The Palm Pre's Missing Menu Key and Why the Center Button Should Be a Trackball

I've gotten used to the Palm Pre's keyboard pretty quickly but the one thing that I do miss the most from the Treo 680 and T-Mobile G1 is the "Menu" key. There are several ways of accessing menus on the Pre. You can tap on the upper left hand corner. And in a fairly ingenious use of the Pre's gesture area, you can tap and hold the gesture area and use it to select keyboard shortcuts like "Cut," "Copy," and "Paste." But these workarounds are just that, workarounds. Tapping on the upper left hand corner is not as easy as just hitting a dedicated Menu key.

And it's not like there is not enough room on the keyboard for one more key. The area which slides out to reveal the Pre's keyboard is about the same size as Treo 680's keyboard and has plenty of empty space which holds no keys. A single key would have gone a long way towards making the Pre's kebyboard a lot more comfortable.

Now about the center button. As far as buttons go, it's a pretty cool one. It lights up when you touch the gesture area and it makes it moves your open applications into card mode so you can easily switch between them—like Microsoft's "alt+tab" key combination. But from another perspective, it's pretty useless. Card mode can be invoked by merely swiping up from the gesture area which eliminates the need for the center button. And while the visual cue of the center button lighting up is useful, you don't really need a button for that. In fact depending on where you touch gesture area, a circle immediately to the left or right of the center button lights up at the same time it does.

What this all adds up to is the idea that the center button in its current form is not really needed for operating the Pre. So other than the fact that it looks cool, why is it there? I can't think of a reason. Now if it were possible to control the position of the cursor on the screen the way the trackball on the G1 does, then the center button would be truly useful. While the Pre does have a "trackball mode" where swipes on the screen can control the position of the cursor while the Pre's orange button is held down, this method takes practice to learn and master while a physical trackball would more intuitive.

I've also seen suggestions online about having the center button light up with alarms. I like this idea. Treos have always had blinking LEDs and since the Pre's center button can light up anyway, it should be fairly easy to replicate this functionality.

Keyboards Compared—Treo, G1, and Pre

Size isn't everything. That's what we tell ourselves and to a certain extent it's true. At least it's true in the case of smartphones. I've compared the Treo 680's keyboard to that of the T-Mobile G1 before and now that I am migrating to the Pre, I have another comparison to make.

I am making more typos with the Pre but it's more than just a matter of the keyboard. Most of the typos that I make with the Pre are on web forums where the font can sometimes become uncomfortably small and hard to read for my aging eyes. While I can easily zoom in and out to compensate, when I do this I can no longer see everything I am writing.

Still the small keyboard is a little harder to type on than my old 680 keyboard was. Both the G1 and the Pre have a problem with causing fatigue during long writing sessions but for different reasons. While the G1's big keyboard is fairly comfortable to type on at first, the G1 itself doesn't feel quite right in my hand while I'm typing and that leads to fatigue. With the Pre the keyboard's small size is the culprit for my fatigue. So of the three the oldest machine, the 680, is the best for thumbtyping. It's smooth, domed keys feel better than the G1's flat keys and the Pre's sticky keys.

The 680's keyboard is also easier to see with their bright backlighting. Of all the phones I've played with, the Treo 650/680 had the best backlighting. The G1's wimpy backlight can actually impair its visibility in certain lighting conditions as it turns the keyboard letters a light gray color which contrasts poorly with its silvery keys. The Palm Pre represents a nice compromise between these two extremes. The Pre's backlighting is very subtle and almost impossible to see under most lighting conditions but under total darkness it works perfectly. While this may not seem like a huge achievement, it's a huge improvement coming from the G1. And even coming from the 680 the visibility of the Pre's keyboard is good as its bright white letters and orange numbers pop nicely when viewed against their black background.

One of the problems with the G1 ane Pre's sliding keyboards is the fact that they are not always available. They have to be opened in order to be used. With the G1 it's a struggle to open with one hand, it is inherently a two-handed device. The Pre by contrast slides open quite easily with one hand—you just push your thumb against the screen. As a result, one handed use—which was one of my favorite features of the Treo—is very easy with the Pre. One-handed of the G1 nearly impossible although the onscreen keyboard which was added in the Cupcake update helps in this regard. But for me virtual keyboards are more difficult and uncomfortable to use than physical ones so the G1 is ultimately a more cumbersome device for me.

