Hey you Palm Pre Addicts!!!
So the launch day is finally here and as can be expected we are getting the trickles of the new unboxing videos of the palm pre.
I thought I would start a post on this and add videos that came up…
Enjoy!
Thanks! Peace & Blessings!
****LATEST**** 21:24 GMT 06/06/2009
Palm’s designers and engineers reveal some little-known details about the company’s highly-anticipated phone.
During the 15-month gestation of Palm’s new cellphone, the Pre, the company’s designers and engineers drew inspiration from Japanese Zen gardens and grassy fields.
The nature theme extended to the phone’s audio sounds as well. Palm commissioned a new set of ringtones and alerts for the phone, which will be available June 6, and is the first to utilize Palm’s new mobile operating system, webOS. When recording the audio’s base notes, the company opted for actual musicians playing simple instruments like Tibetan bells over synthetic gizmos that generate “electronic blips and bloops,” says Matias Duarte, Palm’s vice president of human interface and user experience.
“We wanted to have tones that would be part of the Pre’s aesthetic whole,” Duarte says. “The phone’s hardware, software and audio experience needed to be coherent.”
In the rapid-fire mobile industry where new products debut–and sometimes vanish–within a year or two, it’s unusual to take such pains with a phone’s ringtone. But for Palm ( PALM – news – people ), which is counting on the handset to revive the company’s fortunes, no element was too small to obsess over. Here are some other lesser-known details about the project from the designers and engineers who worked on it.
1. EGGS, PEBBLES AND GECKOS PLAYED A KEY ROLE
Some of the earliest sketches of the Pre referenced eggs. To spark ideas, Peter Skillman, Palm’s vice president of design, distributed large, white ostrich eggs to his designers. One principal designer got a dark blue emu egg.
Read All Comments Pebbles were also an inspiration. Skillman says he kept polished rocks on his desk during the design process. Duarte describes the final product as “a stone at the bottom of a riverbed, rubbed smooth over thousands of years.” Palm wanted consumers to feel the “sense of totemic mystery” that comes with finding something really beautiful in nature, says Duarte.
Palm dipped into nature while developing the Pre’s charger too. Called Touchstone, it employs magnetic induction to power the Pre’s battery without cables or cords. The design also posed a challenge: How could users retrieve their phones from Touchstone without also lifting up the wedge-shaped charger? Palm found the solution in a micro-suction material patterned after geckos’ feet. The technology enables Touchstone to stick to polished surfaces, even walls and windshields, without leaving a mark or collecting dirt.
2. WEBOS APPS SHOULD BE USEFUL
Early reviews have noted that Palm’s new mobile applications store lags those of rivals like Apple ( AAPL – news – people ), Research In Motion ( RIMM – news – people ) and Google ( GOOG – news – people ), stocking less than 20 apps at launch. Palm says it wants high-quality apps and isn’t concerned about the slow pace. “There’s nothing wrong with fun, throwaway apps, but we’re more interested in apps that people use daily or at least more than once,” says Michael Abbott, Palm’s senior vice president of applications software and services.
Palm has yet to publicly release a webOS software development kit–tools that developers need to build applications for the Pre. Abbott says the company wants to vet developers first. “We always want more developers, but we’re less concerned with the number than making sure we do [the store] correctly.”
3. PALM ADOPTED APPLE’S HIGH STANDARDS
Much has been made of Palm’s poaching of Apple talent over the past two years. Executive Chairman Jon Rubinstein is Apple’s former senior vice president of hardware engineering. Mike Bell, Palm’s senior vice president of product development, spent 17 years at Apple before joining Palm in December 2007.
Most transplants declined to compare the two companies. But Palm appears to have embraced Apple’s famously high standards. “We’re the most critical people … we really want the devices to be perfect,” says Bell, adding, “It’s a philosophy some of us carried over from previous companies.”
Like Apple, Palm now seeks to marry engineering with great design. “We don’t just want to be a Silicon Valley tech innovator where design comes in at the end or an idea shop where design is stressed at the beginning but not supported by the engineering or business side,” says Duarte.
