The Null Device

jwz gives up on the Palm Pre

A while ago, Jamie Zawinski bought a Palm Pre. Today, he finally gave up on Palm's new platform and bought an iPhone:
So why would I get an iPhone? Because it's an appliance that just fucking works.
I have a list of 30-ish reports of more-or-less irritating bugs that I encountered during my first week of using the phone that I back-channeled into Palm via several of their developers, but most of those bugs were tolerable. The deal-breaker bugs are as follows:
  1. I still can't reliably sync my phone to my Mac.
  2. Peformance is a joke.
The performance thing I can believe. Given that the Palm Pre's entire functionality is written in JavaScript and based on HTML widgets, there must be a performance hit when compared to Apple's compiled Objective C applications. (In fact, even Java-based phones feel sluggish.) I managed to play with a Pre in an O2 shop after it came out in the UK; it was very slow, taking a few seconds to respond to a touch. Granted, this may have been after other people have played with it for a while, but still it's not acceptable. Perhaps Apple were right in ruling out multitasking on phones.

I was thinking of getting a Pre as my next phone, though after playing with one, I'm not tempted to buy into an 18-month contract for one. Perhaps if they were available as prepaid, I'd consider one. (The Pre concept sounds nifty, and perhaps they'll fix the execution.) Until then, I'll probably stick to my ancient Treo 650; you can sort of get the web on that.

There are 2 comments on "jwz gives up on the Palm Pre":

Posted by: Peter http://www.frogworth.com/blog/ Tue Oct 20 11:12:54 2009

Sad, but I do believe this. I'm sooooo keen on proper multitasking. That said, an iPhone 3GS really is a zippy little thing - Ange got one recently, and it's a lot faster than my 3G one. I just jailbroke it, which makes it actually properly usable I have to admit. But I'm *almost* considering that the following generation iPhone could be my next phone, if the Pre doesn't pick up its act, and if there isn't a really compelling Android one by then (probably another year off, or nearly).

Posted by: ianw http://www.tblspn.net/ianw Thu Oct 22 03:54:12 2009

once jailbroken you can use Backgrounder to keep some apps running (on the iPhone) but they will drop if it gets short on memory