Ars Reviews the Palm Pre: the BlackBerry killer
Most of the gadget press is obsessing over whether the Palm Pre is an iPhone killer, but they’re asking the wrong question. We’ve been testing one for the past few days, and it’s clear to us that the real target of Palm’s new phone is the BlackBerry. Here’s how Palm will use the webOS to tackle the enterprise market.
By Jon Stokes
Since the Pre’s unveiling at CES 2009, the tech press has been caught up in the Rocky-like narrative of a former champ, now fallen on lean times, who tries to recapture his former glory by stepping in the ring with a make-or-break, high-profile exhibition fight against the reigning titleholder. But there’s a serious problem with how this narrative has been presented, and specifically with the mobile device that has been cast in the part of the young, strutting, seemingly invincible heavyweight titleholder. See, the Palm Pre isn’t out to KO the iPhone, but rather it’s swinging at the real reigning champ: RIM’s BlackBerry.
I’ve been using a Pre since late last week, and in this first installment of a multipart review I’ll make the case that Palm is readying an eventual BlackBerry killer and discuss its messaging capabilities.
But before I can make the case that the Pre is intended as a BlackBerry killer, with any harm to the iPhone being just collateral damage, some background is in order.
Why the iPhone and BlackBerry work
The key to the success of both the iPhone and the BlackBerry is that both of these devices do one thing spectacularly well, and they also do a few other things passably enough to get by. For the iPhone, that one thing is media playback and digital commerce (via the iTunes store); for BlackBerry, the focus is on e-mail (though calendering is a close second).
Sure, RIM just jumped on the increasingly crowded App Store bandwagon, but as a platform the BlackBerry is really just a fantastic mobile e-mail client with a killer combination of enterprise messaging support (including remote wipe), battery life, calendering, and usability. Given this focus, it’s no coincidence that the keyboard takes up half of the interface of a typical BlackBerry—this is a device that’s tailor-made for constant two-way communication.
The iPhone, in contrast, is just a large screen, the main purpose of which is to show you things—pictures, video, webpages, maps. And its multitouch-based input scheme is less about two-way communication than it is about enabling you to manipulate and navigate the things that the screen is showing you.
Interfaces alone tell only part of the story, though. The iPhone works because it is seamlessly integrated into a unified media and e-commerce ecosystem that can quickly and easily deliver TV shows, movies, and music to a constellation of Apple devices, from a set-top box to a media player to a laptop. Even if the majority of iPhone users don’t live the Mac life, Apple’s phone still gives them access to that larger ecosystem by virtue of the fact that the device itself is an expression of it.
The BlackBerry, too, is part of a larger ecosystem—the world of enterprise messaging. The virtue of this system for business is that it plugs right into Exchange or Domino, so that you can use your existing infrastructure (plus RIM’s server-side package) to enable and centrally manage messaging and calendaring for a mobile workforce.
Synergy: Today the cloud…
My experience so far with the Pre is that it’s as good a messaging device as the iPhone is a media device. And while it has solid Exchange and push e-mail support, where webOS really excels—at least, for the moment—is in the way that it embeds the Pre seamlessly within the much-hyped “cloud” messaging ecosystem. This cloud messaging integration is most spectacularly showcased in the way that webOS handles contacts and instant messaging.
Pre’s approach to contacts is really the future of contact management. There’s a part in my interview with Russ Daniels, HP’s VP of Cloud Services Strategy, that I keep coming back to, where Russ is describing the hassle of syncing contacts between multiple devices; most of this hassle stems from the fact that devices tend to view your contacts database as pool of data, instead of a service.
What none of them do is the simple thing of, “tell me the URL for your contact service.” Additionally, it has to be a service, not a repository, because in fact the contact information that’s relevant for me includes the global address list for HP, and I have to be able to have that invoked… I can’t replicate that data and keep it synchronized, so I need to be able to use a federation model behind this single endpoint to answer those kinds of queries.
The Pre is the first device I’ve used that expects all contact data to come from a service instead of a repository. Give it your Google, Facebook, Exchange, or AIM credentials, and it pulls all of the contacts for those services down onto the device. Ultimately, webOS presumes that the canonical source for your contact data is a cloud or server somewhere, and that your phone merely acts as a local cache for this data. (In fact, webOS’s contact management is so service-oriented that it’s kind of a pain to access a traditional contact repository—like a standard vcard collection, for instance.)
When it comes to IM, having a Pre is basically like carrying a running copy of the Mac OS X messaging client Adium in your pocket. Those on my buddy list who IM me via either AIM or Gtalk can’t tell that I’m not at my laptop, and we’ll have an most of an IM conversation before I mention that I’m actually on the Pre. (I can’t decide if it’s a blessing or a curse that I’m now constantly available on IM while out and about, and that I can be so available all day without killing the battery, but it’s definitely a new experience.)
The webOS’s much-touted notification system is also a revelation, and it gives you the feeling of being constantly connected without being constantly interrupted. As a Mac user, the way that webOS pops up notifications at the bottom of the screen reminds me of the Growl service; the two are similar in that they notify you of an incoming message in a way that you can easily choose to ignore.
