Indecision and excitement
By The Prodigal Fool, published on 8 January 2009
Regular readers will know that we’re a little schizophrenic when it comes to our smartphones. We adore the iPhone for its elegance and the simplicity of its user interface but bemoan its lack of features and ever increasing ubiquity. We love the Nokia E90 for its phenomenal screen, big keyboard and great camera but shy away from the sheer size of the thing.
Until now, we’ve settled on the wonderful Nokia E71 as the perfect compromise. The best smartphone on the market in our view.
Until now.
In the last month or so we’ve seen announcements from both Palm and Nokia that throw that happy balance out of the window once more.
The first salvo came from Nokia in December when it announced its new N97.
This seriously impressive looking device seems to combine the best parts of Nokia’s N series (high-quality, 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss stills and video camera, N-gage gaming platform, and fantastic media playing capabilities) with those things we love about our E90 (a big, wide screen and a nicely sized physical QWERTY keyboard).
And if that wasn’t already quite enough to entice us, Nokia have thrown in just a little iPhone-like magic, with a finger-based touch screen version of their S60 operating system and a dynamic widget approach which allows you to display all the information that matters to you – such as inbox contents, upcoming diary items and favourite contacts, but also social media or news feeds like Facebook and Flickr – directly on your home screen. Impressive indeed.
So just as we were sitting back comfortably, secure in the knowledge that we’d identified 2009′s best new smartphone, a funny thing happened…
Today in Las Vegas, Palm, a company that most – including the Guide – had long since written off as ‘past it’, announced a smartphone so impressive, so forward-thinking, so cleverly integrated, so well thought through, that it has the potential to wipe the floor with the iPhone and anything Nokia can throw at it.
The Palm Pre has a gorgeous multitouch portrait screen and a slide-down physical QWERTY keyboard all wrapped in a sexy yet compact form factor that leaves the iPhone and N97 looking rather chubby. There’s something organic about the design that fills us with confidence that it’s going to feel great in the hand.
But the hardware is actually the least impressive aspect of the device. The real magic is the new Palm webOS. Unlike Apple, Palm seem to have nailed the art of multi-tasking – not just from a technical perspective but from a user’s viewpoint. The Pre relies on a system of virtual cards that represent open applications, cards that you can flip through with ease or discard as needed. Very elegant indeed.
The OS is also just plain gorgeous, very intuitive it would seem and certainly making great use of screen real estate (something Nokia is not good at).
But the most impressive and the most innovative aspect of the Pre is the way it integrates with other online services. So, for example, the contacts database draws information from all your social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc.); the messaging client shows you your communications with an individual in threaded form regardless of how you’ve been interacting with them: email, SMS, MMS, whatever – it’s all there in one place; and the search function (which launches as soon as you start typing anything from the home screen) searches all your content as well as the Internet itself. Very, very cool stuff.
But to really get a feel for the interface, you need to see it in action. The video above from Stuff Magazine gives you a great overview.
For a variety of reasons, media capture is high up on our list of priorities at the moment and for this reason the N97 might still win its place at the top of our list (the Pre sports a 3 megapixel stills camera – no word on video capture frame rates) but the Pre is clearly the most innovative smartphone to be announced since the iPhone. In one fell swoop Palm has leapfrogged the competition and found itself ahead of everyone else in terms of features, design and just plain desirability.
2009 is shaping up as a vintage year in the smartphone world. And the Guide is now indecisive and excited in equal measure.
For more on the Palm Pre, read Treonaut’s excellent review roundup.
Indecision and excitement
Regular readers will know that we’re a little schizophrenic when it comes to our smartphones. We adore the iPhone for its elegance and the simplicity of its user interface but bemoan its lack of features and ever increasing ubiquity. We love the Nokia E90 for its phenomenal screen, big keyboard and great camera but shy [...]
