The Official Palm Blog

How about a little more Pre eye candy?

One of our Twitter followers asked for a little more Pre eye candy. We’re happy to oblige with links to a few recent videos:

From Wired:

- http://www.wired.com/video/latest-videos/latest/1815816633/palm-unveils-smart-phone-the-pre/6828057001

From MobileDivide:

- http://mobiledivide.com/2009/01/24/palm-pre-ces-09-part-1/

- http://mobiledivide.com/2009/01/28/palm-pre-ces-09-part-2/

From Stuff.tv:

- http://stuff.tv/Video/Palm-Pre/VideoReviews/

By the way, if you follow us on Twitter (palm_inc), not only will you get updates on all things Pre, but you’ll also be among the first to see eye candy like the following true works of art:

- http://bit.ly/54L2

- http://twitpic.com/180rg

- http://tinyurl.com/b5r5nh

- http://mine.icanhascheezburger.com/view.aspx?ciid=3247948

- http://tinyurl.com/bcffhu

Jon Zilber

Got game?

I'm not really a gamer. The last console game system I owned was the Super Nintendo. (Go, Mario Brothers!) But lately it seems like gamers and non-gamers alike are all glued to their cell phones with one game or another. My friends swear up and down about how entertaining and addicting these games can be -- or how handy they are when you need to look busy when you're waiting alone at a restaurant, or how they make that super-slow line at the grocery store seem to move a lot faster.

Our phones have been equipped with mobile gaming capabilities for over a decade now (remember Snake?), and with the number of mobile gamers around the world expected to reach 220 million this year, the mobile gaming business is booming. Games can be downloaded over the air, via a memory card, Bluetooth and sometimes come pre-loaded on to a phone. The Palm Software Store offers several games with free trials; if you decide to buy, prices start at under $10. You'll find titles ranging from Sudoku to Advanced Brain Trainer to Bejeweled 2.

Over at Handango, you'll find a list of the most popular games on the Palm OS. Here are the current favorites:

1. Bejeweled 2
2. Frogger
3. Bejeweled
4. Bookworm
5. Aces Texas Hold'em

We asked a few Palm community mavens about their favorite games as well. Bejeweled is the top pick of Andrew Carton of Treonauts and Christopher Meinck of Everything Treo, while Dieter Bohn of TreoCentral singled out Crosswords, Ryan Kairer of PalmInfoCenter picked Star Command and Sammual McLoughlin of Palm Addict opted for WordPop.

Me? I went for Bookworm. (Yes, I'm a bit of a nerd.) You? Weigh in on our Facebook discussion board.

Zeenat S.
Edelman for Palm

Matt Crowley: Product manager, tech lover, toy maker

Me, You and Palm: Profiles of Palm People
	Role: I make killer toys. At least that is what my son thinks I do for a living. I think he's right. At Palm since: I arrived at Palm when it was cool to pull your phone out of your pocket by the external antenna.
I have an MBA and a degree in Cultural Anthropology. (I also know video compression technologies using inverse telecine and concatenating elementary videos from D1 sources into muxed streams.) I love technology, but I love technology more when people actually use it to make their lives better.   You should not have to “get used to” your keyboard. If you go to press “a” on your keyboard, wouldn’t it be nice to know that you’re actually going to get an “a” on your screen?   Palm isn’t work, it’s a family. And that family goes beyond the walls of the buildings in which we work. It extends all the way to the people that use and depend on our products. Their passions drive us to deliver something better every day.

  

Creating an amazing product is always a tough exercise in the delicate art of managing tradeoffs. Can we make the screen bigger -- but keep the phone smaller? More cool functions, please -- but longer battery life, thank you. There are inevitably healthy tensions among the different teams in product development championing for different tradeoffs. And that’s a good thing -- it pushes us to reinvent the boundaries of what's possible.

Here’s a small example involving Pre's 3.5mm headset jack (vs. a non-standard 2.5mm jack used in other phones). We wanted the customer (okay...me included) to be able to plug their standard noise-cancelling Bose headset into their Pre on a plane and rock out. No funky adapter needed; it should just work. But there was no room for a 3.5mm jack in the design. So it was my job to work with the engineering and design teams to find a meeting of the minds and make it happen. We kept asking: What if we curved it here? What if we had a unique part made to fit? What if...? Finally we came to a solution and balanced the efficiency of the speakerphone air space, and we made a unique 3.5mm headset part to match the curve of the Pre design. The result: You get great speakerphone performance AND a standard headset jack for my...I mean, your...noisy flights.

Join Matt on a Facebook discussion board all this week and ask him about large prime numbers or who he's calling Spaz this week.

A brief history of the Palm Pre

It was just last Thursday that Palm unveiled the Pre and webOS, and the response has been nothing short of overwhelming. Here’s a quick recap of the whirlwind week that was.

