Over the years I have owned a number of phones and played with many more. Â At the end of the day, Palm’s phones, particularly the Treo line, were the ones I liked the most. Â With its mixture of PDA and phone capabilities along with other random things it can do, Palm’s phones were solid. Â If you know me, you know I’m not a fan of the iPhone. Â Much like I’m not a fan of the iPod or the iMac or iTunes or pretty much anything that comes out of Apple. Â When it comes to MP3 players I have enjoyed my Zune very much and want to get a larger one to hold all my music. Â And while I have seen a number of very nice applications pop up for the iPhone, none of them yet have made me even consider buying one.
On the other hand, Palm announced their new phone, the Pre, today. Â Some of the innovations they’ve come up with on their new webOS make their company name apropos as I felt like putting my face in my palm, like the fact their apps are built using HTML, javascript and other basic web tools. Â According to Palm’s blog, the people from Pandora made note that it only took them three days to write up a webOS version of their application as opposed to the months it took them on other platforms. Â Flipping through the screenshots of applications looks beautiful, and easy to use, and then to cap it all off there is a slide out full QWERTY keyboard instead of just an on screen one.
And the best part yet, its a Sprint exclusive phone which means that if I decide to get one at some point down the road I don’t have to change providers to do it.
About the only thing that could get me more excited would be for Palm to announce that in addition to phones they’ll also be putting their new webOS on netbook-like devices (and not cancel it this time), because really, the greatest flaw of the netbook is that it is a small laptop, when it would be much better to approach them as a large PDA.