Palm Is Back

If you attend the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), you’ll inevitably be asked at least once during the day, “See anything good?” Or sometimes the question will be, “what’s the best thing you’ve seen so far?”

It’s usually not that easy to answer either question. This year, at least at the end of the first day of the show, the answer would have to Palm’s new phone, the Palm Pre. Most of us had counted out Palm as having been left far behind — with little chance of catching up. To recover, Palm needed to hit a home run, and that’s just what the company has done.

While the hardware is impressive, it’s Palm’s new “webOS” that makes the new phone innovative. Imagine the easy-of-use touch interface of an iPhone married to the integrated productivity of a BlackBerry.

Highlights include a hidden QWERTY keyboard (it slides out from the bottom), support for multi-touch gestures (zoom in and zoom out of a Web page), a dedicated gesture area separate from the main content area (your finger won’t cover up what you need to see), and intelligent searches that begin locally but seamlessly branch outward to sites such as Google and Wikipedia.

How will the Pre complete with the 10,000 iPhone applications available through iTunes? According to Palm, if you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can create Pre apps. That’s how the built-in programs were created, and they’re both fast and relatively powerful.

The Pre will be available through Sprint in the first half of this year. If that turns out to be June, the Pre will have to complete with a substantial number of applications for the BlackBerry and Android phones. It has only 8GB of on-board memory, and there’s no card slot for additional storage. Also, the 320×480-pixel screen may be a tad small at 3.1 inches.

In its favor, Palm has been down this road before. There’s still a remarkable amount of good will for the company, especially among developers – many who started out writing simple productivity and communications programs for the Palm Pilot.

For any other company, it might be too late to successfully enter this crowded field during a downturn in the economy. Given that it’s Palm and based on the CES demo, I would have to say they have a very good change of succeeding. Sprint should be especially pleased as the Pre will likely attract a significant number of new subscribers.