Think for just a moment on why some SmartPhones are 'better' than others. What is it exactly that makes people feel that one SmartPhone is better than another? It seems easy to judge an old product from years past as not as good as today's product, but it's not just 'speeds and feeds' or just the industrial design. Rather, what makes a SmartPhone great is a combination of the materials used, the industrial design that integrates those materials, the user interface and the services provided. How 'clever' and how 'intuitive' a system is also plays an important role.

When the iPhone was introduced two years ago, it was a 'paradigm shift' in SmartPhone technology providing what most people feel is a very natural user interface (no instruction manual was needed) along with a sleek industrial design. I can remember thinking, "It's going to take quite an effort for someone to out-do Apple and create a SmartPhone that would be 'better' than the iPhone."

Palm is betting the company's future on the introduction of the Palm Pre. Many of us recalled that the Treo was the 'darling' of high technology when it was introduced many years ago. It was the first SmartPhone with a very intuitive user interface and everyone had one. But, all of us in technology are quite 'fickle' – we love what we have until someone comes along and creates something better, and then we all 'jump ship' and move on to the next wiz bang phone that comes along.

Everyone has compared new SmartPhones introduced in the past two years to the iPhone and most have come up short. The Palm Pre is the first I've seen to clearly provide a user experience that's as good or better than the iPhone. Their user interface is a little more natural because it leverages many of the things that Treo did well, particularly the layout of the screen while a call's in process, plus goes further than the iPhone in a number of areas such as integrating more than one kind of information on a single screen.

Here are the reasons I think the Palm Pre is the best SmartPhone to date:

• The Pre is the first to fully integrate multi-tasking that allows a number of applications to be running at the same time. You do this all the time on a PC with 'windows' open for many different applications. But, in phones, you typically have to run one application at a time. Now, with Palm's webOS, users can initiate an application to check on sports scores, another to check on the prices of stocks (with alerts) and another to check email all being done while you're on a call. This will become a standard feature on all SmartPhones within a few years, but Palm is the first to provide it in a popular SmartPhone product.

• The Pre is the first to allow information from multiple sources to be integrated into a single application. This is called Palm Synergy, and it provides developers with the ability to bring together information from the Web or from the storage on the SmartPhone and make it appear in one place. It's like having a 'mash up' tool kit for the phone. Sure, any application could be 'hard wired' to do this but Synergy makes it easy for any and all applications to integrate information that way. The easiest example of this is integrating weather for your present location with the calendar so you can see the weather for the day's appointments. Another neat feature in Synergy: your conversations with the same person are grouped together in a chat-style view. I expect that we'll see some amazing applications built over the coming years that take advantage of Synergy.
• The Pre was designed using open web standards to assist developers in making it very easy to build applications based on the tools and procedures they have been using to build web applications (hence the name webOS). This will allow hundreds of thousands of web developers to think of webOS as a natural extension of the Web and, therefore, accelerate new applications for the Palm Pre platform.
• The Palm's on-device App Store is powered by PocketGear, a company that has been working with Palm for many years. The old Palm application store was web-based. You selected and purchased an application off the Web and then downloaded it to the phone the next time you docked your Treo or Centro to your PC. Now, the new app store has been moved over to the Palm Pre (in Beta) so that same process can be used to select applications in real time while using the device. (Note: just like with the iPhone App Store, the on-device part is just a directory. The actual app is stored in many cases on a remote server and the App Store simply selects, manages payment and then downloads it off the server). Since the Palm development community has already built over 100,000 applications for the previous Palm Treo/Centro platform and PocketGear was used to manage the distribution of those applications, this will put the Palm Pre on a 'fast track' so that developers will be able to easily build (or convert) applications for the Pre and get them distributed.
• The real, pull-out keyboard is very important for business users who process a number of emails and text messages. The iPhone virtual keyboard is 'OK' but it doesn't have any tactile feedback. To be sure, the Pre keyboard is somewhat narrow but the real keyboard has been shown by many research studies to be preferred. Of course, both are even better – using the keyboard when typing something more thoughtful and using the on-screen keyboard to tap a short sequence. The Palm Pre is the first SmartPhone to include both a real keyboard and provide a touch screen. It's usually one or the other.
• The Palm Pre has solid integration and synchronization with Outlook. That makes it easy for many Outlook users (there's well over 500 million of them today) to connect the Pre to their PC and automatically sync with the Contacts and Calendar. And, there's a wireless backup service that makes a copy of your Pre data and saves it on their server. The Pre automatically syncs over-the-air with Outlook, Facebook and Google's calendar and contacts, and I expect to see more sync services being announced in the coming months.
• Pre thinks of applications as 'activity cards' and lets you flip through them, move them around or throw them away. This takes the idea of an application or data being represented on the display as a 'card' that can be easily managed via gestures.
• The Palm Pre comes with media sync that makes it easy to sync up with iTunes which has now become the default music library on PCs. Apple should commend Palm for honoring iTunes as the PC music library so users can continue to enjoy building their music library and then play those songs using the Palm Pre while they are out and about.
• The Palm Pre has built-in email so that users can easily setup their personal email. And, companies like Good Technology will provide email services for enterprises (Good Mobile Services) and enhanced services for consumers (Good for You).
• The Pre user interface goes to the next level in SmartPhones: it's intuitive and classy. You can pick up and move the control bar with your finger, it has pinch and expand and it's more intuitive than the iPhone which is achieved by a number of small things that simply make it very natural and easy to use. The way in which multiple web pages are display and rotated, the way things are picked up and the way to get back to somewhere else all seem to be done in a very well thought out and natural manner.