In all, Palm put as much effort into making the webOS a first-rate messaging experience as Apple did into making the iPhone a first-rate media experience, and with just as much success. So if most of your communication consists of Twitter, email, SMS, and IM with the people in your Facebook network and/or Gmail contacts list, then the Pre will do for your personal messaging what your work BlackBerry does for your business messaging. Furthermore, I’m sure that email, SMS, Twitter, and IM aren’t the end of it—I expect that things like Facebook updates will shortly be added to the list of notifications that can be pushed to you on the device. In short, if it’s an update or message that comes from a network service, it’s likely that the webOS’s Synergy component will support it eventually.
And, of course, Exchange- and Domino-based instant message integration is no doubt in the works as well. This will be necessary if Palm is to make headway in the enterprise.
Palm Profiles: …tomorrow the enterprise
One of the most underhyped yet important features of the Pre is its support for over-the-air backup/restore using Palm’s Profiles service. Like so many other Pre reviewers, my first review unit broke (the middle column of the keyboard stopped working). When Palm sent me a new unit, I used a built-in app to completely wipe the old one, and I did most of the setup on the new one by simply entering my Palm Profiles credentials. (Note that Palm doesn’t offer OTA wipes yet, but this would be a trivial tweak of what it already has. It does indeed have remote wipe already.) Once the new Pre authenticated me with Palm, it downloaded my apps, account information, and preferences, and after a reboot I was IMing and emailing again without having to reenter any of my data.
Note that if you log into Palm Profiles online, there isn’t much there. Palm has left this section pretty bare-bones, and I suspect that this is for a reason. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see that Palm can easily release an enterprise profile management server that would let corporate IT departments create and manage profiles for a mobile workforce. It might even just tie everything to your Exchange credentials, instead of having you make an extra set of mobile device credentials.
It’s likely that a future webOS enterprise scenario will look something like this:
When you’re hired, you’re issued a new or wiped Palm device along with log-in credentials for a corporate profile. On booting the device for the first time, you enter your credentials, and the device connects to the profile server and pulls down all of the apps and preferences that you’ve been assigned by IT. Your e-mail, IM, custom internal apps (CRM and the like), are all set up and ready to go as a result of that one initial log-in. And if you need access to more apps, you go to a private version of the App Catalog that has been customized for your company.
If you lose the device, IT can remote-wipe it and issue you a new one. Your profile, which has been backed up over-the-air, is still intact, and after logging into the profile server with your new device all your data is there.
Parting thoughts
Palm didn’t hire former Apple exec Jon Rubenstein, along with scores of former members of the iPhone team, so that the company that gave birth to the smartphone could finally compete with the company (Apple) that came along and killed it. Rather, Rubenstein and his crew appear to have set out with the goal of making a post-iPhone communication device that could do what the more media-centric Apple apparently has little interest in doing, i.e., go after CrackBerry addicts, some of whom still tote two phones (a personal phone and a BlackBerry for work), and get them to ditch both mobiles for a single device that combines some of the style and media savvy of the iPhone with the messaging prowess of RIM’s enterprise-dominating mobile line.
With Synergy, Palm Profiles, and the Pre’s existing wipe capabilities, all of the pieces are there for handing over complete control of the Pre to a corporate IT department. And Palm is already second only to RIM in existing enterprise relationships, since its smartphones have been standard issue at many businesses for years (Conde Nast included). So the company is set to take on BlackBerry directly in the enterprise, leaving Apple to continue to dominate the media space with its iPhone and iTunes Store ecosystem.
Stay tuned for part 2 of the review, in which we take a detailed look at the Palm’s hardware, software, and power usage.
Ars reviews the Palm Pre: the webOS experience
In this second installment of our Palm Pre review, we go in-depth on the software side of the device. Does Palm’s webOS really live up to its promise as a “cloud” messaging mobile? More on this topic, as well as the calendar, browser, contacts, alerts, dialer, and other features, inside.
In Part I of our review of the Palm Pre and webOS, I attempted to place Palm’s new mobile phone within its proper context as a cloud messaging device. The focus of that installment was on showing how Palm plans to do for social networking and cloud-based messaging what the BlackBerry did for business email and what the iPhone did for portable media. In this respect, Palm is ultimately aiming at the business market, which is dominated by RIM.
But there’s no denying that, whatever Palm’s ultimate goals with their nascent line of webOS-based phones, consumers are still evaluating the Pre and the iPhone side-by-side. And this is appropriate, because the Pre is the first phone to actually take the iPhone as a starting point and build on it, as opposed to merely attempting to ape certain aspects of Apple’s groundbreaking interface.
So in this installment, I’ll shift from the Pre/BlackBerry discussion of the Part I to a more detailed contrast with Apple’s iPhone. The iPhone contrast is useful from a UI and usability perspective, because the webOS represents an attempt to take what worked in the iPhone’s interface and adapt it to a different information management paradigm (more on this below).
Ultimately, all comparisons and contrasts with RIM and Apple products aside, this review is an attempt to evaluate the Pre on its home turf—as a cloud communication device and mobile multitasking application platform. There’s another installment to be written about the Pre’s media capabilities (photos, bluetooth stereo, audio and video playback, battery life during media playback, etc.) and how well it does or doesn’t fit in the iLife ecosystem, and if there’s demand for that I can do it as a third installment.
