The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is filled to the brim with product announcements and new useful (and useless) gadgets, but some stand out more than others. One item that topped the headlines the past few days is Palm’s announcement of its brand new operating system.
Palm’s announcement of its new WebOS and the accompanying pr~A(c) model phone sure made its ripples across the pond that is the internet. While the phone hardware itself is pretty ugly (at least, in my opinion) the real meat here is of course the brand new operating system, for which applications can be written using nothing but CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. Yes, it’s Linux based, and no, it doesn’t run PalmOS 5.x applications.
What is really intriguing though is the new interface, which takes everything that’s good about the iPhone, and brings it to a whole new level by doing away completely with the application-centric paradigm that the iPhone still employs. The fact that smartphones today are all application-centric shows where their software comes from and where their roots lie: the desktop operating system.
Palm is changing all this with its card-based interface, where the application is irrelevant – it’s all about the task. For instance, if you want to chat with a contact, you just open a chatcard with that user, and it will combine the communications over SMS and IM in a single conversation, moving away from the idea that you need the IM application to IM, and the SMS application to send text messages. It’s the content that matters, not the medium.
Cards can be switched in an alt-tab like implementation, and you can switch between cards in a coverflow-like fashion, or zoom out and see an overview. It follows the paradigm of a card deck: new cards enter the “hand” from underneath, and by flicking them to the top, they are closed.
Ars’ Jon Stokes had the opportunity to talk with Palm’s Pam Deziel, who showed off the device in this eight minute video (many thanks to Ars for allowing everyone to embed the video):
Ars Technica first hands-on with the Palm pr~A(c) phone from Ars Technica on Vimeo.
To me, it seems as if Palm is the first smartphone manufacturer to develop an interface from the ground up specifically for a mobile device, without windows, applications, or other desktop-centric ideas. Oh, and it does copy/paste. While it’s dangerous to make any such statements, I do believe that Palm has out-Appled Apple on this one: the iPhone already feels hopelessly kludgey and outdated.
Availability is set for the first half of 2009. The pr~A(c) is a Sprint exclusive.
> first smartphone manufacturer to develop an interface from the ground up specifically for a mobile device
It’s not exactly like this for everyone. Others see the glass half-empty instead:
http://i.gizmodo.com/5126881/palm-pres-ui-has-a-lot-of-great-deskto…
In my opinion, both the Pre and the iPhone are amazing phones. iPhone went single-app/task on purpose btw.
> Palm is changing all this with its card-based
> interface, where the application is irrelevant
But the application is not irrelevant! At least not to me. Sometimes I want to browse the web with opera mini, sometimes with opera mobile and sometimes with the built-in browser. The same goes for other tasks. E.g., if I want to view pictures I want to use one particular image viewer (one with fast loads/switches), but if I’m going to edit some pictures then I want to use another image viewer (one with good workflow).
The point is its not the apps that matters, its the functions you’d like from these apps. What I’m trying to say: All apps do right now is they’re a compilation of different functions + a user interface to invoke them. This made a lot of sense when the concept was developed, as you couldn’t load features on demand or were restricted by resources.
What I’m thinking is the future is a different model. In my opinion Palm is moving in this direction: Every app will publish a data model and be extensible, so that anyone can integrate their data and manipulate it. Of course some security should be applied, but the point is in order to use some specific editing feature you won’t switch the model or the app entirely, just something similar to a plugin.
Huge apps, which claim to do everything the user wants are what prevents choice.
Yes, of course, but until apps are modular in a way that makes them easy to combine in various ways the apps will matter. Any interface that does away with apps before the apps have this kind of modularity is bad.
If the new palm’s apps really have this kind of modularity, then that should be the big news, not the UI.
Edited 2009-01-09 13:38 UTC
I bought my first Mac because of a technology called OpenDoc. I have always thought the approach made a lot of sense. That said it is such a different approach that is causes a lot of problems for folks to grasp in practice. It is nice to see the idea make a comeback.
You can find out more about OpenDoc at wikipedia here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opendoc
I’ll bet this is even more revelant here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBinder
To me, it seems as if Palm is the first smartphone manufacturer to develop an interface from the ground up specifically for a mobile device, without windows, applications, or other desktop-centric ideas. Oh, and it does copy/paste.
This is not true, the iPhone is far to be a phone designed with a desktop centric idea, this is actually the total opposite. I mean, come one, nothing besides the windows makes it behave fundamentally like a desktop environment. And the Pre does not give away the idea of windows anyway, as cards are composed of different windows, either your devise works as the Pre or it works like the iPhone where Apple has chosed by purpose (like Eugenia pointed out) the single task/app approach. So it remains to be seen how the Palm’s card approach works for the user and how having many cards can affect the battery life.
