In LA

I want to talk a bit about the upcoming and wildly anticipated smartphone from Palm, the “Palm Pre“. The Palm Pre is the latest in a long line of hyped iPhone killers. Tech journalists have declared,”The Palm Pre has it all, making the iPhone look almost like — dare we say it — a version 1.0 device” and that it is,”maybe the most important handset to be announced in two years”¹.

I think the Palm Pre is a very nice piece of hardware, with a set of supplied applications that look very nice, but this smartphone is massively overhyped and has a huge, gaping problem: The lack of an SDK that allows the compilation of native applications –incidentally this is the same problem that initially kept me from considering the purchase of an iPhone.

The iPhone was roundly criticized for the same defect, but the makers of the Palm Pre have been shockingly successful at that which Apple failed to do: to give a positive spin to this policy/design-defect. In the case of the iPhone, Apple was able to recant their initial position and fix the issue, leveraging technologies they had been developing for years². Palm will not be able to issue so seamless a fix, as the Palm Pre’s OS is brand new, and I doubt Palm has very robust development tools or frameworks they can prepare quickly and distribute to the eager developers who will gather as soon as Palm Pre users tire of applications that are glorified web sites and want to do things with their phones that simply can’t be done using javascript and html.

To gain a bit of perspective on the Palm Pre, I think it is necessary to take…

…A look back at developer response to the initial iPhone announcement

When Apple first announced the iPhone, they announced there would be no way for developers to compile native binaries that run on the device, but instead announced that developers could create wonderfabulous web 2.0 applications that would run on the phone:

Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone’s services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps

The response from grateful, would-be iPhone app developers? Try this google search for “iPhone no SDK”. A couple of choice quotes from the results:

• “…no SDK == no access to iPhone’s cool frameworks == no revolutionary apps, no real new concepts coming from third-parties, no eye candy available for anyone but Apple…”
• “I became a Mac developer so I could program in Cocoa, not because I have some inherent love for objects with a big Apple on them. If I wanted to program in a crappy language just so I could get more customers, I’d switch to Windows, not stinking JavaScript.”

Apple took a ton of heat from developers and users for their initial decision, and eventually did release an SDK to allow developers to write native applications for the iPhone. The iPhone runs OS X as its operating system, and Apple has a long history of creating and distributing tools for OS X development as well as Frameworks to simplify the creation of rich applications³. Not only are these tools and frameworks feature-rich, mature, reasonably well-known, and stable, they are also the same tools and frameworks used by Apple to build the operating system and the applications they supply on the iPhone.

Most of the third-party apps I frequently run on my iPhone (most prominently: Beatmaker, Evernote, Fring, Brushes, and iTalk) would not be possible to create as web apps with Ajax and Javascript. Those that could possibly be programmed in javascript, such as the iPhone OmniFocus app, probably shouldn’t be. They’re complicated enough that it would be difficult to design them as web apps that have good performance⁴ and manageable code.

My final rant

As far as I can tell, there’s no native development environment for the Palm Pre, nor is there one that will be popping up soon. Would-be developers face the same silly web-app-only idea for which Apple was roundly criticized when they first launched the iPhone. It’s actually the same silly web-app-only idea which has probably contributed to the lack of applications for the Sony Mylo devices⁵.

Unless the built-in applications are spectacular and completely fill the needs of most smartphone consumers, real third-party applications will be necessary for the Palm Pre to make more than an initial blip in the smartphone market. I don’t expect there’ll be many interesting apps available for the Pre until they give developers a bunch of useful frameworks and the ability to compile binaries for the device. The iPhone has a huge advantage here in that iPhone developers get to develop and compile apps for a mature platform based on an OS and frameworks that have been around for years.

As a long-time Palm user and advocate, I’m glad they’re back in the game, and I look forward to being proven wrong on all counts.

Notably ommitted from this analysis because I tired of thinking and typing: Windows Mobile, Nokia⁶, Android, OpenMoko.

1. An endorsement that is simultaneously breathless AND wishy-washy. [↩]
2. Some of the OS X development technologies are approximately 20 years old, having been born at NeXT. [↩]
3. See previous footnote. [↩]
4. Web apps are slow enough when running in web browsers on multi-gigaherz multi-core computers, let alone puny 600Mhz power-saving mobile processors with limited ram. [↩]
5. And this lack of apps might be part of the reason nobody’s ever heard of the Mylo, which like the Palm Pre has decent hardware [↩]
6. Nokia sells way more smartphones than any other player, more than twice as many as Apple. It does seem odd sometimes that the question is “What’s to be the iPhone killer”. [↩]

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Apple, Development, Entitled Ranting, Geeky, PalmOS, Treo 600. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.