Starting points
Many of the comments on Part I of this review are perfect examples of the fact that our focus on where a particular device is now—or where it might go with the next update—often completely crowds out any memory of where that device started. In the iPhone’s case, whatever Apple’s mobile may have evolved into, its origins are very straightforward: in the keynote that introduced the iPhone to the world, Jobs described the device as a fusion of three products: a “widescreen iPod with touch controls,” a phone, and an “Internet communications device”. And thus it remains; the iPhone is a widescreen, networked media player that also does a bunch of other stuff, telephony and Internet included.
The Pre, in contrast, was introduced by Rubenstein as a cloud messaging device that also does a bunch of other stuff, media playback included. And this primary messaging orientation has had as deep an impact on every aspect of webOS as the iPhone’s media orientation has had on the iPhone OS.
To take a step back for a moment, it’s useful to contrast where the iPhone and the Pre started out in the areas of connections and sync, interface, and multitasking.
iPhone OS
- Connections and sync: Tethered to a single computer (later to a single MobileMe account), and linked to a set of application-specific data silos. The data silos are a finite repository of structured data that is organized for browsing.
- Interface: A single touchscreen, designed for browsing, display, and object manipulation.
- Multitasking: You’re supposed to be doing one thing at a time.
webOS
- Connections and sync: All data comes from a service, not a repository.
- Interface: A hardware keyboard/touchscreen combo that expects you to search, filter, and query to locate records.
- Multitasking: Multitasking is presumed from the start, since the communications apps run as background processes.
The contrasts above represent the lens through which you can view nearly all aspects of the two devices’ respective designs, both the good and the bad. But there’s an even deeper, more fundamental contrast expressed in the lists above, and it goes to the heart of how we organize and discover information.
Yahoo, Google, and the Wheel of (Web) Reincarnation
One of the established truths of the past 50 years of computing is that the same basic problems crop up over and over again in different forms, so that technological advances are less of a linear march forward than they are a sort of spiral that turns the same corners again and again, but on a different level with each rotation.
The same dynamic is at work on the Web, and in my 15 years of using the Internet I’ve seen the experience of information discovery and management move back and forth between two distinct paradigms. The first of these paradigms is exemplified by the early Yahoo! directory, and I’ll call it the structure-and-browse paradigm. The idea here is that with a small enough data flow, you can manage incoming information by structuring it yourself, the way that Yahoo! used humans to sort newly created webpages into categories, creating a kind of giant card catalog for the Internet. You then browse the resulting structure in order to find what you’re looking for.
There’s a threshold, though, beyond which the volume of data is so high that structure-and-browse becomes a losing battle. It’s at this point that the second paradigm, which I’ll call collect-and-query, becomes the best way to deal with the mass of unstructured data. This latter paradigm is exemplified by Google’s approach to information discovery, and it always comes second because it involves swapping human effort for a combination of storage (=collect), bandwidth, and compute cycles (=query). So these resources have to become cheap enough relative to person-hours to make this tradeoff work.
The contrast between the iPhone OS and Palm’s webOS exemplifies the latest turn of this wheel, driven by the same dynamic of ever-cheapening processor cycles, bandwidth, and storage.
To recap a bit from the previous installment of this review, the iPhone—and, indeed, the entire Apple ecosystem—presumes that your contacts exist as an information repository, the canonical copy of which exists either on your Mac or on the company’s MobileMe servers. It’s up to you to actively curate this repository, adding structure to it by putting contacts into groups and generally organizing the repository so that it’s easily browsable.
This structure-and-browse approach is a great, time-honored way to manage a finite collection of digital objects (media files are the best examples), and Apple has perfected it across its entire line of products, including the iPhone. Browsing structured data is, in fact, the default mode of interaction with every single Apple product—from the Finder to iTunes to the iPod and iPhone.
Palm’s webOS, in contrast, is built around the collect-and-query paradigm. The current crop of default apps presume, fairly consistently, that the first thing you’ll do by way of interacting with them is to begin typing on the hardware keyboard. Maybe you’re looking for a specific contact, app, or Web history item—regardless, webOS wants you to start typing, even in situations where you also have the option to browse.
At the core of this approach is the global search menu, which Rubenstein rightly made a big deal of in his CES keynote. If you open the Pre and start typing, global search starts combing your apps, contacts, Web bookmarks, and other on-device directories, and if it can’t find a match there it offers you the option of searching Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter.
Note that if you start typing on the keys that double as a number pad, it gives you the option to dial a number first:
In the screenshot above, you can see that the search box interprets my input as both the number 5 and the letter “F” simultaneously.
As we go through the major features of the Pre, we’ll see this collect-and-query approach play out time and time again, in the way that different applications work. And in the few places where it’s conspicuously absent, we’ll notice the omission all the more.
Launching applications
One of the first places where typing can get you there faster than browsing is when you launch applications with webOS. From the desktop view, when you type the first letter of an app’s name a results screen will appear that surfaces matching apps as you enter characters.
Typing a second letter will begin to bring up contacts at the bottom of the screen, while narrowing the list of apps even further.
If you have the keyboard open, this is the best way to launch rarely used apps. Otherwise, you’ll have to browse for apps using the webOS app launcher, which is activated from the launch bar at the bottom of the webOS screen by pressing the small up arrow:
A close examination of the screenshot above will tell you a lot about how this launcher organizes apps.
