Monthly Archives: January 2009

Matt Crowley from Palm is answering questions this week on his Facebook page about the Palm Pre. I have no idea why Palm has chosen Facebook as the avenue for this, but it is working well. Here’s a sample of what to expect over the next week-

“Okay, let me get into some of these questions and comments. Some I can answer, some I can’t. Some you won’t like, some you will. I will do my best here. But whatever the case I do appreciate your input and it does matter.

microSD:
‘Design’ was the highest goal on the Palm Pre project. The phone has to look and function great in the hand and up against the face on a call. The decision to include or not include expandable storage is an easy one when design is the highest priority. The physical size of the device would have been compromised if we added another physical component to Pre. Just a millimeter can seriously impact the curvature of the design in a way that minimizes the design intent. We wanted to maintain a slick curved slider design without building out too much thickness. When you look at the two parts of the product and see how thin they really are, you may be amazed that we were able to fit everything in. And yes, all the stuff does fit.

The other advantage of embedded memory is that you have a large amount of storage out of the box for media and files. Including 8GBs of storage on the phone is a large amount of storage for many people, but not all. Yes, not all. We know that not everyone will be happy, but that is one of many decisions that needs to be made and the product goals help define these decisions.

The last point I will make on storage is to think about how you currently use remote storage. For example, I have my Google Calendar for family events and I have my corporate EAS Outlook calendar. These calendars are pulled down from remote storage (Internet) to my device. If my device is new, all I need to do is log into my account(s) and the content gets pulled to my device over the air. This is true for Contacts as well. We call this “Synergy”. This is something that is just straight out cool. Contacts are now pulled down from the web to my device. So if you update your Facebook contact information, and I am friends with you, your contact information will be updated on my Palm Pre address book. Think about that for a second. I no longer need to cable my device to my computer to make an update to my contacts. I get the updates over the air. Now my contact information is more up to date and if my device is replaced or new, I just enter my account information and I get it over the air to the device. This puts a whole new thought on external storage. The Internet is a BIG microSD card.

One Handed Operation:
We made sure that we designed the device and the user interface around one handed operation. A good example of this is the Back gesture. The Back gesture is a flick from right to left on either side of the Center button. You can be right handed or left handed (like me) to navigate back…”

PDA-247 is having a January Sale of mammoth proportions. Each day throughout January we will be offering a huge discount on a new title, or a selection of titles, and each discount will run for 3 days.

Today we have 50% off Initiate Pro from Hobbyist Software! This represents a saving of almost $12.50. All you have to do is visit this link and use discount code ‘Jan23′ at checkout to obtain your discount.