But again, Apple has clearly designed the iPhone’s interface from the ground up for a portable devise, and i would say that Palm has taken the same way with its own ideas compared to other solutions like windows Mobile or Android which basically work a lot like the computer desktop. More on the side of Windows mobile than Android, but Android much more than the iPhone or the Pre.
While it’s dangerous to make any such statements, I do believe that Palm has out-Appled Apple on this one: the iPhone already feels hopelessly kludgey and outdated.
Yes it is because you’ve just said non-sense. How the iPhone can be outdate when in a first place the Pre has obviously taken a lot of design and interface ideas from it?
I think that what he meant was that the Pre took some of the ideas from the iPhone and improved them, something that, in my opinion, no other company managed to do so far.
Relax, Thom just loves to hate Apple.
Edited 2009-01-09 13:16 UTC
This has got to be one of the most stupid utterings I’ve ever heard. Compare: “How can the Ford Model T be outdated when new cars have obviously taken a lot of design ideas from it?”
Edited 2009-01-09 13:36 UTC
We don’t know yet if this IS better. A few comments from easily impressionable tech writers means nothing.
While I see some good things here, I see some strange, and possibly backwards ones as well.
We also don’t know how well any of these features will work. just because they are there doesn’t mean that they will work properly, or usefully. The metaphor is also being overhyped. no matter how you look at it, it IS program -centric.
I see nothing here that is revolutionary.
And do you recall why, exactly, Apple chose to limit the multitasking capabilities of the iPhone? Exactly, it couldn’t come up with a decent enough UI paradigm that made it easy for users to understand, and they claimed it would eat too many resources.
What Apple is basically admitting here is that they were unable to come up with an interface in which multitasking on a phone would be easy enough and usable.
The Palm engineers DO come up with a way of handling multiple applications, by developing a new paradigm for them. Palm has been able to do what Apple couldn’t.
Then you really haven’t been paying attention. The cards aren’t ordinary windows. They’re not applications. They are tasks – they combine the functionality of various applications and present it all in a logical way. This is fundamentally different from the approach taken by other smartphones – including the iPhone’s.
Because Palm took all that is good from the iPhone, and created a completely new paradigm where you focus on tasks, not applications; in addition, they added an understandable form of multitasking, which is something the iPhone cannot do.
So yes, the iPhone feels outdated compared to what Palm has shown us.
Edited 2009-01-09 13:35 UTC
The gesture interface is silly. It’s far simpler to just click a button than having to move my finger around.
In the video, they talk about ‘applications’, so applications have not gone away.
I don’t see any ‘revolution’ or ‘evolution’ in this interface. Windows are obviously there (but they don’t have a caption or a close button), applications are there as well (disguised as tasks), and the way to achieve things by dragging your finger across the screen is the silliest way of spending your valuable time.
Yes, and Palm’s solution is HTML/CSS/JS applications – no way to leak memory there, no way to step outside your sandbox, but also very little control over performance and functionality you can implement.
I don’t see how cards are different from applications, with possibly the exception of cards displaying web pages and web applications, which cannot be distinguished from “local” cards and basically making web apps a first class citizen, in contrast with other platforms where the entity behind the web app is still the respective browser.
I agree that Palm did a great job identifying the good UI of the iPhone and expanded on it in their UI, but “completely new paradigm” it isn’t (and that expression is so overused that it’s becoming meaningless).
…except that Palm’s API enables the HTML/CSS/JS to have access to the hardware as well.
Ouch! I hope they keep that limited to local apps only, or at the very least limit that to trusted pages and apps.
Have you used MobileSafri^A's tabs? They are represented as cards which you can flip between, and expand to fill the screen when selected, exactly like the Pre.
So, it’s not the lack of a “decent enough UI”, since they already use the cards approach in Safari, but a deliberate choice. The point is avoiding the constant “my phone is running slow, I have to close some apps from the process manager” that plagues many other platforms.
Personally, I think a better choice than iPhone’s “not allowing several active apps” would have been something like Android does: “active” apps are not directly controlled by the user but by the OS, which unloads them (saving the state) automatically as needed. The iPhone actually does this to some level, but only for a subset of Apple’s own apps (like Mail).
In any case, I really like many of the interface decisions made for Pre’s Web OS. This helps raise the bar of what users expect from a phone. I can’t wait to see what the iPhone OS 3.0 & Android’s next version bring as a response.
edit: messed up the quote tags – can’t nest quotes, apparently
Edited 2009-01-09 14:13 UTC
What?
Thom, the Pre’s “applications” are what Apple calls webapps. They have been a feature of the iPhone from the beginning. Not only that, but iPhone’s Safari has supported a multi=page interface from the beginning.