First, you can scroll down to reach more rows of icons, as indicated by the white arrow at the bottom of the screen. The two white lines to the right of that arrow are the equivalent of the white dots underneath the iPhone’s app launcher screen, and they tell you that there are two more pages worth of apps.
You browse through pages of app icons in the same way you do on the iPhone, by flicking left and right. And, as with the iPhone, the permanent row of icons, which I’m calling the launch bar, stays on the screen at all times.
The card metaphor, and how Apple got stuck with a Windows 3.1 idea
One of the biggest advantages that webOS has going for it vs. even iPhone OS 3.0 is not so much technological as it is metaphorical. While Apple’s phone may finally have official (albeit limited) support for multitasking, the webOS card metaphor gives users a workable way to actually manage multiple open apps.
When an app launches, it spawns an “activity card” that’s dealt up from the bottom of the screen. These cards are laid out horizontally in the interface, and you scroll through them by dragging left or right. You can also rearrange them by tapping and holding on one card to zoom out, and then swapping them around to change the order.
The cards are very much analogous to windows on the Mac, in that one app can spawn multiple cards, with no single card functioning as the “main application window.” In the screenshot below, you can see that I’ve got a browser card open to Ars, then a calendar card, then a browser card open to Google News, in that order.
You’ll notice that webOS’s cards look almost exactly like the multi-webpage interface on the iPhone, which Safari uses to let you navigate between multiple open webpages in exactly the same fashion as webOS moves between activity cards. But, in an ironic twist, Apple’ OS forces on users and developers what is essentially Windows’ much-maligned Multiple Document Interface (MDI)—you first have to launch the main Safari interface, which can then spawn multiple child windows.
Short of completely overhauling the iPhone interface to truly accommodate multitasking, I can’t see how Apple is going to escape from this MDI decision.
Of course, activity cards aren’t perfect. The biggest problem right now is that Palm has placed a small tab at the top that hides a drop-down menu, allows you to access app preferences, copy/paste, as well as a few other app-specific functions.
But this tab is tiny and difficult to activate. I find that I’m rarely able to hit it on the first tap. The issue is exacerbated in applications like the calendar app pictured above, where there’s another interface element just pixels away from the tab. (In this case, tapping the date brings up a “Jump to date” function.)
While Palm is stealing Apple tricks, it should’ve stolen the “flip the widget over to configure” metaphor that’s used in Dashboard. Every activity card should have a backside that contains all of the functionality of this tab.
At the very least, if Palm is going to keep the tab then it needs to give users a new gesture for bringing it up.
Gesture region
The Pre’s gesture region is a fantastic idea with more potential than Palm is currently tapping with webOS. This region is a portion of the touchscreen that extends below the visible display area, where users interact with the interface by making gestures.
Though it’s basically just a small trackpad, the real benefit to the gesture region is that it saves already-crowded mobile screen real estate by enabling webOS to replace some interface widgets with a limited vocabulary of flicks, taps, and swipes.
The backward swipe, which is the webOS’s universal equivalent of a browser’s back button, is so useful that I find myself doing it on my iPhone by accident. Within a card’s subscreen—like a preferences screen—the back swipe takes you to the main screen. Or, if you’re on the main screen, the swipe zooms back out and brings up the deck for you to thumb through.
Related to the backwards swipe is the upward flick. If you’re in any app subscreen—e.g., you’re editing a memo in the Pre’s memo pad application—flicking up will zoom the card out and let you thumb through the open cards. And if you’re in the zoomed-out mode, flicking up again will bring up the launcher. Flicking up with the launcher open also closes it, as does the backward swipe.
Finally, there’s the famous “wave” gesture, which Palm calls “quick launch.” Quick launch involves tapping and holding in the gesture region, then moving your thumb up into the visible area to bring up the launch bar, from which you can launch the dialer, contacts, mail, calendar, or the launcher app. I find myself using this a lot, and it highlights one of the strengths of the webOS interface: there are often multiple ways to do the same thing, so you can use the method that comes naturally. In some cases, more than one gesture will zoom out to the desktop and then hit one of the launch bar items, or you can just use the quick launch gesture to go there directly.
But as cool as it is, the gesture area ultimately feels under-utilized. Palm could add in a number of other shortcuts, or even offer programmable gestures to app developers or end users. I bet that if Palm opens the gesture region to developers, it’ll be surprised at what people come up with.
Address Books: contrasting approaches
The iPhone’s address book, just like its iPod app, expects you to immediately begin browsing for the desired record on launch, so it contains little touches that help you drill down faster through your collection. Of course, you still can query the iPhone’s contacts database and get live results, but there are more steps involved: first you have to touch the search box to bring up the soft keyboard, and then you can begin typing the name of the contact that you’re looking for. This initial step of bringing up the soft keyboard is necessary because the entire device is designed around the structure-and-browse paradigm, so the default mode of user interaction for the iPhone is that of browsing a structured collection (of contacts, of music, of applications, etc.).
Good luck browsing the Pre’s address book—as most reviewers have pointed out, it’s a mess. The webOS expects contacts to exist as a collection of federated services that you query, not as a structured, browsable repository. So when you add contact services—Google, Exchange, Facebook, AIM—to the Pre, it dumps all of the contacts that it pulls from these services into one impossibly long alphabetical list (mine is about 450 entries).
