clue free

It’s heartening to read the first chapter of the first Palm webOS development manual. The foundational UI principles laid out on page 9: “maintain a sense of place”, “avoid preferences and settings where possible”, “don’t use modal controls”… bode well for our rosy handheld future. Palm gear — which certainly didn’t used to be flashy — has always been my favorite platform for just getting stuff done. The To-Do list on PalmOS was fast, uncomplicated, and it was deep enough for 95% of what I needed. The generically-named* Tasks app on Windows Mobile, on its face, looked almost identical, but always seemed to be getting in my way.

Also heartening is that Flash will finally come to all smartphones except… yeah, the iPhone. How long will Steve Jobs’ walled garden hold up? Remember what happened last time everyone else built compatible/interoperable hardware except Apple? It was called the PC revolution of the Eighties. Since Apple is maintaining its old strategy (successfully) in new markets, I suppose they’ll be fine as long as they keep leaping into new segments: computers to MP3 players to cellphones to media centers to..?

Palm announcements at MWC this week did not include the expected Vodaphone partnership, although people did notice Vodaphone SIMs inside the Pre demo units. Some are speculating the silence was due to ongoing contractual wrangling between Palm and Vodaphone; I would guess it’s to guard Sprint’s aura of exclusivity until after the [rumored, debunked, rumored again] March 15th launch. I can’t be the only person in America more than happy to pay an import premium in order to avoid committing to Sprint’s sinking ship.

* I’d like to propose a ban on all super-generic program names. WinMo Tasks, Apple Mail: you are giving the Google grey hairs when I try to troubleshoot your “issues”. Please die.

The new Treo looks sweet!  What a relief.  While they were rarely on the bleeding edge of technology, Palm has been the only handheld maker I’m aware of that consistently delivered a great experience.  This was the case until Apple got into the game, although Apple itself has had a bunch of stink centered on its recent release.

Luckily for the rest of us, Apple has raised the game to the point where the old guard finally have to bring a real game to the game.  We’re finally getting past the point where you have to choose between 3G or WiFi or touchscreen or GPS or looking like an industrial air conditioner. Sure, these were not trivial technical problems to solve (that’s a whole bunch of radios in a tight little space), but hardly insurmountable to a determined group of engineers.  It’s shameful that Apple was able to take so much market share so quickly from the hegemony of Nokia, Motorola, Sony, RIM, and yeah, Palm, but it’s not without precedent that they enter and dominate a market years late. The fat cats at the top get lazy, dole out token upgrades every once in a while, knuckle under to the carriers… and maybe people start to suspect that their hardware can actually do more. So one day, someone shows the unwashed masses that yeah, they’re right. (And some of us ask how T-Mobile dares use “Get More” as a slogan, considering how often carriers nerf promising handsets.)

People one day (next week-ish) will point to the iPhone as the inflection point where the general populace realized that it could do so much more with its phone than just call people. People still think of a car in the same way they did 100 years ago; their cellphones, not so much. Now you can map, surf the web, read books, watch full-length movies, play quality games, etc., etc., etc..  But people still, by and large, seem to think this is the purview of the iPhone, even though my HTC TyTN II–a year ago–could do everything the iPhone 3G can today. And a Treo 5 years ago could, too, just a little slower.

So thanks, old guard, for holding us back all this time. You have no one to blame but yourselves for the pickle you find yourselves in, and maybe some of you will be wiser on the next round.