Image via Wikipedia

The Pre by contrast is much more elegant and this is especially true in contrast to the G1 and the 680 both of which very utilitarian in their design. It's system of gestures works very naturally and fluidly and even helps enhance the keyboard by acting as a virtual menu key for using the Cut, Copy, and Paste shortcuts. When I handle the Pre, I can't help but think about Obi-Wan Kenobi's line in Star Wars about his light saber, "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age." I suppose this sort of statement makes me a huge drooling fanboy but gadgets are as much about the way they make their users feel as they are about helping them get work done. When I used my 680, I was frustrated by its bugs. When I used the G1, I was frustrated by its sluggishness. With the Pre, I just flat out enjoy using the device and its bugs don't bother me as much as the bugs on the 680 and the G1 did.

Warning: Some Readers May Be Blinded By The Obviousness

It may not be a huge revelation but camera phone cameras suck. But sometimes there is a moment when blindingly obvious points are driven home quite dramatically. For me that moment came between the time of 5:30 and 6:00 AM Central Standard Time. I was walking down the street minding my own business when I looked up and admired a beautiful blue sky dominated by an almost full moon hanging low in the sky. Surely, I had to record this beautiful sight....So I pulled out my T-Mobile G1 and pressed the camera button. And then the camera application crashed...again and again. And it kept either crashing or hanging until I reset my phone. This isn't all together surprising. The G1's Android operating system is normally quite stable but if it is not reset every few days, repeatedly running and quitting applications will cause memory leaks that leave digital bric-a-brac all over an Android phone's memory. Sooner or later, applications will start to trip over it. In my experience, the G1's camera app is particularly clumsy in this regard.

So I decided to try a little experiment. I grabbed my Treo 680, my G1, and a real camera—a Canon PowerShot SD770 IS Digital Elph (what a name)—and took a few pictures.

First the Treo 680. Yuck. In fairness to the 680, it was actually a pretty good camera phone for its time when used under the right conditions. But its VGA resolution makes it worthless for this particular job—taking a picture of a nearly full moon during early morning hours with plenty of light. These are actually pretty good conditions for taking pictures with the 680 but again, it's low resolution is its Achilles Heel.

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Next up is the T-Mobile G1. With its three megapixel resolution it can actually capture and show the moon as a round white blob. Under certain conditions, the G1 can take great pictures. In fact most of the pictures on this blog have been taken with the G1. But it simply can't capture the beautiful details that the naked eye can see in an object as "small" as the moon.

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Finally, the Canon with the long name, ten megapixel resolution, and wide variety of zoom options. The camera can't capture the amount of detail the human eye can see either but at least it begins to hint at it with subtle shades of gray and off white that stand out against the blue sky. It's no contest.











So much for digital convergence.

WebOS Developer Webcast

It's been up for about two weeks but I finally got around to viewing Palm's hour-long developer preview webcast on Palm Infocenter. To no one's surprise, it turns out that programming for Palm's upcoming webOS, the operating system which will power the Palm Pre, is a lot like programming for the web. The information was very basic but it looks like webOS will be very easy to program for traditional PIM applications like Calendars and Contacts.

But what about more elaborate applications? People keep asking about games but I'm thinking more in terms of other classes of applications. Suppose I want to write a Usenet client for the Pre? It would have to connect to a Usenet server on the Internet and download articles using the NNTP protocol and install them into a database on the Pre. That should be no problem for a decent programmer (it might be beyond my abilities but that's another story). But what about other tasks that a good Usenet newsreader needs to perform like filtering, sorting, and purging articles? Will it be doable on webOS and will it be fast?

Another question is how easy will it be to add things that Palm leaves out of the Pre. Specifically, I'm thinking about a PalmOS emulator and Graffiti support. While I understand Palm's decision to not support legacy PalmOS applications, that doesn't mean I have to like it. So how long will it take to get a PalmOS emulator to run on webOS? I don't suppose that an application like WINE which is not an emulator in the strictest sense but does allow Linux to run many Windows applications is possible for running PalmOS apps under webOS?

