Posts Tagged ‘pre’

what palm needs to do with WebOS

Saturday, April 3rd, 2010

A little while ago I laid out what I believe Palm should do with their next phone.  Since then Sprint has announced the HTC Evo 4G and I’m seriously considering getting it when my year with the Pre is up.  Here is what Palm should do with WebOS as a platform, not just as a phone OS.

I believe the biggest thing holding WebOS back now is the hardware.  The hardware is limited to phones right now, is a year and a half old and is badly in need of a refresh.  Seeing as how the iPad is coming out this weekend, I have naturally been thinking about the tablet form factor in general.  I’m not a big fan of the iPad (obviously), but I believe the form factor has alot going for it and for the right features and price I would be all over it.

WebOS excels at it’s purpose, being a finger-friendly, multi-touch, multitasking operating system.  This would translate perfectly over to a tablet form factor.  Taking the iPad’s form factor, which is almost without flaw, Palm could make the software match the hardware for beauty and usability.  Enable a ‘touch bar’ around the entire border of the display.  Allow developers to enable or disable portions of the touch bar to enable different hand positions on the device.  Just like on the Palm Pre, having a gesture area that is not on the screen can be very useful and add valuable real estate to the device.

Also, and this is a big one, add a camera!  It appears that even Apple had a camera in the iPad but was removed before it’s debut for some unknown reason.  Adding a front-facing camera enables native Skype calling, picture/video capture and a new interactive level to games. This ran a close second to being the biggest reason why I don’t want to get an iPad(yet).

Update WebOS to be able to operate like Google’s Chrome OS by saving all your documents to the web.  If I could prop the tablet up and sync a keyboard to the device and work on any documents that I need without the hassle of dealing with copying them manually to another device, that could solve a huge hassle when you’re sitting on the couch decide to type a quick something up and sharing it with others.

Add USB ports (or even microUSB)!  Adding two little ports would expand the usability exponentially.  The ability to directly connect millions of peripherals to the tablet directly would greatly expand the capabilities of the device without the need to buy any special adapters or new accessories.

Till Next Time

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in industry | No Comments »

hopes for Palm Pre v2

Sunday, February 21st, 2010

I’m a proud owner of a Palm Pre, circa June ’09.  My phone is now getting a little long in the tooth compared to what phones are coming out now.  I’m really liking the Nexus One and the Droid.  Having just heard about the new Windows Phone 7 Series that Microsoft just announced,  that has seriously my interest peaked as well.

I’m very happy with my Pre and only have a few small quibbles with it.  Occasionally the phone slows down, I’m assuming due to background apps, but I’m not sure.  I would like the app loading to be a little faster, for simple apps like the calculator it should be lightning quick to load.  I would also have liked a louder speaker on the phone when either using it as a speakerphone or playing music over the speaker, it’s just not quite powerful enough.

Now onto what I would love to find in the next Palm phone.

To really show that Palm is back, they need to show that they have both ends of the spectrum covered.  They wowed everyone last year with the introduction of the WebOS platform and now they need to knock everyone’s socks off with some new high-end hardware.  They need to be first (or at most, second) to market with a 4G handset.  It appears that the HTC Supersonic will be first with an integrated 4G modem, but if Palm comes out with a 4G radio I believe that will be the biggest sign that Palm is truly coming back.

Secondly, they need to up the screen specs.  Palm needs to increase the size to at least 3.7″, up the resolution to at least 800 x 480 and go AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic LED).  Since the Pre has the gesture area below the screen, it allows them to run a slightly smaller screen but new generation device screens are more than 20% larger and come with many more pixels.  OLED would help offset the larger display’s power consumption, but more importantly, it would at least match the screen quality of the current top-end phones available today.

Third, take a page from Google’s playbook and add voice-to-text for any text fields.  This is a fantastic evolution of speech recognition.  There have been countless times that I would have found that very convenient to be able to speak what I need typed.  In addition to this they need to get an on-screen keyboard; many times I have need to type something short and quick into my phone and I wanted to do it one-handed but that is not very feasible with the slide-out, physical keyboard.

While I don’t expect, yet still hope, that all of these changes are in store for the next Palm phone, I hope that they will soon start releasing information on the next device – my year is almost up and I need a new phone.  I believe they need to continue pushing the envelope if they want to stay relevant and carve out a niche for their future success.

Till Next Time

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in industry | No Comments »

soooo, this is like an all new blog

Friday, February 27th, 2009

so it’s been years, literally, not just in a tech sense, since the last time I wrote a blog post.  I have been meaning to start this back up for a little while now that I have a real job and am out of school.  But you know how things always seem to get in the way.  I finally found a nice, new, clean domain name….heehee.  I love my new domain. :-)

 

So, life.

 

Recently have split with my girlfriend of a few months.  Started my third job out of college in the span of 14 months.  Have started doing some web projects for other people, a little money on the side never hurt.  Am getting stoked about the new Palm Pre.  Am living in Decatur, GA, in a 3/1.5 house by myself, waiting for my fantastic sister-in-law to find someone to rent the house so I can move out.  

Current loves:

my car:  2006 VW Golf GLS

my job: web developer 

hometown: atlanta

 

Current non-loves:

my living situation: no cool roommate(s)

computing power:  need a new desktop bbbaaaadddd

friends:  they live too far away

 

So today I bought my first new computer in ~4 years.  A Dell Mini 9.  I saw on engadget that Dell was having a $199 sale on them and that hit my impulse buy price.  I added a integrated webcam and messenger bag for it and off my order went.  It sucks that the estimated ship date is St. Paddy’s day, but oh well, at least I got a great deal on my lappie.  In a few months I plan on completely overhauling my desktop computer.  It’s currently running something like single core 2.4 GHz, 512MB RAM, 32MB Video Card, all from ~4 years ago.  I plan upping the specs to Core i7 920 (2.66GHz quad core), 4-6GB RAM, 512MB Video card.  This should definitely improve my computing experience at home.  I’m also planning on installing the windows 7 beta.  I had installed it on my workhorse laptop, but with it being 4 years old, I don’t think 7 really agreed with it cause it started crashing more than it was running.  But anyway, onwards and upwards!

 

I am really looking forward to the new Palm Pre.  Before it was announced, I felt that Palm was starting it’s death rattle.  They hadn’t put anything exciting out in a few years and was having internal struggles which is indicative of a dying company.  But Palm surprised the entire tech community at CES 2009 when they introduced the Pre and webOS.  No one saw this coming, there weren’t any leaks or buzz surrounding Palm before their keynote.  After the keynote, Palm was all anybody could talk about.  As soon as I heard that there was going to be a development camp in Atlanta, I signed up for it and voluteered.  I figured it was time to get into the tech community in Atlanta and hopefully meet some new people down here.  There is not a date set for preDevCamp yet, but I’m hearing that it will be about a week after the Pre actually launches.

 

Last night I watched the hour long webcast that Palm’s Software CTO Mitch Allen put on.  He only provided general information about the Pre and webOS, but it was encouraging to see how simple it will be to create an app on the Pre.  I need to start brushing up/learning javascript now.  :-)

 

So I’m about out of info for this first post in a while.  Be back more often from now on.

 

Till Next Time

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in general | No Comments »