Palm Pre First Impressions Review - Software

OS
The Pre features Palm's brand new operating system, webOS. During the press event announcing the Pre and webOS, Ed Colligan, Palm's President and CEO, described how it was built with common existing development tools and languages already used for the web - HTML, Javascript, and CSS. As a brand new platform and with only a short time with the Pre during our demonstration, we don't have an idea of its stability and power. It does incorporate 2 interesting concepts that are exciting - Cards and Synergy.

Cards is essentially how the Pre will multi-task and handle applications that are pushed to the background. Applications that are pushed to the background appear as cards on the home screen that can be re-ordered to your heart's content. You can scroll through cards with simple flicks of your finger and tap to select tone. Closing one is as easy as swiping it upward off the screen.

Cards showing multiple applications open

Synergy is the concept that links your information with your web-based accounts, such as Google and Facebook. Once you enter your account information on the Pre, it will remain in sync with those applications so you don't need to do anything to update individual records on your device every time a change is made.

We can't fully express how much we're looking forward to getting our hands on the Pre to run the webOS through its paces without using far more exclamation marks than would be prudent and professional.

Home Screen
At the top of the Pre's home screen, and every other view in any application except during video playback, is the status bar that shows you signal strength, the time, battery level, and other standard bits of information. The bulk of the screen is taken up by the wallpaper image, which can be customized. The launch bar at the bottom of the home screen can hold up to 5 application shortcuts. By default, they are phone, contacts, email, calendar, and a shortcut to show the full Launcher of all applications.

The Pre's home screen

There is a great deal of empty space in the middle of the home screen, and we hope that Palm or a 3rd-party developer will provide some way to fill this user-selectable information to show things like upcoming appointments, due tasks, quick dialing shortcuts, and such.

Extensibility
An SDK will be available for developers to build 3rd-party applications for the Pre. An application store, like the Android Market for the T-Mobile G1 and the App Store for the Apple iPhone, will be available and allow direct downloads of applications onto the Pre. Palm has not released any additional information about their application store beyond noting that one will be available.

Customizability
As previously mentioned, the home screen can be customized with different wallpaper images and the launch bar at the bottom of the screen can be customized to show your favorite applications. Beyond this, no additional information about changing font sizes globally, applying themes, or other changes has been released.

OS Responsiveness
We had limited time with the Pre during the demonstration, but it appeared to be pretty responsive overall and we never saw one of the multiple demo units crash once, which is a nice sign. Palm demo staff repeatedly warned that the some of the applications loaded onto the Pre were not finalized and did not contain all of the settings or capabilities that may appear in the final versions when it goes on sale, so we'll reserve our final verdict on the webOS's performance until we get a production unit in hand.

Browser Features
Palm boasted that the Pre's browser will provide a browsing experience similar to what you'd find on your desktop computer. When you browse to a web page on the Pre, you see the entire page in miniature form and you can zoom in to a section by double-tapping or spreading 2 fingers in an "opposite" pinch just as you can do on the iPhone. The pinching motion zooms you back out to a wider view.

A single page shown in the browser

Palm stated that their browser was created using the WebKit open source browser engine. During the demonstration, the advanced browser feature of opening multiple pages at once was shown. Bookmarks can also be saved, and they are shown in small thumbnails, though there was no word on whether or not they can be organized into folders.

Multiple pages open at once

Document Software
No mention has bee made by Palm of any document viewing or editing software that will come with the Pre, nor was any in evidence during the demonstration.

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