And would it be possible for an enterprising developer to add custom gestures which would allow for character input—in other words a replacement for the PalmOS's old Graffiti character recognition system? A year ago, this probably wouldn't have mattered to me but then I upgraded my phone from my Treo 680 to a T-Mobile G1. Suddenly, I found myself using my Palm TX a lot more for tasks where my G1's Android OS didn't measure up to the PalmOS. And thus I rediscovered Graffiti. It sure would be nice to have a webOS Dashboard that could pop up a Graffiti like input area for times when I only need to enter a few characters and don't want to open the Pre's keyboard. I'd probably never use it after a while but it would be nice to know that it was available.

Will The Palm Pre Leave Me Cold?

Yesterday was a bitterly cold day in Chicago, with temperatures reaching as low as -11 degrees Fahrenheit. Today wasn't much better and it was fairly mild here compared to other parts of the Upper Midwest. That got me thinking about how I use my phone when I'm out in the cold which got me thinking about Palm's recent announcement of its new phone.

The Pre is a lovely phone with a cool new operating system and a sophisticated system of multi-touch gestures which promises to revolutionize smartphones. This last part is what concerns me on this cold day. One of the reasons why I never wanted an iPhone was because of the virtual keyboard. It was hard for me to type with and I really appreciate being able to type on my Treo and T-Mobile G1 keyboards even while wearing light gloves. Now the Pre does have a keyboard and its portrait orientation means that it would probably be good for one-handed typing—something that I've sorely missed since upgrading from my Treo to my G1. But the Pre is also going to be heavily reliant upon a system of gestures which will require bare hands. Without an alternative to these gestures for navigation, I'm not sure I'd enjoy using a phone like the Palm Pre during a cold January winter in Chicago.

T-Mobile G1—Size Comparisons

I've been meaning to post these pictures for a long time, just so I could compare my new T-Mobile G1 to my other gadgets. It's not much of a surprise I suppose. The G1 is a little taller, a little narrower, a little thinner, and a little lighter than the Treo 680 and a little shorter, a lot narrower, a little thicker, and a lot heavier than the Palm TX. Overall, the G1 strikes a nice balance in terms of size which makes it more pocketable than my two Palm devices. But I love the sheer size of my TX's screen.


Bottoms up so to speak. Palm's big "Athena" connector dominates the bottom of the Treo and TX while the G1's tiny micoUSB connector is hidden behind a little plastic door. One of the first things that I told the T-Mobile store sales rep. was, "That [door] is going to break off fast." But a month later, the little door is still attached. Curiously enough, even though both the TX and the Treo can recharge throgh the Athena connector, Palm has also included a second, tiny recharging connector right next to it. This is great for traveling as you can leave the regular Palm USB cable with its tiny, delicate wires at home but it makes the devices bulkier.


The right side of the G1 features a dedicated camera button, something the Treo 680 lacks (of course the 680's buttons are fully customizable so it's easy to assign the camera a dedicated button on the 680). It's actually a pretty nice placement for the button since it allows you to turn the G1 on its side and use it like a point and shoot camera. Sadly, the G1 camera's slow shutter response negates this cool factor somewhat. The 680 has a door for its SD card on its right side which feels pretty flimsy but it does keep the SD card from popping out the way the SD card my old Treo 600 would pop out on occasion (such as when I dropped it). The TX is the thinnest of the three devices here and its stylus is exposed through almost the entire length its right side. It's a nicely weighted metal stylus which allows for good precision use of its touchscreen, allowing you to write comfortably on the screen. The G1's screen is optimized for finger use and it has no stylus; while I rarely miss being able to use a stylus, there are times when I can't quite control the G1's screen and scrolls too fast for my taste.


The left side. Both the G1 and the 680 have their volume buttons here. The 680 also adds a side button which you must press to confirm that yes, you really did mean to raise or lower the volume, the phone didn't just get jostled in your coat pocket. The side pocket can also launch an application when it is held down which makes it perfect for using the Treo's camera or voice recorder. The TX comes with a flip cover which attaches to its left side. This is a fairly unique feature to Palm PDAs as it allows you to protect the device's screen without using a bulky case which helps maintain a nice, thin profile. Unfortunately, the flip cover tends to tear over time which makes the TX look a little shabby.


