Now the Sprint Pre has been joined by the Pre Plus, which runs on Verizon Wireless and began shipping in January. After I recently said I was flirting with abandoning my AT&T iPhone, Palm offered to loan me a Plus for review. Here’s my take, following up on the story I did on the original Sprint Pre back in June. Executive summary: the Pre Plus isn’t a radically different phone from its predecessor, but it’s still a really good one–and while the WebOS third-party application situation pales in comparison to the iPhone, it’s better than I expected judged on the number of available apps alone.

(Note: Over the weekend, Palm pushed out WebOS 1.4, an OS upgrade that enables video capture and which supports Adobe’s Flash Player. However, it’s n0t yet available for Verizon’s WebOS phones, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, and I haven’t tried it.)

The Hardware

Most next-generation smartphones are decidedly iPhone-esque–they look like the iPhone with a slide-out keyboard, or like the iPhone with a trackball. Or they just look like the iPhone, period. Physically, the Pre Plus  is a near-twin of the Pre, and it continues to offer a choice, not an echo. At 2.3″ by 3.9″ by .67″, it’s strikingly smaller and more phonelike than the slablike iPhone. It fits well in the hand–it’s a great one-handed phone which you can navigate entirely with your thumb if you choose–and slips easily into pockets.

A smaller phone means a smaller screen: The Pre Plus retains the Pre’s 3.1″ display, vs. the iPhone’s much more expansive 3.5″ one. But at 320 by 480, the more petite screen has the same resolution as the iPhone, giving it the same pixel density as the higher-resolution Verizon Droid. Photos and type look gorgeous.

In general, both the built-in Palm apps and third-party ones do a good job of scaling their interfaces to the Pre’s undersized display; it rarely feels cramped. The only time I pined for something larger was when I was read blogs, news stories, and other wordy Web pages. For those, I opted for the Plus’s landscape mode. And I don’t think I’d want to use the phone for truly heavy-duty consumption of text, such as reading e-books–which is one reason why I’m not grief-stricken that there’s no Kindle app for WebOS.

The Plus’s physical changes compared to the first Pre are all minor: The home button on the phone’s front has been replaced by a glowing virtual slit, the keyboard has been tweaked (with a firmer feel and new monochrome look), and the sliding mechanism, which some criticized as flimsy, is more solid. The phone also comes with a back that’s compatible with Palm’s nifty Touchstone charging station as standard equipment; with the original Pre, it was an extra-cost option.

Its keyboard is…okay. Using it still feels a bit like jabbing at Jelly Bellies, and the phone’s narrow width makes two-thumbed typing slower going than with a BlackBerry. I’m not going to argue that it’s inherently superior to the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. But I like it much better than the Verizon Droid’s wider, flatter keyboard. And I still think that one unappreciated virtue of physical keyboards is the way they free up all of a phone’s pixels for other stuff. When you compose an e-mail on an iPhone, the on-screen keyboard leaves a tiny window for your text; on the Pre Plus, the whole display is available.

Inside the phone, Palm has doubled the RAM (to 512MB) and the storage memory (to 16GB). I found that the Plus’s performance felt similar to that of the first Pre: pretty zippy overall except when loading a program into memory, which is surprisingly slow at several seconds per app. The increased RAM should help the Plus multitask more apps without bogging down; the more generous storage is a plus if you plan to load the phone up with music, movies, and/or podcasts.

I didn’t attempt to measure the Pre Plus’s battery life, but I did notice that I had to use it somewhat cautiously to get through a full day on one charge. Palm quotes the talk time as up to 5.5 hours and standby as 350 minutes (both the original Pre and the iPhone 3GS claim up to 5 hours of talk time and 300 minutes of standby).

The Software

Palm’s operating system, WebOS, is still pretty much the same one that the company unveiled in January of 2009. Which is a compliment, not a criticism: In terms of ingenuity, elegance, and efficiency, it remains the only mobile operating system that truly rivals Apple’s iPhone OS.

Actually, in multiple ways WebOS feels like a hybrid of the most appealing aspects of iPhone OS and Google’s Android, without their downsides. Like the iPhone, it looks beautiful, offers full multi-touch support, and lets you navigate around mostly through intuitive gestures. (Most Android devices still don’t do multi-touch, and the OS is burdened with too many buttons, menus, and inconsistent ways of accomplishing tasks.) Like Android, it multitasks–but with the ingenious Card interface that makes it a snap to bop between apps:

WebOS’s Synergy feature, which melds contact and calendar information from Outlook, Google, Facebook, and other sources, isn’t quite as unique as it once was–Android 2.0 has cribbed some aspects of it, such as integration of Facebook friends into its contact database. But it’s still the richest expression of the idea. (For instance, Android’s version lacks Synergy’s LinkedIn integration.) And it helps to make the Pre Plus especially appealing if you’re buying a phone primarily as a tool to help you whip through busy workdays as efficiently as possible. So does WebOS’s to-do list–for some reason, iPhone OS and Android still don’t come with task management as a standard feature.

