Post Palm Pre Post

I dig technology, but tend to be a late adopter. One of the few exceptions was in June 2009, when I was quick to jump on the Palm Pre. The iPhone Killer. Sprint’s first real smartphone. It was a revelation, the device.

Just look at that baby. The Sprint Palm Pre, circa 2009.

Slide-out keyboard, cards you could swish into the great beyond with a flick of a thumb, wirelessly synced contacts, the Web at your beckon, Google maps when lost, Asphalt 5… The closest experience I can recall was my introduction to the first Macintosh as a teen in 1984. Just an entirely new approach to technology.

The Pre borrowed heavily from the iPhone, of course, to the point that iTunes, until Apple sued Palm, thought it was an iSomething. I’d been a palm user since the late 1990s, starting with the Palm V. Also had used Sprint for years. So it made sense.

I was happy for a year, year and a half. But a sliding keyboard is a big-time moving part, and moving parts weaken and break. The mobile computing was going fine, but calls started crackling. Still, I waited for the next Palm. Though it would have to be an HP product.

See, Palm’s big gamble with the Pre bombed. They botched the release marketing, didn’t get the SDK out to developers fast enough, and apparently didn’t see Android coming, either. Before the company cratered entirely, HP bought them, valuing Palm’s only true asset, the WebOS running on the Pre, for $1.2 billion.

HP announced their new WebOS hardware in February, a couple of phones (the HP Pre 3, the Veer) and a tablet, but the summer arrival of the phones (the tablet is here) was delayed, and Sprint has been silent.

Two years passed. My brother, an iPhone user, took to saying, Is that a Palm Pre? Whenever the device emerged. I’d dropped it while jogging, so the screen was all scratched up. Call quality got worse. The thing seemed to be slowing down, somehow. I’d bought a few apps — the most important of which was an electronic wallet called jVault, in which I’d put a zillion passwords, which I’d have to port over manually to whatever new app I found on whatever new phone I bought.

I surfed forums of pathetic Pre owners such as myself. But the switching costs were low enough that I bailed.

Spent $200 on the Google Nexus S.

The Google Nexus S, circa now

Am using the free and excellent KeePass for my electronic wallet. Bought Asphalt 6. There are 225,000 vs. 5,800 apps. Android Gingerbread 2.3.4 isn’t as elegant as WebOS. I miss the manual keypad (though not the sliding-out part). It’s not revelational. It doesn’t, as Foreigner sings, Feel Like the Very First Time. Nothing ever does.

But the hardware is way fast, it’s a lovely device, and Android is good enough that I don’t miss the Palm offering at all.

Given Android’s and the iPhone’s momentum, it’s hard to see how HP will ever sell phones. They’re apparently toying with licensing the technology. But this whole episode is starting to remind of the Dvorak keyboard, Beta videotape standard sort of thing. The quality of the OS is higher, but Palm/HP’s dithering has lost the market. Palm Pre, we hardly knew ye.

On a positive note, for those tens — if not hundreds — of Palm Pre users who remain, when you switch phones, you can turn on WiFi in airplane mode and the device is a great little MP3 player/video game machine/web/e-mail client for young children. You may as well: Sprint is buying them back for all of $9.