The top of the G1 is pretty boring compared to that of the G1 and TX. You can just barely make out the release tab for the G1's battery cover but otherwise there is nothing of note atop the G1. The 680 and TX by comparison have headgear that rivals Carmen Miranda's.

The 680 has a switch that shuts off all sound on the device. This feature is so brilliant and so simple, that it should be mandatory on all cell phones. With the G1 by contrast, I must use the Ring Toggle application. While this application which is available for free from the Android market is wonderful; I have to turn on the phone, unlock the screen, and tap on a radio button in order to silence the phone. There is simply no substitute for a physical button for this important function. The 680 also has an infrared (IR) port and a small but usuable stylus. Thanks to Palm's optimizations for one-handed use, the 680's stylus rarely leaves its nicely hidden stylus.

The TX's top is even busier. While the 680's IR port is more for backwards compatibility with older Palm devices, the TX's IR port is much more powerful and when paired with Novii Remote, the TX becomes a universal remote capable of controlling almost any TV, TiVo, and a whole crap load of audio and video equipment. The TX also adds a recessed SD card slot which for the most part does away with the whole card popping out of its slot problem. The on/off switch on the TX is somewhat squishy and unreliable, it's one of the most annoying aspects of this device. The TX's stylus extends to the top of the device. The TX also has 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, something that both the Treo 680 and T-Mobile G1 lack, forcing you to make due with bulky adaptors or non-standard headphones. It has quietly become one of my favorite features on the TX because even though I usually carry an iPod, the TX has a much bigger, prettier screen and is great for viewing movies with CorePlayer. It can also function as an MP3 player in a pinch if your iPod dies. In fact, with the advent of Dmitry Grinberg's PalmSDHC driver, the TX can use newer high capacity SDHC cards and can be a compelling alternative to the iPod and other MP3 and media players. In many ways, the TX was a device ahead of its time.


And finally, just because its keyboard makes it look like a tiny laptop, here's my T-Mobile G1 with a 15.4" HP laptop and an 8.9" Acer netbook.

Treo Versus T-Mobile G1—Software

Walking out of church last night, I was stunned at the sight of Venus in the night sky. Nights when you can really see the stars are rare in a big city like Chicago with its many lights. Being the nerd that I am, I whipped out my T-Mobile G1 and tried to see what I could see. Sky Map is powerful application available for the G1 on the Android Market. It uses the G1's GPS and accelerometer to create a tiny planetarium in your phone. The view changes as you move the phone around providing what is at times a mind-blowing effect. I also used Sky Map a bit during my trip to Texas to watch the night skies in a more rural setting and it was a pretty cool experience.

But Sky Map is slow...so slow that Android sometimes thinks that it has stopped responding an offers to force the application to close. I usually just tell Android to wait and Sky Map responds just fine once it has updated all the information that it needs to calculate to show its interactive star map. That's just the price of working with a complicated application right?

Actually I have a similar application installed on my Treo 680, Astro Info. It's a much simpler application which shows a globe with the positions of the stars plotted on it. It takes a lot of work to set up, you have to install the application along with several other databases which contain the stellar data that it needs. Then you have to figure out your geographic coordinates and enter them into the application. While Astro Info does allow you to define several different locations, if you find yourself out on a country road at night and the mood to do some stargazing strikes you better have a map or a compass or you won't be able to get much information out of Astro Info. Sky Map on the other hand, is still good to go.

Still Astro Info is a simple and powerful application once it is properly set up. You still have to know if you are facing north, south, east, or west but if you know that, it's pretty easy to use Astro Info for stargazing. In some ways it's easier than Sky Map because you don't have to wait for it get a GPS fix (actually Sky Map does have a manual mode but I rarely use it). I can usually find any star Astro Info by using the moon as a reference point.

