We could have been good together
John Stokes of Ars Technica calls it, “the first non-iPhone-rip-off–iPhone-like device… They took what Apple did right on the iPhone and they just sorta stole that and then they made the rest better.” He also agreed with Boing Boing Gadget‘s Joel Johnson when he suggested that it “made your iPhone look old and busted.”
They were talking about the soon to be released Palm “pre” — a phone that looks nicer than the iPhone, has a nicer interface than the iPhone, runs Linux and has (thank the Lord!) copy and paste. This is what I’ve been waiting for: something that will wipe the grin off all those smug iPhonites’ faces; something that isn’t locked to buggery like iPhone; something that will prove my superiority over all other phone-owners. My current minimum contract term with O2 runs out in March, and I’ll be elligible then for a handset upgrade, including the iPhone, which would make me a reluctant late-comer to the new smartphone generation. I watched BoingBoingTV’s CES report on the new Palm device, though, with an accelerating pulse. Though I had thought it unlikely, I have been secretly willing all Apple’s competitors to come up with something that would make iPhone seem old hat before I had to commit to another minimum contract. The Palm pre, it seemed, was the very thing.
This has happened before. Back in the day (2005 maybe), a colleague showed me his new phone, a complete brick of a thing that ran Windows Mobile, had built-in GPS and could do a billion things other than make calls and texts. Naturally jealous, I investigated getting one myself. My research immediately revealed an online frustration with Windows Mobile (for much the same reasons as for any brand of Windows), and a preference for Palm OS, which was a bit older and less snazzy, but far more reliable. That’s when I switched carrier so I could get my Palm Treo 650. Although it needed a separate Bluetooth GPS module to use sat nav, it was the bomb! Hardly ever crashing, it was also much prettier than my colleague’s unsightly Windows brick, and, quite frankly, I was in love with it. (So much so that a friend got one too, although his was a bit wonky from the start and he never had the fully satisfying relationship with his that I enjoyed.) Tragedy struck when I came in drunk one night and dropped it in the toilet. Palm were good about replacing it, but they kept sending refurb models that had (never the same) things wrong with them, and in the end I had to abandon my beloved Treo for a Sony Ericsson p1i, swapping Palm OS for Symbian. (It’s pretty good, but I only like it as a friend.)
So now here I sit, contemplating a return to Palm, albeit with a new OS, the Linux-based Synergy. There is a problem, though, and it is the same problem that has kept every so-called iPhone killer in the starting gate for me: no Mac support. Watching the other companies trip over themselves trying to ape iPhone has been bemusing to me, because all I can think when I see the ads or posters is, “You’ve missed the one thing that iPhone does that I actually care about: it’ll sync with my Mac.” Now my p1i syncs with my Mac, but I have to use a piece of software Sony Ericsson had removed from their official site months before I got it. A friend subsequently got a similar Sony Ericsson handset because the sales guy told him in the shop that it’d sync with his MacBook, only to find that that it didn’t out of the box and the Sony Ericsson tech support was unwilling to help at all.
iPhone does some cool things, and some pain-in-the-arse things, but it syncs with Macs. It pushes email and syncs calendars on the move. The pre product page at Palm boasts Outlook support, but that’s it. Of course, this is largely Apple’s fault for keeping its MobileMe locked while Microsoft allows everyone to make use of Exchange, but even simple contacts and calendar syncing would do. I know I could always export my Apple calendars to Google Calendar periodically and sync it that way, or perhaps someone will write a third-party app that will do my syncing for me, but with no clear indication that I’ll be able to access all my data easily, it looks like I’ll have to take the iPhone plunge come March.
In desperation, I offer this plea to all makers of mobile phones: “Incorporate Mac compatibility and I’ll be your friend. Don’t, and it is YOU who are forcing me to your competitor’s product. Against my will!”
Will they heed my call within the next month and a half? I think we all know.
Link to Boing Boing Gadget’s video on the Palm pre at CES
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