If you Coral, and you Twi want your CSS's done, give me a shout and I'll stick it on the to-do list. As you can imagine, free time has become very minimal since I got work. :S

Before the Pre, Palm was close to bankrupcy. They had one more chance to put a winner out there otherwise their end was met. Before the Pre, Palm was solely a purchase choice of finance directors, CEOs who cared not for shiny and serious PAs. It was very much a business device that was incapable of attracing a wider audience outside business. To sum it up in one sentence, Palm's older offerings were boring, but PalmOS was still a freakishly stable operating system. I've been using Palm PDAs since the budget M100 that I claimed back in 2002, two days after christmas day, the day one of my old folks fell down the last couple of steps and broke his leg, which also involved a rush to hospital. So there I was, walking around a hospital looking for two AAA batteries so I could play with my M100. Needless to say it was another day I had to wait before I could play. Used it as a remote control for an old remote control-less stereo and changing the channels on the TV in hospital from "Loose Women" or whatever daytime TV nightmare was on back then.

A couple years later I get the Palm M500. Pretty much a more powerful brother to the M100 which had a larger screen and looked even more businessman-like. I went on the internet with this one over the infra-red connection on the top to my Nokia 7110. Those were the days.

I didn't get another Palm device since, and two years ago noticed our finance guy at work had a Palm Treo, I was surprised as I thought Palm had gone under a few years before seeing as I'd not heard anything from them in years, but they were still going.

Fast forward to the hype surrounding the Pre's launch. Palm were on their last legs, and the Pre was to determine their survival. It was their first capacitive multi-touch smartphone running on webOS, an entirely new platform running atop a Linux kernel. Mixed reactions to the ads, I quite liked the "Flow" ad myself. The device just seemed really neat and was the only one I thought I was going to end up with rather than the iPhone and be a sheep with a shine fetish. Then I placed an order for one, and got it. There was going to be an unboxing ceremony but that never happened because I lost patience and tore the boxes apart for all my new goodies and got right down with playing. The packaging was nice. Gave a "This is a damn expensive phone" feel to it. Within two minutes I had whipped the back off, put my new SIM in and shoved the Touchstone back cover on instead, then waited forever for the phone to boot (I was impatient and wanted to play, 1 minute 20 seconds felt like forever). I then spent ages playing,... with the touchstone charger. Wireless charging is awesome. No more fiddling with silly plugs, just place the device on the touchstone, and it begins charging. Apple's patent department must have been beating themselves senseless for not patenting this earlier so nobody else but them could use it (Unless you manufacture electric toothbrushes).

Since I got it, I've considered it the start of the revolution. The device is incredibly easy to use, the gestures feel natural, the phone can literally be operated with one hand, even when typing (Sticky shift gives capitals when auto-punctuation doesn't). WebOS has a nice feel to it, looks nice, the App Catalogue looks fantastic and has a really nice feel to it instead of the usual up/down nature of the App Store. Multitasking is fantastic. I can minimize Tweed so I get notifications of incoming tweets, minimize Music or internet, swipe a card up to get rid of an app (Close it) and the apps work together, rather than each app having to use an API to access specific hardware and reinventing the wheel. Threadded messaging is just fantastic, I can view all my previous conversations with someone at the flick of my finger rather than having to go in to each one individually to see what went on. It even behaves like an external disk. Music can simply be dragged and dropped from where you keep it and it'll traverse your directory structures to find your music and give it you in an fully auto-sorted interface that looks very well put together. I can't believe this is built atop Linux because it all just works, and it all works really well and it's really stable. We get Flash Player January, have a big update to the OS this Sunday, and development of apps on webOS is multiplatform. Whether you own a Mac, Windows or Linux PC, you can develop on webOS. This opens up possibilities to everyone, rather than vendor locking individuals into buying a Mac just to develop on iPhone. Whats more, the SDK is easily obtainable but registering on the webOS developers portal and downloading, and away you go. I mean, even I have the SDK, thats how easy it was for me to get hold of it.

WebOS has a very long road ahead of it, and this is just the start, especially with the Palm Pixi just round the corner (Which the Ad looks pretty awesome for by the way).

I have to say: Well done Palm for making an excellent device that works well, allows developers poor and rich to develop on your platform, offers a full transactional system so devs can charge for their apps rather than them all being completely free and overall for risking everything on something brand new and unproven. You pulled off the impossible.

Pink out.

~Lee Ward
Fractalcast Networks 2005 - 2008
Software architect, designer, IRC network founder.

City Academies
ICT Technician, PHP & MySQL developer and Linux enthusiast.