The one major new feature in the Pre Plus that really is a new feature rather than a tweak or hardware upgrade is Mobile Hotspot. It’s a twist on tethering that turns the Pre Plus into a pocketable Wi-Fi router, much like Novatel’s MiFi. The feature costs an extra $40 a month for 5GB of data–twenty bucks less than you’d pay for access via a MiFi or USB modem–and is a cakewalk to use. Once you’ve set a password, you just turn Mobile Hotspot on, then connect to it from your laptop as you would to any Wi-Fi hotspot. (It supports connections from up to five simultaneous devices.)

Mobile Hotspot isn’t going to replace a separate EVDO modem for everybody. In my tests, it was slower than a USB-stick Verizon modem, giving me a connection that ran at slightly under 400-kbps vs. 500-kbps for the stick. Verizon’s CDMA network won’t let you use the hotspot and talk on the phone at the same time: If you take a call, the Internet connection cuts out until you’re done. And the feature guzzles battery power (a Palm representative suggested to me that it makes sense to keep the Pre Plus connected to a laptop via USB cable during hotspot sessions).

If AT&T ever gets its act together and lets iPhone owners simultaneous talk and tether their laptops, Mobile Hotspot may seem limited by comparison. For now, though, it’s a reason for iPhone types to be (mildly) jealous of Pre Plus owners.

One area where no iPhone user will envy Pre Plus owners is entertainment features. WebOS still offers a basic music player and video player, plus on-device access to Amazon’s MP3 store. But this is still a phone that focuses on productivity with a dash of fun, not a media-centric device like the iPhone. And now that Palm’s quixotic attempt to make WebOS devices sync directly with iTunes seems to be over, the OS could also use a media-syncing app for Windows and OS X. (I used the free DoubleTwist to transfer music, video, and podcasts; it worked just fine.)

Oh, and for what it’s worth: The Pre Plus performed well as a phone in my tests. Voice quality was consistently very good, and I didn’t experience any dropped calls.

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Hierarchical Temporal Memory may sound like hifalutin stuff, but Vitamin D Video aims to serve a totally mundane but useful purpose: providing cheaper, more effective video monitoring for security and other applications than existing software does. It’s designed for small businesses and individuals and works with standard Web cams and with relatively low-cost network cameras (such as those offered by Panasonic). And instead of relying on crude motion detection, it’s smart enough to tell human beings from other objects in motion (such as animals and shadows), to pay attention to specific areas in a scene it’s monitoring, and to help you pinpoint the moments you might actually care about.

Here’s a video from Vitamin D that does a good job of explaining and demonstrating all this:

Vitamin D Video’s Starter Edition works with one camera at QVGA resolution and is free; the $49 Basic Edition handles two cameras at VGA resolution; the Pro Edition costs $199 and works with as many cameras as your computer can manage. Even that last one is budget-priced by the standards of more traditional surveillance software.

To mark the software’s formal launch, Vitamin D is holding a contest to find the most “useful, fun, or strange” moments captured with its software. The winner will get something which I suspect will be a popular contest prize in general for the next few months: an iPad.

A few years ago, I was bedeviled by thieves who broke into garage almost weekly, and I could really have benefited from Vitamin D Video and a networked cam. (Only slightly off-topic note: One of the things they swiped was my…shiny new Palm PDA.) These days, I live in a more peaceable neighborhood. I still plan to experiment with the software, though–even if chances are pretty high that the only intruders who it’ll catch on camera are a kittycat or two.

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Well, sort of. Palm hasn’t completely excised the Treo Pro from its Web site. It just removed the navigational links that help you find it. Google for “Treo Pro,” and the first link you get is to a page on Palm’s site where the Pro is apparently still for sale:

The Sprint link takes you to a page where the Pro is priced at $149.99–the same final cost as the Pre. There may be a rationale for buying the Pro–a phone that was sort of a nicely-refined dinosaur even when it shipped in 2008–over the Pre, but it’s escaping me right now.

Besides, the Treo Pro may have been a Treo in name, but it was a Windows Mobile phone. That meant it didn’t have the bloodline going back to the first PalmPilot. Even if it’s all been discontinued, it’s not a major moment in the history of Palm. The major moment came when the company’s final Palm OS device went off the market.