When you consider all of these things, it's easy to understand why the Palm Pre is a major advancement in the evolution of SmartPhones. They are operating exclusively on the Sprint network for the next six months. The price is $200 after a $100 mail in rebate (Sprint stores should make that an instant rebate). Every Treo or Centro user should consider migrating over to the Pre, and I expect that many Sprint subscribers whose contract expires in the next six months will consider switching over to the Pre.

The longer term challenge for Palm is what to do after the next six months. It seems clear that they should quickly offer the Pre on Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile as soon as possible. And, they should expand internationally. Their webOS and Synergy platforms should make it easier for developers outside the US to develop applications adapted for the local culture and language. And, I'm sure that the Pre 2.0 is already on the drawing boards. My guess: they will do a Pre model that has a slide out keyboard that's horizontal rather than vertical in the vein of the HTC Android G1. And, at some point, Palm will have to consider licensing webOS to other SmartPhone manufacturers such as Samsung, LG and HTC.

As with all new platforms, there are some quirks and bugs that need to be fixed such as: making clipboard cut/copy/paste easier to use, copying portions of a web page, viewing the phone log, setting the home page, viewing a summary of events in the Calendar, adding keyboard shortcuts and adding categories for the Contacts. These will likely be addressed quickly via downloadable system updates over the coming months.

For Palm, the light is finally burning at the end of a rather long dark tunnel. They have stepped up to the plate and upped the ante in the SmartPhone wars. It's now up to developers to build some really great applications and users get excited and tell their friends that they love their Palm Pre. Competition makes it great for the industry and gives users more choices. I look forward to testing one of them in the near future.

Kudos to the entire Palm team. As reported in the news recently, Ed Colligan (CEO for many years) has stepped down to join Elevation Partners, and Jon Rubinstein has taken over as CEO. After fixing the initial problems, I recommend Jon create a roadmap of insanely great wireless handheld products.

Specifications of the Palm Pre

The Pre specs include a 320x480, 3.1" touch-screen HVGA display, QWERTY keyboard, built-in GPS, a 3MP camera with LED flash and extended depth of field. The Pre supports Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with WPA, WPA2 and 802.1x authentication, 8GB or 16GB options, USB mass storage support, a microUSB connector with USB 2.0, charged wirelessly via the (optional) Touchstone charger that uses induction to charge the battery. Note the comparison of the Palm Pre to the iPhone shown in the chart to the right (courtesy WSJ web site).

Written by:

J. Gerry Purdy, Ph.D.
VP & Chief Analyst
Mobile & Wireless
Frost & Sullivan
gerry.purdy@frost.com
404-406-5309

Disclosure Statement: From time to time, I may have a direct or indirect equity position in a company that is mentioned in this column. If that situation happens, then I'll disclose it at that time.