Palm’s New Reach

Palm's engineers have done some really slick things with applications themselves, especially contacts and calendars. You can pull together multiple calendars and view them all at once—say, your work calendar, your home calendar, even calendars from other people, like your spouse's Google calendar (your spouse needs to give you the log-on info). The contact manager pulls contact information from multiple sources—Yahoo contacts, Google contacts, Facebook contacts. A listing in your address book can contain every way of reaching that person—via work mail, Gmail, or Facebook mail, for example—and lets you send a message to a friend using any one of these. Also, the applications talk to one another. When the calendar application prompts you for a reminder about a meeting, it also pulls up a list of the people who will be attending, with their contact info. So if you're running late, you can let everyone know.

So: is it an iPhone killer? McNamee wishes people wouldn't ask that question. "Everyone in the cell-phone business has missed the point. They're all trying to make an iPhone killer. I don't want to compete with Apple. Why the hell would you want to get in the way of that machine? I look at the guys who are trying to compete with Apple and I think, Are you guys crazy? I just want to learn from Apple's experience." Nonetheless, the "Will this kill the iPhone?" question is the first one everyone asks about any new high-end mobile phone today. And the answer is, well, probably not. Not because the Pre isn't terrific—it is—but because Apple's brand is so powerful, and because Apple has sold 13 million iPhones, and because there are 10,000 applications already written for the iPhone. Nonetheless the Pre has moved the ball forward in some very significant ways. The experience it delivers is much closer to what we get on a laptop or desktop computer, which is essential if mobile devices are to become the hub of our Internet lives rather than mere peripherals that attach to a personal computer.

Most important, the Pre represents only a first shot. Rubinstein and his engineers are already preparing a family of devices that will run on the Palm Web OS. Could it be that Apple has staked out an early lead with a breakthrough product only to be passed by others? It's happened before. In 1984 Apple introduced its first Macintosh. The machine featured a graphical user interface and was way ahead of its time. But several years later Microsoft copied the idea and created Windows, which gained 90-plus percent of the market while Apple's share lingered in the low single digits. That bit of history may be why Rubinstein seems to be feeling so good these days. "Apple wants everyone to believe that it's game over, and they won," he says. "But I don't think so. I think this is just the beginning."

© 2009