Palm is imitating the iPhone here.
That’s just silly.
I really don’t think you understand what is going on here.
It’s easy to make it LOOK as though the apps don’t matter, but in the end they are what is being called, no matter what the “window” is supposed to be.
Apple didn’t limit multitasking because of the UI. What are you talking about? They did it because phone cpu’s bog down from doing too many tasks at once. it’s very likely that this phone will bog down also from too many background processes.
Maybe they took ideas from more than one Apple design – the whole task based card based interface where modules embed into areas within cards sounds a lot like something Apple did during the 1990’s I think it was. Didn’t it fall over because nobody wanted to write modules to interact with other people’s and share open file formats? I wonder if that mindset has changed yet?
But revolutionary? Don’t think so…
Edited 2009-01-09 13:59 UTC
Please, please PLEASE don’t try to tell me that you got fooled by the BS of a line about it not being about the apps. “Cards” ARE apps. So it is STILL about the apps. They aren’t that different either.
So you basically have coverflow to go from one app to another. That sounds great. So what happens when I have 20 apps. I’ve got to scroll through all of them cover style to find the one that I want? Sounds really handy to me … not.
I’m probably not getting it but my first paragraph is still right on. It is still about the apps. The question will be, how enjoyable is it to use? coverflowing through pictures is one thing. To do it through apps might or might not be another thing. We’ll just have to see.
PS: For what it was at the time I loved Palm devices. No so much anymore. I don’t have big fat fingers but I have the keyboards on Treos and Blackberries. I’m not wild about the software keyboard for the iPhone either but it is not worse than the BB and P keyboards.
Voice commands. That’s right. Give me voice commands to pull up an app and I’ll be a lot happier. Obviously you can’t always be using your voice to pull up apps but this is an option that would take a lot of headaches away from finding the app I want quickly.
PS: Voice commands existed a LOOOOONG time before Bill Gates finally caught on. He is the very old man in the game where it took him years to figure out the internet until everyone else had. Just like voice commands. And Surface? How bleeping much do they want for that? What a joke.
Edited 2009-01-09 14:24 UTC
In some ways, yes it the same, but the way to look at it, makes it quite a lot different.
Just take how it works with contact. On a desktop, you must think of a procedure to accomplish something.
When you want to communicate with someone, do you think like a step-by-step process? I’ll open an outlook text editor to send you a message via email? No! You either want to speak/im/email with your contact, that^aEURTMs pretty much it.
So you go from 3 and more application (contact which is pretty static (does nothing but store information), msn, Skype, yahoo, gizmo, talk, outlook/mail/thunderbird/name it.) to only one task oriented application/card. So if the ratio keeps up, you’ll go down from 20 open apps to 5 cards.
Maybe it’s technically a small change, but if the paradigm works more like my brain does, well, I will benefits tremendously.
Im sure they have a handy way to navigate in the case you have a lot of applications, don’t worry.
When I read the feed on my reader last night that Palm presented its new linux based phone, I couldn’t have been more apathetic.
After being a very happy treo 650 user for a couple of years I bought a windows mobile phone (SCH-i760) mistakenly thinking if the old palm os was this good the new windows mobile should be great.
I’ve hated windows mobile so much now I’ve wanted to come back to palm for a long time – after my 2 year agreement is up. But palm was stagnating with their palm OS, and even with palm’s improvements to WM, it was not for me.
So, getting to the point, I worried by the time I could chose Palm again they would be a non-competitor.
However palm made radical improvements compared to PalmOS(which I think is how it should be compared to truly appreciate it the most):
1. It went from ugliest to one of the prettiest interfaces(I know that’s subjective, but look at Palm 5 for crying out loud)
2. PalmOS was traditionally isolationist in its philosophy from web services and relied heavily on 3rd party apps(like the facebook app) to try to bridge the gap. Palm took what was worst about palmOS and made it pre’s best. Palm reapplied its philosophy of having all your information in one place.
3.(really an extention of point 2)Synergy blends your contacts(at your discretion) from completely disjointed services – something I’ve only seen 3rd party apps try to emulate but I think is more natural being 1st party. I really like seemingly switching between a sms conversation to a aim/yahoo/whatever in the same chat window and not lose place of the conversation – something only reasonable with synergy. I’m not sure that’s been done before on a phone and if it has it certainly hasn’t been made easy.
The concept I’m most excited about the most is having one list for the people I spend my time with. No more sorting through multiple contact lists because they’re all different different sources/services.