Or has it yet?

Google the word “Centro,” and you’ll find a Palm.page on the Centro, which I think was the final Palm OS phone:

While the page offers to help you buy a Centro, it seems to be a phantom–as far as I tell, the links don’t work. The major moment that was the passing of the final Palm OS phone came and went, and I didn’t even notice.

Except…the Centro isn’t quite gone yet. Sprint still sells it, for a final price of thirty bucks. I’m prepared to accept the possibility that Palm has stopped making the things and Sprint is blowing out the final production run, but it’s sort of endearing to see a Palm OS phone out there in the iPhone/Android/WebOS era. At least for a little while longer. And even though I don’t recommend buying it unless you really like the Palm OS, and maybe not even then…

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If Palm must be sold, Motorola is the most logical buyer I can think of–and some neat phones could emerge from the deal.

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With the original iPhone, Apple addressed the shortcomings that most devices in the category had with fresh, innovative ideas. Initially, there were many second rate imitators, but now, products including the Palm Pre and Nexus One match if not surpass the iPhone in numerous ways.

I love my iPhone, and couldn’t imagine life without my apps. However, there are great alternatives for people who have not yet upgraded to a smartphone or want to save on their monthly service fees.

Case in point: A few months back, a friend and I were sitting in an East Village bar waiting for a bossa nova show to begin. We both whipped out our phones (his was a Pre) and had the proverbial “size contest.” I couldn’t knock the Pre, and he is very happy with it.

Moreover, AT&T’s decision to carry five Android phones is prescient–Android has no place to go but up. While it’s still not fully mature, Android is a great operating system for device manufacturers that do not have their own OS, and that is somewhat reminiscent of the early days of Microsoft Windows.

What is Apple to do? It will do very well due to the strength of its brand, and dedicated users like myself, but those strengths will eventually decline into inertia. Even a phone that leaves the Pre and Nexus One in its dust will not be good enough–Apple must bring back the “wow” factor in order to maintain its leadership of the market (or cede and focus on another groundbreaking product).

I’m confident that Cupertino has enough tricks up its sleeve that it could leave the rest of the industry chasing the iPhone again. There is room to play as the smartphone category grows, but anything less than a revolutionary product simply isn’t good enough for Apple.

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I’m shocked. Shocked. Once again, Apple has updated iTunes, and once again, the update disables the ability of Palm’s Pre to sync directly with iTunes via the Pre’s Media Sync feature. If I’m keeping track correctly, this is the third time Apple has blocked the Pre.

I would have guessed that Palm would have given up by now. And I think it should give up–even if you’re okay with the Pre piggybacking on Apple’s software by using USB in a way that the people in charge of USB apparently object to, a feature that’s destined to break over and over isn’t really a feature. It’s an unreliable kludge. And Palm could implement non-kludgy iTunes sync if it chose to. The way some of its competitors have.

And here’s an interesting twist. On Palm’s site, the feature list for the Pre still touts Media Sync as a major benefit:

And as usual, a footnote explains that Media Sync only works with a certain version of iTunes, and that it’s, um, conceivable that Apple could update iTunes in a way that renders Media Sync inoperable:

Palm is also promoting the Pixi, its new $99 WebOS phone which doesn’t arrive until November 15th. The company has a very similar blurb on that phone’s media features that talks about iTunes transfers–but this one doesn’t mention Media Sync:

And this time, the footnote doesn’t offer any disclaimers about syncing only working with certain versions of iTunes:

Unless Palm has come up with a superkludge that it’s positive Apple can never foil–which it hasn’t–I can think of only three explanations for the changes in its explanation of iTunes sync:

(A) It’s still planning/hoping to use the kludge or a variant thereof, but has decided it doesn’t need to offer any disclaimers;

(B) It’s still planning/hoping to use the kludge or a variant thereof, and its marketing copy has gotten unimaginably sloppy;

(C) The Pixi will use the same sort of utility that the rest of the industry uses to sync with iTunes libraries externally rather than directly through iTunes.

Scenarios (A) and (B) both seem unlikely, so I’m guessing that the Pixi will offer a more traditional, less controversial approach to iTunes sync. And if the Pixi does, the Pre surely will as well. I guess we’ll know in a little more than two weeks, if not sooner.

(Okay, here’s another scenario: Palm and Apple have struck a deal to let the Pixi sync with iTunes, no kludge required. Whaddaya think the chances are of that happening?)