When you launch the Pre’s address book, you’re supposed to just start typing the name of the contact that you’re looking for on the built-in keyboard, and let webOS zero in on the desired record. If you try browsing for the desired contact, you’re wasting your time, because the data is just not structured for this kind of discovery. Pre wants you to query a service, not browse a repository.
Or, rather, it’s more accurate to say that Pre wants you to filter a pre-sorted records list from a federated query that is regularly run against all of the contact services that you’ve added to the device.
Pre uses this query to pull in phone numbers, birthdays, and any other info that your friends have shared with you on Facebook, or that other contacts services like Google and Exchange have provided, and attempts to consolidate the info from all of these services into a single entry per person. Even your contacts’ pictures get pulled in and added to a single contact card, if they’re available.
Links, queries, and the webOS address book
Pre’s address book may be a superior way to wrangle the torrent of contact data that the cloud deluges us with, but its approach isn’t without a downside. In particular, webOS’s problem isn’t with the “query” part of the paradigm, but with the “collect” part. And most importantly for Palm, the problems I’m going to outline below are inherent in the approach that Palm has chosen, which means it’s going to require some real problem-solving to get around them.
First, let’s talk about the webOS concept of “links.” It’s easier to show you an example of links than to explain it, so below is the address book entry for my good friend Taylor Guillory, aka Mr. Britches on Facebook.
I connect with Taylor via email, IM, and Facebook, and the Pre has profiles for all three accounts in the entry above. On Facebook, however, Taylor doesn’t use his real name; he just goes by “Mr. Britches” in his profile. Furthermore, neither of the email addresses that I have for him in my Google Contacts database match the address that his Facebook profile has. Yet, somehow, after collecting contact info for Taylor from both Google and Facebook, Pre has figured out that these two profiles belong to the same person, and has linked them together into a single address book entry.
If Taylor had another email address lurking somewhere in that list of 450 contacts on my phone, I could press the “Link more profiles” button, find the new address, and manually link it to his main profile.
Now, there are two problems with the links that Taylor’s profile illustrates, a problem with the auto-generated links and a problem with the manual ones.
Profile link problems
First, the auto-generated links: I’m not entirely sure how Pre did this, nor am I sure why it did not make this same connection the first time I loaded up my initial review unit (the one that broke) with these same contacts. On that first Pre, Taylor and Mr. Britches were two separate entries with no automatic link between them.
And here’s another mystery: webOS erroneously linked my profile with that of a random friend of mine, even though we have no contact info in common. After removing my Google account from the phone and doing a bunch of random mucking about with and pruning of my Google Contacts database, it did not make this erroneous link a second time when I put the Google account back in.
So the problem with the auto-generation of profile links is that it’s not always 100 percent accurate, and the way in which it makes its determinations about what goes with what isn’t apparent to or under the control of the end user. So when I searched for my friend Alan and my own profile came up, with his email address and number added to it, I had no idea what the Pre was thinking. But I know what I was thinking, and it was “welcome to the world of collect-and-query, where you take the search results that the computer gives you, and they’re not always perfect.”
Now for the problem with manually linking profiles: there’s no way to save these links outside of the device, since Palm Profiles doesn’t appear to back them up. So if I invest a bunch of time in making links between different profiles, and then my Pre breaks (as my first one did), I’ll lose all of that effort.
It’s possible that Palm has a plan to remedy this by backing up the links so that they persist across devices, but it’s hard to square that idea with the concept of a purely service-based contact list that’s essentially a list of live query results.
You can’t back up links between query results without also backing up the results, so the idea that Palm Profiles will store the links between address book profiles necessarily presumes that Palm will also store some copy or representation (a hash?) of the linked contact entries. Palm may indeed opt to go this route, but the company will have to be careful to navigate any privacy issues arising from the fact that it’s caching representations of a subset of some third-party service’s contact data.
In conclusion, webOS’s profile links are a hack that lets Palm implement federated search in a manner that’s intended to reduce the amount of post-query browsing and sorting of results that the user must do. In this respect, Palm is trying to have it both ways—links are intended to add structure to the data that the device has cached from your services, but only just a little bit, and only once (you hope). So the links are a concession to the fact that queries run against unstructured data that doesn’t always surface the desired record first.
Final thoughts on the address books
So where does all of this abstract discussion of paradigms and links and queries leave the Palm Pre? Well, I’ll tell you where it left me. I spent about 45 minutes one evening consolidating all of my contact info into Google Contacts, and then pruning and merging the resulting database so that the Pre would be less confused by it. And I’m still not done deleting old email addresses that Gmail has saved.
Even so, I still much prefer Pre’s approach to contact management. I’d rather spend my time massaging a massive dataset so that it generates better query results than manually organizing a much smaller one for rapid browsability. It’s also the case that services like Facebook, Google Contacts, Exchange, etc. might one day become aware that they’re being used in a federated fashion, and find ways to include explicit support for such use.
Messaging, alerts, unification
One of the great strengths of the webOS is its alerts system, which I described in Part I as a mobile version of the OS X app, Growl. Like Growl, the alerts feature innocuously notifies you of incoming messages and alarms, but without interrupting your work flow. And, like Growl, you sometimes wish it would shut up already and go away.
