miamime

provocations & observations by William Plasencia 
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webos

 

Dear Palm: It isn’t you, it’s me.

Two weeks ago, a package arrived with the new Palm Pre + I ordered after spending a lot of time researching, talking to friends who have one and handling the phone at my local AT&T store. For me, it was like coming back home after many years of using Palm products but after having spent the last five on a Blackberry.

Ok, call me crazy, but it’s a great phone OS. I need to make that distinction because you can make the world’s greatest phones (Nokia, I’m staring at you) and have them run on the crappiest operating system, or you can do what Palm did and create the WebOS, which I consider a superior mobile OS every bit as good, and in many ways better, than the iPhone’s iOS – except, it runs on mediocre hardware.

I tried to love my Pre. I did, really. But after two weeks of anxiously keeping it on a Touchstone charger, and running low on battery life more times than I care to admit, I began to have doubts that this was my time to come back to the Palm fold.

Several other reasons factored into my decision to send the phone back today, and they should give Palm pause to think and also give the company some hope that it can woo back people like me who want a modern, flexible and accessible mobile device whose OS doesn’t force the user to conform to working in one particular way (Yeah, Apple, I looking at you. What of it?)

I work my phones hard. I talk, surf the web, and spend all day on Twitter and Facebook. All I ask for is a universal inbox, a good web browser, a Facebook app that doesn’t suck and a Twitter app that lets me interact quickly. The Pre and its WebOS give me all except the latter.

The WebOS Twitter apps don’t compare well to what’s available for the iPhone and Blackberry phones. I tried three different apps (and paid for two) and they both lacked what Ubertwitter and TweetDeck offer. [SocialScope is the gold standard] Simple things like Reply All and autofill of names are missing or executed in a clunky fashion.

So when I emailed one of the WebOS Twitter app developers to ask him when he was planning on implementing those elements, his response left me cold: “Reply-All is on the list, but honestly, it's fairly low (based on user requests). Auto-completing of names is difficult given how Twitter's API works, but this is also on the list.”

Mobile app designers, if you’re reading this, remember: EVERY tap and keystroke counts. We’re in a hurry. Don’t make us click and tap several times to do simple chores.

The nail in the coffin was a burst of tweets this week from vocal Palm advocate Rahul Sood, HP’s CTO of gaming, and a blog post he later wrote expanding on those tweets. What I took away from what Rahul wrote was that we shouldn’t hold our breath for new hardware from Palm. And that’s significant because without new, compelling hardware, developers aren’t going to create more and better apps for the WebOS.

It’s chicken and egg. And I’m not willing to wait – at least not for my phone. This is where the hope comes in.

It’s clear that Palm has found a good home in HP – a company with a record of creating solid hardware and a distribution network to sell it all. When Palm and HP come out with a WebOS tablet next year I’ll be one of the first in line to buy one. 

Spend any time at all with a WebOS device and you’ll see this is an operating system made for the big screen. It’s easy to navigate, it makes sense, it’s quick, responsive and with a user interface that allows people to customize it to a large degree. That last point will really attract a lot of folks who chafe under Apple’s velvet yoke.

So, Palm, goodbye for now. I’ll call you.

Filed under  //   iphone   palm   smartphone   webos  

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