These two applications are a good example of the differences between the Android and Palm OSes. One is extremely modern and can leverage just about every technology you can name to form powerful platform. The other is old and tired but simple and flexible enough that it has allowed many powerful applications to be created despite its limitations. One allows for extremely simple, easy to use applications but all this simplicity is build upon a complex foundation. The other is inherently simple and easy to use but its age has made it increasingly difficult to create easy to use applications since developers must work hard to get around its flaws.

Another good example of the difference between Android and PalmOS can be found in their contact applications. This one area where Palm after all these years is still ahead of most of its competitors. Creating a new contact in Android opens a busy window full of boxes, buttons, and icons which wastes tons of space. The G1's 480x320 screen allows you to enter six pieces of information in your new contact: a picture, full name, cell phone number, e-mail address, ringtone, and a checkbox to tell Android whether or not to send this contact's calls directly to voicemail. Scroll down and you also see a More info button which allows you to enter a wide variety of phone numbers, e-mail addresses, IM addresses, and other information like an organization for the contact or a note.

The Treo 680 by contrast produces a much starker, more elegant, and efficient window. Despite its smaller 320x320 screen, the 680 actually shows more information in the new contact window than the G1 does. It shows eight pieces of information: separate first and last names, a picture, ringtone, company (note that Android buries this option in the More info menu as Organization), title, and work and home phone numbers. Scroll down and you see fields for a cell phone number, e-mail, another phone number, IM address, website, a physical address with separate fields for number, city, state, zip code, and country. Scroll down a little more and you see fields for a birthday, anniversary, and four custom fields which you can define yourself. And Palm also makes good use of its limited screen real estate by putting a category menu (in a tremendous contrast with an Android phone which as far as I know cannot assign a contact to a different group even though Google Contacts does support organizing your contacts into various groups), and icons for creating a note (an option which Android buries at the end of its More info menu), and an icon for adding still more phone numbers, e-mail and IM addresses, physical addresses, and even more custom fields. The Treo's Contacts and other PIM applications really do typify the "Zen of the Palm" the simplicity which once made Palm's PDAs and smartphones so popular.

I could go on comparing the software available for the Android to software available for the Palm. But I think that comparing these two applications make my point. I have two problems with the software on my T-Mobile G1, one which I am confident will be solved with time and another which I fear will never be solved. Android lacks a full suite of applications before it can be a legitimate mobile computing platform, the big one is an office suite. But Dataviz has announced plans to port its excellent Documents to Go application to Android so that problem will be solved soon. Similarly, Android e-book and PDF applications are already in their infancy and will only improve over time. The other problem is less serious but is also less likely to be remedied. Android does not seem to have a design philosophy beyond "make it colorful and pretty." This emphasis on style over substance makes Android applications clunkier and dumber than they should be.

Can Palm Come Back?

PalmDoc shares his excitement over Palm's upcoming CES presentation and has a rather nice wishlist of what he wants to see from them complete with a pretty snazzy mock-up. I've owned ten PalmOS devices over the past ten years and would love to see Palm get its act together. But it's hard to say if I should be enthusiastic or not given how tight-lipped Palm has been about its new OS. 

And yet, I look at my old Treo 680 and Palm TX and think that they are pretty good devices. I still use my TX as a PDA, PDF and e-book reader, and as a universal remote. For all my T-Mobile G1's powerful hardware and sohpisticated Android OS, its software library lacks the breadth and depth the third party software that is available for the PalmOS. The way I use my TX is a perfect example of this—there are PDF and e-book readers available for Android but they are slow and clunky in comparison to Palm's offerings. 

And that's part of the reason why I worry about Palm's new OS. Will it be backwards compatible with older applications? Palm won't say. Historically Palm has been very good about supporting older apps on its newer operating systems but Nova is expected to be a huge leap from earlier versions of the PalmOS. Without its huge software library, I would see no reason to abandon my shiny new Android phone for a new Palm Nova OS with little or no third party software.

Treo Versus T-Mobile G1—On The Inside

One of the greatest strengths of Palm's Treo smartphones has been their large, removable batteries. The large batteries are also one of the reasons why Treos tend to be so thick. The T-Mobile G1 also has a fairly large removable battery but the device itself is so capable that battery life takes a major hit. Moreover, while the G1's battery is removable, it's not nearly as easy to remove as the Treo's battery.