4. SPRINT IS PALM’S OLDEST FRIEND
It’s easy to understand Sprint ‘s ( S – news – people ) decision to support the Pre. The phone is one of the year’s hottest launches and Sprint needs a new flagship phone to compete with the iPhone, BlackBerry Storm and the new Google Android phones that will soon be available on competing networks. Sprint also likes to talk about its long relationship with Palm. It offered the Treo 600 back in 2003, giving it a longer relationship with Palm than any U.S. operator. Since then, it has frequently been the first carrier to launch new Palm phones.
Despite its history of collaborations, Sprint mostly stayed out of the way with the Pre. Discussions between the two companies focused primarily on which applications to install on the device or offer in Palm’s App Catalog, says David Owens, Sprint’s director of devices.
5. LOTS OF WEBOS DEVICES IN THE WORKS
Palm plans to continue developing webOS over the next 10 years, eventually extending it to a family of devices. Its designers and engineers are currently working on phones that will launch in 2010 and 2011.
People within Palm aren’t focused on making “iPhone killers,” according to Skillman. He adds, “We think there’s room for several significant players in this market and we’re going to be one of them.”
It’s seems palm has finally decided to release the ‘relase’ date info on the much hyped palm pre.
According to our sources at boy genius report, the much anticipated date is:
6th June 2009.
But where does that leave the UK?!
No information has been leaked yet…. So what do you guys think?
Not too much needs to be said here. Hit the jump for a bunch of pics.
Read
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheBoyGeniusReport/~3/DAf5ejaqwCY/
Before phones show up at retail, they start showing up in totally random places in China — it’s basically a law of physics. And once that happens, they almost inevitably end up posted in a forum somewhere, and… well, you can gather where that leads. Chinese firm Ludle — which, according to its own description is in the business of “exploiting, producing and selling” — somehow came across a Pre (or possibly just an empty shell thereof), and a staff member took the time to do a quick set of comparo shots against a Centro and iPhone 3G. He notes that the Pre gets clogged with fingerprints as easily as the iPhone but handles scratching on the back a little better; the front is a different story, though, where the iPhone’s glass display wins. He goes on to say that the phone is currently in mass production (we’d certainly hope so), but what we don’t know is whether we’re looking at a CDMA version for Sprint or the GSM variant destined for sundry networks around the globe. We’ll take either, personally.
[Via PreThinking and TreoCentral]
Palm Pre gets caught taking a walk in the park http://viigo.im/iGs
Every so often an interesting story surfaces that has regrettably been passed over. One such story is the case of the Palm Touchstone, the wireless charging dock for the upcoming Palm Pre. During CTIA, tnkgrl was getting briefed on the Pre by a Palm marketing manager when he let it slip that the Touchstone is not just a wireless charger but is also the name of a whole series of products and accessories for the Pre. What makes this interesting is that the name Touchstone alone implies that the rest of the series in the Touchstone line-up will feature inductive technology. So what can we expect to see — a USB dock, TV-out dock, stereo speakers, car kits? Who knows, but for now we’re pretty satisfied with reverting to a childlike state of imagination.
[Via PreThinking]
hi guys,
so I’ve been getting a little excited recently, at the announcement and possibility that PALM may finally release a ‘great’ phone. Y am i so excited?
well simply because, the reason i first got into portable gadgets was because of palm. i was given a palm zire as a gift when i was a first year student at college. this was a transformation from my hefty and at times, embarrassing filofax. i quickly moved onto the palm m515 and then the t3, tungsten and finally Tungsten T5.
It was in my 2nd year at university i began to notice the limitations of the palm handheld series and was not to excited at the treo or palm’s phone range. that’s when i went BLACKberry and haven’t looked back since.
however, this new announcement of the palm pre has made me wonder about some of the imitations of the blackberry. Sure its great with email, but i think blackberry lacks some of the simpleness of the palm organisation tools.
Over the next few months, i’m going to put togther a project to look into the Pre and hopefully be one of the first to get my hands on a Pre when it launches here in the UK. but for now, here’s a video of the palm pre walkthrough…. click the image below to watch the video
Enjoy!
