a glob of nerdishness

July 2, 2011

Parting questions for PalmHP

written by natevw @ 2:51 pm

To be clear, I LIKE webOS and want it to succeed. :/
Steven Frank, 2011 July 1

One of my first memories of Palm’s new “New Palm” thing was when they were in the papers every month for making their first webOS device pretend to be an iPod. For USB syncing purposes. Clever way to get some free advertising from MacRumors, but you know what? I hate what iTunes has become and loved being able to just drag and drop MP3 files onto my Palm Pre 2.

Anyone wanna buy a Palm Pre 2?

I tried to love it, just like how for years I’d been trying to love the heavy, bulky reel mower I also bought online. It’s good for the ecosystem, it’s got some very very nice qualities designed into it…

I’ve decided I don’t like either the lawnmower or the smartphone. And while I don’t need perfect landscaping in an efficient amount of time or energy, with greater responsibility at work comes greater need to join the same technological century as the rest of the world. Even though I’ve owned a Palm Pre 2 since last December, it’s never felt okay nor have I had room for it on my person. Thus it was not until this week that I became a cellphone person.

More honestly: I am now an iPhone people. It seems like such a silly insignificant change to go from having an iPod touch always in my pocket to an iPhone always in my pocket, but for me it is a defeat.

When something fails I wanna know why. So here are some poignant, probing questions that will magically make Palm/HP awesome again:Good questions are hard please read the following rants instead:

  • what’s with the HP logo when my phone reboots? The original palm wordmark was a reserved, artistic logo. The new .(h|p)*…thing is a glowing gradient of a corporate wart that only calls all the nice things the Palm people have said about their acquisition into question.
  • for example. why is “http://h41112.www4.hp.com/promo/webos/us/en/smartphones/pre3.html” the URL for the Palm Pre 3 (and why is it down while I’m trying to gather info for this post?)
  • why is the Palm Pre 3 still only [no worky web page, no getty authoritative tech specs...] X millimeters “thin”-ner than the mainframe computer I am typing this on?
  • why does it still have a stupid slidey keyboard thing that I could never shake the feeling would remain in my pocket when I accidentally pulled out only the other half?
  • why, after I really really really wanted to love my Palm Pre 2 but couldn’t, am I now completely uninterested in any incremental non-improvement you’ve not really made at all since then? Since the very first Pre?!
  • I know HP used to be a great company and all, but can you please just license the poor operating system that still somehow shows the most spectacular promise of being potentially both usable and open, try taking it and licensing it to a company that might actually be capable of combining it with some decent hardware before it’s too late?
  • and also: I said “potentially spectacular” operating system, not “actually spectacular”. Pls to put a hard-driving perfectionist in charge of software. No more Mr. Nice People, otherwise only Mr. Nice People will be able to say Mr. Nice Things about the promising prototype-grade rubbish you keep. shipping.
  • Buying an iPhone was a defeat because now i’mStuck with iCloud instead of a Synergy plugin that could talk to data on a server I control. Now i’mStuck with iStore monopolies instead of your fun official instructions for owning the device I bought. Now i’mStuck with the same iPhone that everyone else and their soccer mothers all sport like a luxury item because a truly useful phone still is — and it’s cheaper than yours!

    But the saddest thing about it all is that this sticks me with an even better web browser — w00t! — than I got on a platform called webOS. So even while Apple keeps shoving native adults into a sandbox, they’ve also been pushing web technologies up towards where I suspect native vs. web will meet: the same amount of power, but on the latter: the freedom to innovate that only a real platform can provide.

    The web is the only tool developers have left. I feel defeated because it’s not thriving as or even on anyone else’s operating system and I don’t know what that means.