Palm Pre

Kudos to Palm for announcing a new smartphone platform. The venerable Palm OS needed a vast overhaul, or to be put to pasture. The Pre with WebOS looks quite interesting. Of course, it's not available yet. 'First half of 2009' and no price given. Apple did much the same thing with the iPhone - releasing it in June of 2007 ('first half').

So the blogsphere seems to be having fits of joy over the phone, but no one has actually got to use one yet. All of the first impressions were one-on-one demos given by Palm employees.

Anyway, I find it interesting in Gizmodo's comparison (see here: Gizmodo: In a Nutshell..), that they gave the nod for item #4, Development platform, to the Pre... well, they had, before they updated their list. Anyway, it seems odd. Apple initially told developers to develop for the iPhone using 'JavaScript, HTML, and CSS' and developers yelled out loud for a native SDK. Apple eventually delivered, but has continued to push the capabilities on the web side. You can now create an iPhone web application that:
1. you can create a custom launch icon and let users save it to the home screen (and when it's launched, the Safari chrome can be hidden)
2. store information in a local database
3. capture and respond to multi-touch gestures
4. dynamic animations such as screen flips and slides
5. use accelerated graphics via canvas blocks

There are still some capabilities web apps on the iPhone are missing, but by and large you can create an iPhone web application that does almost everything a native app can do.

Unfortunately, no one seems to know this...