waffle

I’ve just managed to find my way to an actual video of the Palm Pré in use, and I have to say that it confirms a large part of my previous warm fuzzies.

Let me put it bluntly: I love the iPhone despite its weaknesses, but I will likely get a Palm Pré when they come out here in Sweden.

Often, users of any Apple product are portrayed as mythical nutjobs, cult members willing to take any beating at the altar of having a fancy logo and a lot of aluminium on their electronics. While Apple users have been few (globally speaking), the size of the base has always been large enough that there’s been a number of over-enthusiastic fellows in just this way; plenty enough to confirm the stereotype by anecdotal evidence. I’ve always held that like the other 99.997% of Apple users, I’m not one of them. I just have, you know, standards.

People keep telling me that “if iPhone is so bad at some things, and Apple are so draconian with others, why stay around?” As established, I have standards. I tried using my old Sony Ericsson Z800 for ten minutes just a few months ago, and I couldn’t stand it. Same with someone’s Sony Ericsson X1 and the HTC Touch. I don’t want to switch to a worse product just to make a statement; even if half a million people did it, it’d be lost in the static. Apple’s products are that good; they attract that much people.

However. I am, it turns out, amenable to switch to something that looks to be better.

Two years ago almost to the day, the original iPhone was presented for the very first time. Most of the old guard took to trashing it in public and copying it in private. I chose the word copying because they didn’t clone it (although certainly, some gentlemen did). They considered how the iPhone looked and seemed to work, and asked themselves two questions: How much can we steal? and What is superflous glamour?

In the process of removing the superflous glamour, like, say, the accelerometer, multi-touch or a graphics chip to provide animations that are smooth enough to track your finger, they killed the concept, and in the process of backing away just enough from the concept, they arranged for a speedy burial.

I’ve kept a hopeful eye to this end of the market, but HPC’s, Sony Ericsson’s, RIM’s and Motorola’s attempts have all failed in precisely the way I expected them to. It’s like a Lada with a hood ornament, judicious chrome application and a trendy plate sealing off engine access under the hood, as if there was valuable electronics powering useful functions behind it; it’s still a Lada, you’ve just failed at making it handle and look better.

The iPhone rethought the way mobile phones should work, successfully. The Pré not only rethought the way Palm’s ailing own devices should work, but the way the iPhone should work. Multi-tasking seems so easy, it’s not even funny; the device seems to respond very well, and the card metaphor is a good fit. IMs and SMS messages from the same contact even shows up in the same display. And although development isn’t open as in Android open, you appear to get better access to the device’s databases and other applications.

Palm is one of the few companies I believe could have created this general interface before the iPhone came around, because they have a record of good interface design, although the team responsible for it must have gone into hibernation shortly following the completion of the first Palm Tungsten design.

It’s a rare moment to see Apple genuinely beaten at their own game, but at least from now, at least from my angle, that’s what it looks like. And with that in mind, I can’t wait to snaffle a Pré for myself, and for the iPhone to hopefully improve and drop some of the worst decisions in response to actual, worthy competition.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.