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What is Palm up to? With its new WebOS 1.21 update, it’s once again re-enabled the Palm Pre’s ability to sync unprotected music and videos, photos, and now photo albums with iTunes, no extra software required. The move comes after the USB Implements Forum took Apple’s side in the tiff over Palm’s spoofing of iTunes into thinking that the Pre is an iPod. If I recall correctly, Apple has released two iTunes updates that blocked earlier versions of WebOS from syncing, and chances are presumably sky-high that it’ll block this one the next time that it pushes out a new version of iTunes.

I keep declaring this clash of wills between the two smartphone companies to be over, but I’m officially giving up on making any guesses. Whatever will happen will happen, and Palm, at least, isn’t behaving in the nice, predictable way that you expect of large companies. I dunno how the USB-IF will respond to Palm ignoring its stance that the Pre shouldn’t masquerade as an Apple product via USB connection, but it seems to be clear that Palm is willing to burn bridges behind it.

The company is unquestionably bursting at the seams with smart, talented folks; the Pre remains the iPhone’s most formidable competitor by far from the standpoint of user-interface sophistication. But I’m mystified by what it’s up to here. Palm continues to tout iTunes compatibility as a major feature of the phone. But the convenience that the feature offers when it’s working is completely negated by the periods when it’s in limbo, not to mention the general uncertainty of the whole idea. Whether you take Apple’s side or Palm’s or (like me) aren’t completely thrilled with either company’s behavior, it would be silly to think of the WebOS’s Media Sync feature as an argument in favor of buying a Pre.

Mac and iPhone developer Craig Hunter has a cogent post up on all this that beats up Palm pretty good. He wonders the same thing that I’ve been curious about for months: Why doesn’t Palm, like numerous other companies, write a standalone app to do the syncing? It would work well, and there’s no evidence that Apple would try to foil it.  Just how many Pre owners would vote for continuing to play chicken with Apple when there’s a boring but effective alternative route to nearly the same end result?

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This is not a startling development: I woulda put ten-to-one odds on it happening all along. The Pre has pretty much been using somebody else’s driver’s license to get into a bar–or, if you prefer, somebody else’s invitation to get into a party.

What’s Palm’s next move? I keep thinking that it’s got no options left but to surrender, but who knows? I do notice that the Palm site still touts Media Sync:

Here’s the footnote:

No matter how you slice it, this is misleading and out of date: We already know that iTunes 9 breaks Media Sync, so whether or not Palm “guarantees” compatibility is irrelevant. And iTunes 9 isn’t a future version, it’s the current one. I guess “Plus, use the Palm media sync feature to transfer your DRM-free iTunes music, video, and photos to your Pre…as long as you’re using an old cersion of iTunes” doesn’t have the same ring to it.

I wanted Palm to win this fight, and I think everyone, including Apple, would win if iTunes had some level of built-in support for non-Apple devices. But it’s surely time for Palm to either eliminate references to media sync as a selling point or introduce a Media Sync 2.0 that uses a bit of middleware to do the syncing, a technique which works just fine. If I’d bought a Pre in part because Palm told me I’d be able to sync with iTunes, I know I’d vote for the latter option…

[UPDATE: PreCentral is reporting that an upcoming WebOS update will re-re-enable Media Sync, and that Palm wants the cat-and-mouse game to continue indefinitely. Doesn’t sound like much fun for anyone involved if it involves Media Sync breaking then working then breaking then working ad infinitum…)

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Today, Gearlog’s Sascha Segan notes that current Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein said during Palm’s earnings call today that the company won’t be making any more Windows Mobile phones–starting with the Pre and Pixi, it’s betting everything on its own WebOS. Which isn’t the least bit surprising given Windows Mobile’s diminished state. This time around, the hard-nosed business move is also the one that feels truest to Palm’s character as a company.

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I say that with regret, because I was rooting for Palm: iTunes sync is a nifty feature, and I wish that Apple looked at non-Apple phones syncing with iTunes not as an intrusion, but as an opportunity to sell more music. (If it did, it might actively court other phone manufacturers such as Palm.) But we now know that Apple won’t even take a laissez-faire approach here–it’ll boot the Pre out again and again.

Which means that it’s silly for Palm to promote the Pre’s Media Sync feature as it stands as a reason to buy the phone–even in a best-case scenario, the feature is doomed to an unhappy, tentative future.

The solution seems simple to me: Rather than hacking iTunes to provide direct syncing, Palm should use a bit of PC/OS X middleware to do the job. Lots of products do this without controversy, and Palm can probably license the technology if it needs to. In theory, it’s not as elegant a solution as direct syncing, but it works. And there’s absolutely nothing elegant about the cat-and-mouse game that Media Sync has been playing with Apple to date.

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