* Photo: Jeff Mermelstein * It is impossible to talk about the Palm Pre smartphone without referencing the device that is both its inspiration and its archrival: the Apple iPhone. Yet comparisons irritate both companies.
The view from Apple is that the iPhone occupies a lofty tier that admits no pretenders. This haughtiness, though, may be tinged with the sting of betrayal: The Pre's auteur is Jon Rubinstein, who was a top Apple executive before becoming Palm's CEO. His defection has made him the Fredo Corleone of Cupertino. And from Palm's point of view, judging the Pre only in light of the iPhone is an insult to Palm's former glory. "There's a lot of Palm DNA in there," Rubinstein says.
Yet the Pre succeeds largely because of Rubinstein's willingness to embrace the ethos of the company he left. The Apple homage begins with the packaging, a compact trapezoidal box that opens to reveal an onyx-colored device, displayed like a rare jewel. What follows are other Apple-like touches—literally. If the swipes, pinches, and taps used to control the Pre seem familiar, that's because Rubinstein found the confidence to buck his former employer's intimations that these gestures were patented property. (Google, in contrast, chickened out, and the Android phones are thus gesture-challenged.)
But the Pre also delivers features that the iPhone has yet to match. It has a physical keyboard, albeit one best suited to munchkins. More impressive, it actually manages to run several applications at the same time. Despite being a drain on the battery, multitasking capability is definitely a must for the smartphones of the future.
But while it's great that the Pre can have more than one application open at a time, this capacity only underlines its greatest weakness—the paucity of those apps.
For all its technical wizardry, the iPhone's greatest triumph is the way it ushered in a bounty of mobile apps, a fecund diversity previously seen only on the desktop. Ironically, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was opposed to this approach when he introduced the iPhone at Macworld Expo in January 2007.
"This thing is more like an iPod than a computer," he told me that day, referring to the fact that outside software developers had no easy way to put their applications on iPods. "You don't want your phone to be an open platform. You don't want it not to work because one of three apps you loaded this morning screwed it up." He shrugged off my objections. "This is five years ahead of what everybody's got," he said. "If we didn't do one more thing, we'd be set for five years!"
Jobs finally changed course and not only opened the floodgates to developers but made them the center of his marketing strategy. "There's an app for just about everything," the commercials say, and with more than 50,000 choices in the iTunes App Store, you can believe it.
And the Pre? A month after launch, the Palm App Catalog—with a payment system yet to be determined—has only about 30 choices. (Compare that not just with the iPhone ecosystem but with Google's Android, which has 15,000 apps.) It's like visiting a bookstore with a single shelf. Though all is not lost, operating systems tend to be winner-takes-just-about-all battles: A critical mass of applications for a particular platform leads to wider adoption, which leads to—more apps.
The Palm Pre did prove Jobs wrong about one thing: Apple's lead in smartphones wasn't five years but two. Of course, Apple has maintained a steady pace: The 3GS, introduced only two weeks after the Pre, added an upgraded camera with video recording, implemented cut-and-paste, and sped things up to make sure all those apps ran briskly. Palm will need to keep moving swiftly as well. Unless Rubinstein and company get oodles of programs and developers on board pronto, the question of whose DNA dominates the Pre will be moot. As Apple understands, now it's all about the apps.
Email steven_levy@wired.com.