For starters, you can catch the full video of the unveiling of our new platform here. The Pre was almost immediately recognized with several prestigious awards:

CNET
Palm Pre wins Best of CES 2009 and People's Voice Award

LAPTOP
Best of CES 2009

Popular Mechanics
Top 18 Products at CES 2009: PM Editor's Choice Awards

The media coverage of the Pre and webOS has been wide-ranging (the wordcloud below gives a sense of the coverage), with stories reflecting the immediate 

excitement around the new device, the longer-term potential of the new platform, and the drama around Palm’s “comeback.” Here are a few of our favorite stories and headlines:

CNBC
David Pogue “It’s the belle of the ball”

CNET-TV
Interview with Stephane Maes

Newsweek
Palm’s New Reach, Once a tech industry heavyweight, Palm was nearly knocked out by its competitors. Can its latest smartphone help spur a comeback? 

New York Times
Palm Unveils iPhone Competitor, the Pre

USA Today
Palm's new Pre smartphone gets lots of good buzz

Dow Jones
UPDATE: Palm Shares Soar As New Smartphone Wins Wall Street Praise

Financial Times
Palm: Not dead yet

Associated Press
Palm unveils new smart phone, operating system 

Bloomberg
Palm Pre Takes On BlackBerry, IPhone in Comeback 

San Francisco Chronicle
CES09: Palm silences doubters with new OS and phone 

TheStreet
Palm Pre: iPhone Killer? By Gary Krakow

MSNBC
Palm unveils 'Pre' smartphone device, new OS 

Yahoo! Tech
Palm gets back into the game with touchscreen Pre, WebOS 

Gizmodo
Palm Pre Hands-On First Impressions

Engadget
Live from Palm's CES press conference

CrunchGear
CES 2009: Palm Press Conference 

PC Magazine
The Palm Pre: CES 2009's Hottest Product 

InformationWeek
Palm's Pins Comeback Hopes On 'Pre' Smartphone 

CrunchGear
“Hands on” with the Palm Pre

BoingBoing
Seven features that make the Palm Pre better than the iPhone

Jon Zilber

Relive the Pre and webOS unveiling

Wondering what the fuss is all about? You can have a front-row seat at last week's unveiling of the Palm Pre and webOS in Las Vegas right here. See the gesture interface! Marvel at the form factor! Observe Palm Synergy in action! (And discover more than you want to know about the joy of vole sex.)

Jon Zilber

Palm Pre Sweeps CNET Best of CES Awards

Everyone knows who CNET is. They were a gadget site before gadget sites became en vogue. Heck, my mom looks at CNET (Hi, Mary) and she thinks QWERTY is a Moroccan chicken dish. The point is, CNET has built up some major credibility the last 15 years, providing technology news and reviews. In the past, they've become very familiar with Palm products, loved them some of Palm's products and others...well, not so much.

Each year, at the Consumer Electronics Show, CNET and the Consumer Electronics Association hand out The Best of CES awards, which “represent the cream of the crop at the most important trade show in the consumer electronics industry,” according to CNET. The CNET editorial team recognizes the best new products at the show with awards in ten categories, an overall Best of Show award, and the People's Voice award that's selected by CNET's online audience.

You may have heard that Palm recently announced a new operating system, Palm webOS, along with the first phone that webOS will run on, the Palm Pre. Well we just returned from Las Vegas, where CES is held and we're ecstatic to report that the editors at CNET have bestowed upon the Palm Pre three Best of CES awards: the Best Cell Phone / Smartphone, the People's Voice award, decided by over 10,000 CNET readers, and, last but not least, the Best in Show Award, given to the best overall product at the show. This is the first time ever that CNET has awarded all three awards to the same product. Check out this video of CNET Senior Editor, Bonnie Cha and Palm Vice President of Smartphone Product Marketing, Stephane Maes, walking through the Palm Pre.

The indomitable David Pogue of The New York Times, was also quite impressed with the Palm Pre, calling it the “Belle of the Ball” and the “Buzz of CES,” while appearing on CNBC. And on Engadget, former SNL veteran and future Conan O’Brien replacement, Jimmy Fallon, was also very impressed with the Pre.

Needless to say, much more to come on the Palm blog regarding the Palm webOS and Palm Pre, so stay tuned.

Alex H.
Edelman for Palm

Jimmy Fallon loves the Pre so much...

...he bought stock in Palm. See the whole video at Engadget here. Or jump to the segment about Palm here.

Jon Zilber

More resources for Palm Pre info

If you're interested in developing applications for the Pre (or just finding about more about the development environment), check out the Palm Developer Network at http://developer.palm.com/. And to get details about Sprint's plans for Pre, sign up to get information here: www.sprint.com/pre.

Jon Zilber

Want more info about Pre?

You'll find lots of details about the new Palm Pre phone and webOS at www.palm.com. And there will be even more coming very soon.

Jon Zilber

Live from Las Vegas (14)

Whodathunkit?

Matt Miller, ZDNet: Congratulations Palm! You needed to hit a homerun today to stay relevant in the mobile space and I would have to say you did just that.

slashgear's vincent nguyen says, "It’s curvy and beautiful!!!... .(Okay, I'm sold)"

Jon Zilber