[ad_1]
It's hard to get to Steve Jobs' head by launching the iPhone in 2007, which already felt like watching something that changed the world. But the people of Palm have certainly tried.
Even two years after the release of the iPhone, its competitors were still far behind, and some brazenly rejected the threat of Apple. While Android grew up alongside iOS at that time, it lacked a material close to the nail polish of the iPhone. Jim Balsille, CEO of BlackBerry, said the iPhone was "another entrant into an already very busy space". Steve Ballmer of Microsoft laughed.
But the same year, the iPhone came out, Jon Rubinstein, who helped develop the iPod, left Apple for Palm: a company best known for its bulky (but beloved) PDAs. Then, two years after taking charge of product development at Palm, he stepped onto the scene of the Consumer Electronics Show 2009 to show something as enchanting as the iPhone: the Palm Pre.
After an hour, there is a lot to watch and specifications can be exceeded. (Before 5G, there was EvDO, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were real selling points.) But I think it's still one of the big technological rhetoric – something that, on the heels of a revolutionary product, has managed to significantly raise the bar.
What was so amazing in the keynote speech is that nothing about webOS and the Pre derivative is a derivative of what we had seen before. This was a brand new user interface brimming with new ideas about running a phone and creating apps. Many features already seemed ahead of their time – and many of its features have been adopted by competitors since then. There was even an amazing wireless charging dock! (It's not apples-to-apples, but if you keep points, AirPower was canceled … in 2019.)
It's unfortunate that Sprint exclusivity, its dominant competitors and self-inflicted wounds ended up stifling Palm's market, but many of its ideas remain. You can not take an iPhone or a Galaxy without keeping a little of Palm Pre's dream.
[ad_2]
Source link