Palm’s Spectacular Hail Mary: Pre Smartphone and WebOS Operating System

By  |  Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 12:36 pm

I’m going to have lots more to say about the demo of Palm’s upcoming Pre smartphone and WebOS that just ended here at CES in Las Vegas in a bit–but for now I’ll just link you to Ryan Block’s coverage at GDGT and share some photos I took. The device looks very impressive and the OS looks exceptional, and neither is an iPhone knockoff. It’s very dangerous to get too excited about a product based on a demo–and Palm is only saying the Pre will ship in the first half of this year (on Sprint). But this is by far the most impressive Palm demo I’ve seen since I first saw the original PalmPilot in 1995. If the Pre lives up to its unveiling today, it’s not hard to imagine being a huge hit and the beginning of a mobile platform that matters as much as the original Palm OS did in its day.

Photos after the jump…


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7 Comments For This Post

  1. dale johnson Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 12:40 pm

    too late, i used a palm of some type for over a decade, but they took to long to have anything useful keep me from staying. now they have to get me back from Apple.

  2. Phil Martinez Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    Nice job Palm! I cannot wait to play with one.

  3. mikhailovitch Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 1:32 pm

    It truly does look awesome. Hands on will be something else when it actually arrives, but this is the first device I’ve seen that could actually give the iPhone something to worry about. Apple, start your photocopiers!

  4. Sachin Balagopalan Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 4:23 pm

    Watch out iPhone ? http://bit.ly/wYPX

  5. Nope Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 4:40 pm

    Unfortunately it’s coming from Sprint.

    Worst. Customer. Service. Ever. And CEO Hesse just said he may close 20 call centers. Just try and get an honest bill.

    I don’t buy phones that don’t have removable batteries, and I don’t buy phones that don’t work abroad. By the time this thing gets started, Android will be all over the place.

  6. Lance Jungmeyer Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 8:40 pm

    That looks pretty sweet. Will it be as fun as an iPhone?

  7. tom b Says:
    January 9th, 2009 at 6:37 am

    I used to have a Palm. Cool idea at the time, but each revision was actually WORSE. They never got syncing to a point of reliabiliy, and they should have nailed that as one of the most important things to “get right”.

    I don’t have an iPhone. But my iPod sync’s correctly EVERY TIME– no fuss; no workarounds.

2 Trackbacks For This Post

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    January 9th, 2009 at 5:56 pm

    […] look at the company’s radically new Pre phone. It looked at least as good close up as at yesterday’s big press event: It’s strikingly smaller than the iPhone, and more elegant than you’d expect given the […]

  2. Palm’s Pre Pre-View | Technologizer Says:
    January 10th, 2009 at 8:02 pm

    […] all:&nbspQuickies Palm has posted an online video of the press conference it held on Thursday at CES to unveil its Pre smartphone. I’m glad I was able to attend the event in person, but […]