...more recent posts
A few days after me, UNIX turns 40 years old.
jQuery Tools looks really nice.
Palm released it's new phone, the Pre, yesterday. A bunch of the usual suspects received review units ahead of time, and their reviews pretty much all agree. It's a very nice phone.
This is an interesting story because Palm was basically dead. They went from complete control of the electronic pocket organizer market space to nothing very quickly. They literally almost went out of business. Then in a last ditch effort to save the company Palm hired Jon Rubinstein and gave him complete control to build a new team and design a product that would save their lives. Rubinstein had been through this before when he worked at Apple and had a hand in creating both the original gumdrop iMac, which saved Apple from a similar extinction, and the original iPod, which launched them into the profitability stratosphere.
And it looks like it worked. To be way too short about summing up the reviews and initial impressions I'll say: it's basically as good as the iPhone but with a hardware qwerty keyboard, without visual voicemail and without an enormous and often very inexpensive app store, and runs on Sprint instead of AT&T.
Whether that sounds a little better than the iPhone or a little worse depends on the viewer, and probably mostly turns on the keyboard issue.
Still, for how well Palm seems to have done with the Pre, will it matter? The iPhone has a massive head start. And WWDC (Apple's yearly conference for independent software developers) starts on Monday where it is widely anticipated that Apple will release the new iPhone. Nice timing. Being basically as good as the iPhone may not last for too long.
I may take a look at the Pre, but I think I'll be buying the new iPhone.