LAS VEGAS -- With its new Palm Pre phone announced earlier today, troubled phone maker Palm has clearly put itself back into the game.
The spotlight is clearly on the slick hardware but Palm is betting its secret sauce, its newly created operating system, WebOS, will give the Pre an edge over competitors.
"We created a new platform from the ground up," said Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm at CES 2009. "It is going to redefine the center of your access point to the Internet."
A key feature of WebOS is the Palm Synergy, which brings different information from calendars, contacts and instant messaging applications into a single screen.
WebOS links contacts together so if the same contact is listed in Outlook, Google and Facebook accounts, it recognizes that they are the same person and links them together into one listing.
There's also combined messaging, which allows you to see who's active in a buddy list and start a conversation with just one touch, instead of having to fire up the IM application seperately.
The OS treats every application as a "card", a new term that Palm has introduced with the Pre. Cards or individual applications are stacked up like a deck on the main screen and can be scrolled through.
WebOS also comes with global search-- any search string typed on the phone searches through contacts, applications and other information repositories on the device. The OS also offers to search the Internet, all in a seamless way.
While Palm has said the WebOS is developer friendly, it hasn't commented about how applications written for WebOS will be compatible with Palm OS 5.
