“Palm impressed CES attendees this year with the unveiling of a new smartphone OS and prototype hardware called the Palm Pre. Given the low expectations set for the firm, the demos drew applause. But why?” Daniel Eran Dilger asks for RoughlyDrafted.
Dilger writes, “Imagine a company announcing a new smartphone that blew away the current state of the art and ushered in a totally revamped user interface with intuitive touch control. That would merit applause. Now wait two years and duplicate the same demo, with missing functionality and lots of important details still unreleased, including the phone’s price.”
“Palm simply showed up with a copycat iPhone interface two years late. But that isn’t the most egregiously lame part of the Pre’s introduction. Imagine now a different scenario: a new phone with a radical new approach to UI and mobile software is given an open, web standards-based SDK and developers are invited to write cool new applets for the device. Everyone groans and registers a wintery volley of discontent, complaining that without a native SDK, they’d rather develop for other platforms,” Dilger writes. “That of course was the iPhone in the fall of 2007, before Apple released its Cocoa-based development tools that allowed developers to write actual apps, not just Widget-like JavaScript applets.”
“So now Palm scrambles out a demo of a Linux phone running what is essentially a Dashboard layer of browser widgets written in HTML and JavaScript, and CES pundits hail the project as a phenomenal wonderful development, even though the company hasn’t released any details on how to actually develop those supposedly wide open apps outside of a small, closed subset of developers,” Dilger writes. “This is just another gagging example of how the tech media can complain about the downsides of getting Christmas ponies from Apple while marveling at the potential of diamonds from the chunks of coal thrown at them by other tech companies.”
There’s much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote last Thursday in response to Palm’s Pre, “Been there. Done that; and better, too. In 2007.”
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