The Treo's battery compartment is very well thought out. As you can see from the comparison photo, the Treo has a nice little button near the bottom of the battery cover which allows you to easily pop it off and get at the battery. While it's not exactly a unique cell phone feature, it works so well that beginning with the 680, Palm decided to abandon the use of a reset button and now sets its devices to automatically reset when you remove the battery.

The G1's battery compartment is somewhat less elegantly designed. The G1 has a release tab which allows you to remove the back panel and get at the battery. In order to do this you must, "Slide open the display to reveal the keyboard." and "Pull the release tab out while at the same time peel the back cover off." (These are direct quotes from the T-Mobile Getting Started booklet.) In practice however once the release tab has been pulled out, the back cover is still firmly attached to the phone and must be removed using an uncomfortable amount of effort. While it's not exactly hard to remove the back panel, the amount of force you need to use tends to slightly deform the back panel causing it to creak slightly—a disappointing thing to see in a hot new phone.

Another problem with the difficult to remove back panel is that the SIM card resides underneath the battery. And the slot where the SIM card resides is just long enough to make removal difficult—not hugely difficult mind you but just enough to annoy. The Treo 680 by contrast, has a handy little tray for the SIM card which makes it easy to remove. The end result is that it is harder to switch back and forth between phones with the G1 than it is with the Treo.

One area where the G1 outshines the Treo is in terms of removable storage. The T-Mobile G1 has a tiny (fingernail sized) microSD card (a 1GB card ships with the G1) which fits into a tiny side door which is built into the device's "chin" which is revealed when you slide out the display to reveal the keyboard. It has all the same problems as the SIM card slot—tiny and hard to remove (I know it's sexist but I sometimes think that the G1 was built specifically for women with small hands and long fingernails). But the nice thing about the G1's microSD card is that once it's in, there is no reason to take it out because the G1 alerts you and offers to mount the card as a removable drive when you attach it to a computer. As a result, it is easy to get things on and off of the card. About the only problem with G1's storage scheme is that there appears to be no way to use the card to store applications which can run on the phone. As a result, you have to rely on the phone's own built-in storage which is somewhat limited. With the growing diversity of third-party Android applications for the G1, expect to see a lot of "low space" warnings.

Palm has always had problems handling removable memory on its devices and the Treo 680 is no exception. The Treo has a large battery door on its side which accommodates SD and SDHC cards. While it's never actually snapped off, the delicate plastic certainly feels like it could snap off easily. And this is a bad thing because there is no way to mount the Treo's SD card as a removable drive on your computer without resorting to expensive third-party software. This has been a problem with Palm devices for years going all the way back to m500 which debuted way back in 2001. It's simply mind-boggling that Palm never got around to fixing this problem in seven years. (Perhaps they figured that it wasn't important and best left to third-party developers but this ignores the fact that this feature has been available on Palm's Windows Mobile smartphones for years while devices based Palm's own, more flexible OS languish.) On the bright side, it is fairly easy to run applications directly from the Treo's SD card although some applications do need to reside on the phone if they handle alarms or are older and can't see the SD card.

Overall, the story of the Treo's internal hardware is one of thoughtful touches marred by one stunning omission. The G1 on the other hand is quite consistent in all areas, rough around the edges but consistently powerful. The G1 is bristling with radios: the obligatory cellular radio which also transmits 3G data, wifi, Bluetooth, and a GPS unit. It downloads email automatically and switches between 3G and wifi on the fly. While you can save on battery life by shutting down its various radios, the G1 uses them so well that there is a tendency to leave them on. If the back panel were easy to remove, carrying a spare battery with the G1 would be a no-brainer. While its battery life is generally poor in comparison with the Treo its hard to see how it could possibly be better given current battery technology, the device simply does too many things. I was going to write that the G1 struggles to get through a day of light usage the fact is that there is no light usage with G1 unless you start turning everything off and just use it as a phone (if this was all I wanted to do, I'd get a dumb phone), it will always be active in the background. The Treo on the other hand gets much better battery life but does less and does a lot of what it does do less well than the G1 does.