As is often the case with webOS, the platform’s facility in collecting information via Synergy and putting it in front of you can result in mild information overload. Right now, in my alerts, I have a spam message, a voicemail from some unknown number (probably a PR person), and an IM from Ars managing editor Eric Bangeman; only one of those has any priority, but I have to keep seeing all three alerts until I’ve read/heard the corresponding messages. Indeed, webOS presumes that you have decent server-side spam filtering, because if you don’t, be prepared to be notified about every herbal Viagra offer that makes its way into your inbox.
WebOS needs a way to dismiss incoming alerts so that you don’t see them again. (I just learned that you can slide the alerts off the side to dismiss them. So, problem solved!) It also needs a way to prioritize alerts by type. For instance, I really don’t use voicemail, so I want to be able to prioritize what alert types are most important. In short, webOS needs to give the user back some of the control over incoming information that Synergy takes away. Let me elaborate on the “takes away” part.
In experiencing the Pre’s constant stream of alerts—alarms, calendar events, voicemails, IMs, emails, Twitter updates, etc.—I began to realize just how much I had been unconsciously relying on the normal division of message types by application/service to do message and contact management. In other words, if I want to see what someone is saying Facebook, I launch the Facebook app on my iPhone or load the Facebook page in my browser; for Twitter, I check my Twitter client; and so on.
Indeed, on most platforms—Windows, Mac, the iPhone, Android, etc.—cloud communication is divided up into silos by application and/or URL. So even though the same physical person may be behind a tweet, an IM, and a Facebook status update, these three message types typically present themselves to recipients as originating from three different profiles on three different networks.
With the iPhone, separate apps with their round, red “updates” badges impose a structure on updates and alerts; so you don’t get an undifferentiated stream of alerts pushed at you. At a glance, you can check the iPhone screen to see which services have updates for you, and you select those services manually and view the messages. So even though 3.0 finally brings a semblance of real “push” messaging, you still have to “poll” the apps yourself for udpates. This polling requirement is actually a blessing if you get a lot of low-priority inbound messages.
Palm needs to come up with some way to bring back some type of order to the alert stream, because when Facebook updates and FriendFeed updates and all the rest of the cloud messaging and social networking applications eventually find their way to the bottom of the Pre’s screen, it’s going to be a complete mess.
The answer will ultimately be to give users some sort of control of the alerts space via a filtering and prioritization tool, but it remains to be seen how Palm will actually implement this.
Since the Pre is centered around messaging, it’s no surprise that its mail application is first-class. I’ll enumerate all the wonders of Pre’s email in a moment, but first, given the theme of this article, I have to start with its main shortcoming: it doesn’t use the collect-and-query paradigm at all. There is no search, so you’re stuck with browsing.
Given the search-centric nature of the webOS, the mail app’s lack of any sort of search is a major, jarring omission. And to make matters worse, this lack of search, when coupled with the phone’s robust support for things Google, means that users of Gmail on the Pre will actually be missing critical functionality (search) that they get with the Gmail client on the iPhone.
Indeed, search is absent from the entire, Synergy-based messaging experience the device. You can’t search mail, and you can’t search IMs, SMSes, or any of the other types of messages that the webOS supports.
I can’t imagine that this glaring error won’t be fixed in the next major revision of webOS; the only possible explanation for its absence in the launch release is that Palm didn’t have time to implement it. But the company will have to fix this, if only to maintain consistency with the rest of the webOS experience.
As for what webOS does right with mail, the answer is “plenty.” By far the best feature is the “Favorites” section of the main screen that opens when you launch mail application.
You’ll see in the picture on the right there are three sections of this screen: “Favorites,” and my two mail accounts. Tapping the disclosure triangle for “Favorites” expands this section to show a list of mailboxes that I’ve flagged for the app.
The first two mailboxes are smart mailboxes—the only two such live query-type mailboxes available on the current iteration of the app. The names of these are self-explanatory (the first lumps all your incoming mail into one view, and the second all your flagged items), and they can be turned on and off individually. (Note to Palm: the first time I turned off “All inboxes” and then turned it back on, it refused to reappear. Only a complete reboot fixed the issue.)
Moving down the screen, you’ll see that I’ve marked the following mailboxes from my Ars IMAP and Gmail accounts as “favorites”: Ars inbox, Ars Sent mail, Gmail inbox, and Gmail starred items.
This favorite function works for any of the folders on my IMAP account, including drafts and other special folders:
By tapping the star next to any one of these folders, I can cause it to show up in the Favorites section.
The favorites function also works with Gmail labels, and highlights another great example of webOS’s stellar Google Apps integration (which, again, makes the lack of message search so jarring).
All of the Gmail labels show up as folders that you can favorite, as do the special-purpose, system-generated folders like Drafts, Starred, Spam, Trash, etc.
If you’re a Gmail power user who can do without message search, then you’re going to love the ability to set up custom filters using labels and have them show right up in Favorites.
In case you’re curious, above is a shot of a message with an attachment, and another shot of a message with images in it. If the attachment is a PDF (if I could use search I’d find one for a screenshot) you can download it and view it directly in the Pre’s built-in PDF viewer.
