pages, swipe across to change them, and then zoom back in — then imagine that but taken to the ultimate, logical, extreme. That’s webOS Cards. Instead of just web pages, every app including web pages gets its own Card and you can zoom out to see them all, swipe to change between them, and tap to zoom back in. Yes, that means webOS supports multitasking for 3rd party apps, something only Apple apps are allowed to do on the iPhone.

It works well on the Palm Pre. It works mind-bogglingly well on the Palm Pre Plus (Dieter had 50 apps up all at once). It works so well, in fact, it kind of makes me sad I can’t drag and drop elements from one Card to another. Why give me that fantastic visualization, why make a windowed multitasking interface for a small screen, if the biggest advantage of doing it — drag and drop — isn’t implemented. Unless, of course, that’s the “next step”. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for webOS 2.0…

Notifications, in terms of webOS, means once again I have to complain about the iPhone’s current, modal implementation. Modal, if you’re not familiar with the term, means that once the notification pops up, you have to either “dismiss” (and lose it forever) or “view” (and interrupt whatever you’re doing) immediately. There is no later. And if another notification comes in, it obliterates the previous one entirely. With webOS, like Android, you’re told about a new notification but you’re free to ignore it and the system will just keep track of them for you until you choose to take a look at them. That difference means everything, especially when you start getting a ton of notifications coming in.

Conclusion

It’s not all rosy for Palm, webOS, the Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, and their mobile strategy going forward. Sprint exclusivity might have guaranteed Palm some money but it doesn’t seem to have given them the sales they needed. They’re hitting Verizon now, and AT&T soon, but if they’d gone on Verizon sooner (before the Droid) they could have had a much bigger impact. Unlike Apple, Google, or Microsoft, they don’t have billions in the bank or other businesses to prop them up. Unlike RIM or Nokia, they don’t have entrenched business or international market share to ride. It’s going to be an uphill battle for Palm. That they’ve accomplished and innovated so much in just a year is an outstanding accomplishment, however, and means I’ll be cheering as they battle up that hill.

For iPhone users, switching to webOS means you gain a physical keyboard and those nifty Synergy, Cards, and notifications. You’ll also gain a more “open” system as Palm has treated hacking webOS in a way Apple almost certainly won’t for the foreseeable future. We didn’t really get into the whole homebrew (think jailbreak apps) and patching culture of webOS, or Palm’s efforts to reach out and embrace developers, but kudos to them for doing it. If that’s something that’s important to you, and Android/Google is a non-starter, it’s certainly another plus in Palm’s column.

As I write this, however, Apple might just be on the verge of announcing iPhone 4.0, and that just might “invent” multitasking for iPhone users. Better contact and notifications might be on tap as well. Hey, maybe even an iPhone on Verizon. The soonest we’ll know is this Wednesday’s “Come see our latest creation” event, otherwise Apple usually shows off new software in March and new hardware at WWDC in June.

I’m not saying wait and see before you leap to webOS or another platform. I’m just saying… wait and see.

The biggest thing about this year’s Round Robin is that every device-maker brought the competition. Apple is still ahead in some areas, but they’ve been overtaken in some others. Apple having to catch up… that’s good for iPhone users, and it’s good for everyone.

Things are exciting again!

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Palm Pre, Palm Pix, webOS Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin

TiPb’s iTablet hopes and dreams are fairly simple — Apple, please make us a device we can give to our moms and never get another tech support call back from them in our lives.

Okay, maybe never is dreaming in AMOLED color, but we’d settle for seldom at this point. And we don’t mean to pick on mom — feel free to substitute or add dad, siblings, neighbors, and everyone else to the list.

Now, almost no one outside of Steve Jobs knows exactly what Apple will be releasing at “Come see our latest creation“, yet everyone and their blog is speculating, including TiPb. Doing for print media what they did for music? Sure. Great. Nice. Text books, subscription TV, iWork touch? Fine. Fine. Fine. Content and apps you will bring we have no doubt. We expect no less. But we want that one more thing, and we want it pretty much to be what Daring Fireball, Ars, and Marco Armant suggested almost a month ago — a modern, highly abstracted re-conception of the personal computer meant for mainstream users.

Apple helped bring the CLI (command line interface) to the masses with the Apple II, the GUI (graphical user interface) with the Mac, and the multitouch interface with the iPhone and iPod touch. Each has been easier for more people to use than the one before, but the iPhone and iPod touch traded mobility for functionality to the extent that while great devices, they can’t fully replace netbooks or laptops, which is the sweet spot for consumers.

An iTablet could. An iTablet that removes any care or concern about right vs. left mouse clicking, saving files within hierarchical directories, icons disappearing from docks, files littered across the desktop, disk and other maintenance, complex software installations, windows getting lost, drivers causing disasters, and all the headaches that come with a regular person trying to manage a monstrous modern computer system like Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux.

Google is trying to do a lot of that with Chrome OS, but that will still be a WIMP (windows, interface, mouse, pointer) GUI that’s basically a browser and subject to the greatest terrors WebApp interfaces can bring.

If Apple can bring an iPhone level of usability to a tablet sized device and give it just enough productivity to let regular people edit what documents they need to while enjoying incredibly easy access to their magazines, newspapers, books, videos, music, games, and apps… If Apple can make a device that “just works” for 80% of mainstream users… If Apple can make a computing product that I can give to my mom and not have to worry about getting a call saying “where did my internet go?” or “I swear it’s clicking on things by itself”…

If Apple can do for the personal computer once again what they did with the Apple II and Mac — make it more usable for more users — then that’s all TiPb really wants.

Will we get it? Shrug. Apple’s track record is fairly good, and a lot of people smarter than we are seem to think it’s the next logical step, so all that’s left is to cross our fingers, throw away our tech support hotlines, and wait for Wednesday’s “Come see our latest creation”.

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

What TiPb Really Wants from the iTablet — No More Tech Support Calls from Mom

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