Entertainment on the Go, Beauty vs Functionality

My iPod broke the other day. But even though I'm constantly listening to music and watching videos, I haven't really missed it. This is mainly because I already carry around a pretty good media player, really two. My cell phone, a Palm Treo 680 and my PDA, Palm TX, both already have a good built in MP3 player in PocketTunes and it's easy to view video on both devices with an application called CorePlayer. On top of that, the TX also has wifi and can use the Treo as a modem which means I have have Internet access anywhere I go.

It's almost like having an iPhone except that my Treo and TX are two year old devices which could do what they do long before Apple introduced the iPhone. And they can do even more. Both devices have great built-in calendar and note taking software and a multitude of available third-party software for including Documents to Go for editing Word and Excel files, e-book readers, and games. I can even use software to convert my Palm TX into a remote control. The iPhone meanwhile can't even copy and paste yet and has to be "Jailbroken" in order to install third-party applications. Apple promises that it will allow third-party apps onto the iPhone and iPod Touch, it looks like they will be tightly restricted.

So why are Apple's iPod, iPhone, and iPod Touch so popular while Palm's products wallow in obscurity? It seems to be a mixture of marketing, opportunity, and technology. You can take an iPod out of its box, charge it, install iTunes on your computer and you're all set. The iPod is ready to use. The iPod is tightly integrated with iTunes and you can import your music library easily or build one by buying music and movies directly from the iTunes Music Store. And if you buy a new iPod, you just plug it into the same computer and import your music library.

When you take a Palm PDA or Smartphone out of the box, it's the beginning of a long process. You have to install some sort of synching software on your computer and it can vary widely depending your computer, your choice of PDA or Smartphone, the phase of the moon, and whether or not you are upgrading. Treos and Palm PDAs can synch with Microsoft Outlook but they can also synch to Palm's own Palm Desktop which is a fairly simple easy to use application. Unfortunately, Palm Desktop has numerous compatibility issues and sometimes it seems that each new Palm PDA or Smartphone has its own version.

While Palm Operating System's huge library of third-party software is its greatest strength, it's installed software is relatively weak. While most newer Palms and Treos usually come with Documents to Go and PocketTunes, I've yet to see a Palm PDA or Smartphone with a decent video player. There doesn't seem to be a good reason for this—there are at least two good third-party video players available for the PalmOS that I know of: Kinoma and CorePlayer which can be bought and installed on your Palm PDA or Smartphone. And there is even a free version of CorePlayer called "TCPMP" which is widely available. So if Palm can license Documents to Go and PocketTunes, why not do the same with either Kinoma or CorePlayer? Well, in a sense they have done just that—newer Palm smartphones like the Centro and my own Treo 680 do have an embedded video player which appears to have been licenced from the makers of the Kinoma video player. But as far as I can tell, it's not a standalone application. You can't just throw an .avi file onto the Palm's storage card and play it unless you have already purchased and installed a third-party video player.

That brings me to the other big problem with Palms as media players—size. Not the size of the device but the size of the devices' onboard storage. My Palm TX has a 2GB Secure Digital storage card. That's good enough for about two hundred songs, a little less than two hours of video, thousands of pictures, lots of documents, many Palm applications, and leaves plenty of space left over for more stuff. But my iPod had a 30GB hard drive enough for over 2200 songs, over 20 hours of video, and over seventy podcasts and the iPod was still only about three quarters full. There has never been a Palm PDA or Smartphone which can compare to that kind of storage capacity. Also, you have to buy a seperate SD card in order to have any storage capacity at all.

Finally, I mentioned podcasts above. I don't think that I'm the only schmuck with a blog on the Internet who is addicted to podcasts. Apple realizes this and makes it easy to subscribe to podcasts directly from iTunes. In the Palm universe, podcasting might as well not exist. I actually did roll my own solution for downloading podcasts and synching them to my Palm LifeDrive and used it for over a year but that particular PDA had capabilities which Palm never duplicated on its latter models. In a way it's sad, the Lifedrive could have been Palm's version of the iPod Touch two years ago but it had several serious flaws and Palm never created a followup product to address these issues.

But at least they've made their products good enough that I didn't have to automatically run off and buy a new iPod when my old one broke.