Before leaving the topic of the mail app, I have to lodge a final complaint. In the shot below, you’ll see a little yellow alert triangle next to my inbox unread count. This is telling me that mail can’t get my messages. The problem is that tapping on that alert triangle does nothing, so there’s no way for me to view the error that’s being generated in order to troubleshoot the problem. I had this issue quite a bit in the first week, and it griped me to no end that I couldn’t view some sort of error log to find out what the problem was.
Finally, I haven’t touched on the topic of the Pre’s integration with Exchange. Reader feedback indicates that there are a few kinks to be worked out in that area, most of which stem from the fact that webOS doesn’t understand categories. So calendars, contacts, and tasks don’t recognize any category assignments that are made in Exchange, and, in fact, if you edit an item on the Pre, webOS will reset its Exchange category to “none.” (A reader wrote in to flag this, and Ars forum mod Kurt Hutchinson confirms it).
Calendar
The webOS calendar is another place with no search functionality, but here the lack makes considerably more sense. In terms of its browsability, this calendar is considerably more useful than its iPhone counterpart. Specifically, it has the all-important week view that the iPhone lacks.
And then there’s the month view:
Finally, the shot below shows a single day, with a few appointments (one duplicate) and a two-hour block of free time. The free time does the accordion/compression thing that Rubenstein showed off in his CES keynote, and it’s nice because it cuts down on the amount of scrolling you have to do on relatively open days.
Tapping the top bar lets you jump to a specific date, which is nice:
In all, I don’t have any gripes about the calendar, but that’s because I’m a Google/iCal user. Exchange users may have a different experience, given the aforementioned lack of support for categories.
Dialer
The Pre’s dialer app is the one place where I really miss the iPhone. First off, it needs a “Favorites” page for commonly dialed contacts that it can default to. As big as I am on the keyboard search, I really just want to dial a very small selection of numbers, so I hope Palm puts this into a future update.
On launching the dialer, you can immediately begin dialing a number via the on-screen keypad or the built-in keyboard. If you want to search contacts, you’ll have to tap inside the “Enter number” region at the top, which will take you to your contacts list.
Seriously, Palm, please give us a “Favorites” screen.
The other part of the dialer that makes me pine for the iPhone is the voicemail—it’s back to plain old “press 7 to delete, 9 to save” voicemail for me. This is painful, since I was addicted to Apple’s visual voicemail.
(If Google Voice would launch a native Pre app, then this issue would suddenly go away, and it would be visual voicemail + autogenerated transcriptions.)
In other news, the Pre’s ringtone selection is horrid—Apple has Palm beat hands-down here. Maybe this is my Apple snobbery talking, but I found them all to be uniformly grating and awful. For the first time in my life, I’ll be using a musical ringtone, which is easy enough to set.
In all, the Pre’s dialer feels like a bit of an afterthought, but I rarely make mobile voice calls anymore, so I can live with that.
App Catalog
The Palm App catalog is still in Beta, so I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it.
As is the case with all live network services where the phone can’t cache the data, that search box up top doesn’t do live pattern matching. You have to type in a search term and hit the return key to get results back.
Check out the shot above, and notice the tiny blue arrow in the top corner of the AccuWeather icon. That arrow tells you there’s a new version of that app for you to download. If you want to update all your apps, you can either find them in the catalog, tap them, and then tap “update,” or you can just run the separate “Updates” app to do them all at once.*
* Note: I wasn’t initially aware of the updates feature, but initial feedback brought it to my attention.
Web Browser
Palm’s WebKit-based mobile browser is excellent, and matches Apple’s point-for-point on performance and usability. The iPhone’s vocabulary of multitouch gestures works on the Pre—pinch and double-tap to zoom in and out, drag to scrub around the page—and the performance is top-notch.
When you first launch the browser, you’ll be greeted by the favorites screen, which is essentially a thumbnail grid of your bookmarks. (If you want to reorder the icons, you’ll have to go into the “Bookmarks” menu of the browser and change the listed order.)
Typing in the top bar brings up the Web search menu, with Google and Wikipedia search options at the top and your bookmarks and history items at the bottom.
The browser pull-down menu has quite a few entries, and I’ll walk you through the most important ones below.
The “Page” menu offers you the option to add a page to the main app launcher or to email it. Here’s the default email message that you get if you tap “Share”:
You also get the option to bookmark a page, or, you can go to the bookmarks screen from within the launcher to scroll through your bookmarks that way.
The browser preferences screen offers the following options:
In the end, the browser is one of the strong points of the Pre experience in terms of speed, features, and usability. And the fact that your browser history items show up in the webOS global search is a big bonus as well.
The Pre Hardware
The physical aspects of the Pre hardware have been done to death elsewhere, and anyone who’s serious about purchasing one is going to drop by a retail outlet and check it out for themselves at this point, but I do want to say a few words on the topic.
The Pre’s small size is nice, but Apple is definitely onto something with their whole thinness obsession. Despite being shorter than an iPhone, the Pre feels bulkier because it bulges further out of my pockets. I’d settle for a larger phone if they made it thinner.
Likewise with the keyboard, which, even with my large hands, I find to work much better than the iPhone’s keyboard (even in landscape mode). But it’s still not a BlackBerry keyboard—it’s just a tiny bit too cramped, and I would’ve rather had a slightly wider form factor with a more comfortable keyboard.