So I give kudos to palm for being truly innovative. Yes, they took a lot of ideas from the iphone/android, but they took their ideas in an entirely different direction and made new concepts in the process, and I think that deserves kudos, and I hope, in spite of their poor choice of carrier, it brings them back as serious competition in the smartphone race. I hope pre with Sprint isn’t exclusive for long. A longtime Treonaut wants to believe again.
So will it come with HyperCard?
I watched the video… and I still don’t understand this whole task-card paradigm and how it is different from normal applications.
Maybe I’m going about this too much from a programming perspective. At best, I can see Palm providing a set of ‘objects’ (for example a contact list… and a contact), and an API that you can use with your application which can be triggered off the contact. Basically a plugin architecture.
On the other hand, it might just be Palm providing a bunch of really well integrated applications that combine lots of functionality into one window.
If each card is actually an application, I’d say its a decent way to do multitasking. Launch from the bottom, it run in the middle as a card, then u flick it away to the top to end the application. It has a nice flow to it.
hy^A·per^A·bo^A·le [ h"A<< p~Aorb'ETMlee ]
noun
Definition:
exaggeration: deliberate and obvious exaggeration used for effect, e.g. “I could eat a million of these”
Is Palm using BeOS technology on this new Pre???
Nope. They are using Linux. BeOS belongs to Access.
That’s rich, considering key staff are those who come from NeXT and later Apple, ultimately producing the web approach that Apple realized are painful on the Web [sorry Google, but your Web Office will never supplant MS Office and especially not OpenOffice].
too bad the pre seems to not have any flashplayer for my eye candy.
i am also wondering what is an evdo connection? how does it differ to a 3G
evdo is 3g as used by most of the us networks
It’s awesome to see that Palm hasn’t forgot what made it great in the first place–its knack for making simple UIs that put real utility in the hands of the people. This makes up for all of the blunders Palm made in the past decade.
With each demo I watched (here: http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/244962/palm-announces-killer-phone.html ) I got more and more excited. Instant messaging integrated with texting! Global Spotlight-like search of all apps and contacts! Opening multiple compose e-mails at once! Try doing that on an iPhone! This is true desktop-like computing with full multi-tasking, squeezed into a portable device *the right way*. This is a gadget that anyone can get the hang of, yet doesn’t make power users feel stifled.
This thing looks so awesome that I’m practically ready to buy one this minute… Of course I’ll wait to see what the final reviews say (I’ll have plenty of time till it comes to Europe anyway). But at the moment this is the most excited I’ve felt about a phone since the original iPhone Stevenote!
How can they achieve these visual effect with html/css/js ?
Is there a X/opengl layer that render html windows?
Palm’s webOS and its Mojo framework are essentially Web 2.0-style web applications. This is the same stuff that Apple was roundly criticized for upon its initial release of the iPhone. Everyone clamored for “true” applications.
Where is the same criticism of Palm and the Pre?
http://www.treocentral.com/content/Stories/2315-1.htm
Edited 2009-01-09 23:10 UTC
IIRC, the uproar over the iPhone was not about the ability to run web-based apps – but the fact that web-based apps were initially the only choice for doing 3rd-party development on the iPhone.
So far as I can tell, that is not the case with Palm and the Pre. At the very least, it would be pretty dumb if that *were* the case – the abundance of 3rd-party software has long been a strength of Palm’s handheld devices.
Everything I’ve read, including a transcript of the presentation, says that PalmOS applications are completely incompatible. The new applications are much more akin to Mac OS X’s Dashboard widgets or the original Web 2.0-style applications of the iPhone.
Yes, I’ve also read the comments from Palm stating that the new OS will not be backwards-compatible with PalmOS 5 apps.
It wasn’t backwards-compatibility I was referring to, though. What I meant was: due to the number of existing third-party PalmOS apps & devs, I would expect the new Palm OS to be more developer-friendly out of the gate than the iPhone was.
E.g., another post in this thread mentioned that the new SDK will allow devs to access hardware from their software, which is typically not the case with web-based apps (and, AFAIK, wasn’t/isn’t the case with web-based apps on the iPhone).
The problem with the iPhone was that the web-apps were available only when you had internet connectivity and they were not first class citizens. On Pre, they’re available locally (and they cache the information too) and feel like native apps, because… they’re native apps
Come on, really Thom, we know you love to hate Apple but seriously. Go check out some of the web based CRM tools out there with their plug-in modules to do IM and mail and …
This is nothing more than a flashy version of that on a phone.
Neat yes, but nothing new here – move along…
Oh, and how well does this “new(?)” paradigm work with things like games, GPS, Music, Video, etc?
I’m actually willing to give Palm the benefit of the doubt here and give their new UI a shot. They seem to have actually thought it out pretty well, at least compared to the halfbaked touch UIs out there (*cough* touchflo 3d *cough*)