The unit’s screen is excellent—it’s very viewable in many different light conditions, including direct sunlight. It’s a bit smaller physically than the iPhone screen (3.1″ vs. the iPhone’s 3.5), but the 480×320 resolution is identical. As I pointed out in my discussion of the gesture region, I think the Pre makes a bit better use of its real estate because it effectively has a touchpad beneath the screen that lets it replace some of the iPhone’s UI elements. But this efficiency is application-specific, so your mileage may vary.
As for interacting with the multitouch screen, I wish it were a little more responsive. This issue mainly shows up in the Web browser, where it seems tougher than it should be to click links. In fact, the iPhone seems to be a lot better at figuring out where you’re trying to tap than the Pre is—it’s almost as if Palm’s device interprets taps in a more “literal” manner that requires them to be accurate, whereas the iPhone is able to target the right on-screen element if you get near enough to it.
As many other commentators have remarked, there’s a bit of “give” in mechanism that lets you slide the keyboard out. I thought in the beginning that this was a feature, not a bug—that if the mechanism were too tight then it might not open as easily. But that give is actually absent in the second review unit I got, and in the retail unit that I now own. So it was very noticeable in the first unit, but it’s now absent. Clearly, Palm had some quality control issues with the first batch of phones, but I hope that these are behind them now.
As you can see in the above shot of the back of the phone, there’s a mirror in the slide-out portion of the device. I presume this little touch is there in case you get lost in the wilderness, and you need a signal mirror to catch the attention of passing aircraft, because that’s about all it’s good for… unless you actually enjoy the funhouse aspect.
The camera is 3.2MP with a built-in flash, and it takes pretty good pictures. Below is a shot that I took in my back yard at mid-day.
Charger and battery
The phone’s battery life is adequate but not stellar, and I found that after a day of moderate activity with WiFi and Bluetooth enabled I’d need to charge it. But I can generally use it for about 12 hours between charges, IMing regularly, doing email, and some light surfing.
Palm also shipped me a Touchstone charger for review, and I quite like it, though I’m not sure it’s worth the extra $70 that they charge for it. As you can see from the picture, where I’ve attached it to the side of a bookcase, it sticks to everything without leaving a mark.
I did run into one problem with the charger, though. On one occasion I left the phone out overnight and the battery was completely dead by the morning. So when I placed the dead phone on the Touchstone charger, the screen lit up with a “your battery’s dead” icon, and stayed that way for about four hours.
I finally got tired of waiting for it to change, so I took the phone off the charger to no effect—the screen was frozen with this dead battery icon on it, and no amount of power-button-mashing would wake it. I eventually had to remove the battery to effect a hard reset, and after the phone rebooted I found that it had only charged a little this entire time. This sounds like a firmware issue that Palm will need to fix.
Speaking of the removable battery, I’m eager to get my hands on a spare for my upcoming summer vacation, but no Sprint or Best Buy in the San Francisco area seems to have any in stock.
Unboxing and accessories
Though it’s customary across the Web to start every gadget review with unboxing photos and a list of included accessories, I never quite got the point of putting the least important information up front.
Clearly, Palm has taken a page from the Apple playbook in compressing their items into a small, slickly designed package. Included with the Pre are a USB cable, a wall charger, a set of black headphones, and a little orange and black pouch. (The pouch is kind of cute, but I’m not sure why they bothered.) The USB cable is a micro-B cable, so the cables that work with your digital camera won’t be compatible. (I initially thought it was proprietary and said so here, but I don’t know what’s worse about this: that the people at the Sprint store all insisted that the cable was a proprietary Palm connector, or that I actually believed them.)
The round charger attachment that plugs into the wall is larger than the comparable attachment for the iPhone, and I doubt that was necessary. Apple has the right idea in making these accessories as compact as possible, and Palm should follow suit.
The headphones are remarkable only in that they’re black with chrome accents, instead of iPhone white, so in this respect they seem a bit retro, like maybe I should be listening to the Top Gun soundtrack through them. But fortunately, the standard iPhone headphones work with the Pre, down to clicking once to pause/play, and twice to skip forward.
Conclusions
In the final accounting, what Rubenstein and Palm have done is taken many of ideas that worked in the iPhone and translated them into a new niche (cloud messaging) that begins with new assumptions (data comes through a service, information discovery happens via a collect-and-query approach, users will be multitasking most of the time) and ends at a place that’s much different than Apple’s handheld.
Users who are already wonderfully served by Apple’s portable should probably not bother with the Pre. But if you’re like me and you felt that the iPhone, even in its post-MobileMe incarnation, never quite made sense as an Internet- and cloud-centric messaging device, then the Pre may be the answer to your prayers.
But this isn’t to say that Palm’s new handheld and platform are without their flaws. The webOS in particular is unfinished, in that Palm hasn’t given nearly enough thought to necessary refinements like email search, and some amount of user control over alerts. Palm also has a hard problem on its hands with the contacts and links issue, and it’s not clear how they’re going to sort that out. My guess is that they’ll keep tweaking whatever algorithm generates the links, and that they’ll also do something to make the contact browsing experience less painful (for folks who just have to browse).
So right now, it’s obvious that Pre is a 1.0 product, but it’s also clear that it’s a fantastic start. If Palm can continue to refine webOS and to offer new models in different form factors, then the sky’s the limit for where this platform can go.
