I know, it’s a bit early to to pit the iPhone against the Prē, since the latter hasn’t even come out yet. But having been a Palm user for years, I was very excited to learn about the Prē, which could be the first real competitor to the iPhone. Let’s compare the two devices.

Comparison table

	Apple iPhone 3G	Palm Prē
Size (w × h × d)	62.1mm × 115.5mm × 12.3mm (2.4 inches × 4.5 inches × 0.48 inch)	59.5mm × 100.5mm × 16.95mm (2.3 inches × 3.9 inches × 0.67 inches)
Weight	133g (4.7 ounces)	135g (4.76 ounces)
Display	3.5 inches 320 x 480 pixels 16,7 m. colours	3.1 inches 320 x 480 pixels 16,7 m. colours
Multitouch support
Physical keyboard
Operating system	Mac OS X for iPhone	webOS
3G
EVDO
GPS
WLAN (WiFi)	802.11b/g	802.11b/g
Digital Camera	2.0 megapixels	3.0 megapixels
Camera flash		LED flash
Memory	8GB/16GB	8GB
USB mass storage support
Removable battery
Modem use
Bluetooth	Bluetooth 2.0, EDR	Bluetooth 2.1, EDR, A2DP stereo
Audio formats	AAC, Protected AAC MP3, MP3 VBR Audible (formats 2, 3, and 4) Apple Lossless AIFF WAV	MP3 AAC AAC+ AMR QCELP WAV
Video formats	MPEG-4 H.264	MPEG-4 H.263 H.264
Connectors	3.5mm stereo headphone jack 30-pin dock connector	3.5mm stereo headphone jack MicroUSB with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed
Sensors	Accelerometer Proximity Ambient light	Accelerometer Proximity Ambient light
Data sources	apple.com	palm.com

Openness

Palm adopted a far more user friendly and less industry-imposed approach than Apple:

• USB mass storage (disk mode) support
• Bluetooth with A2DP stereo standard support
• Modem use
• Removable battery
• MicroUSB connector

Palm seem to have listened, because these features are among the most longed-for by iPhone users.

The keyboard

The physical keyboard of the Prē could be a selling point for people who are used to their Treo or Blackberry keyboards but in my opinion it can’t keep up with the virtual keyboard of the iPhone in terms of universal applicability and, of course, sexiness. Seeing the whole screen and having physical feedback while typing may be advantages of the hardware keyboard, but I don’t miss that on the iPhone.

I guess it is simply a matter of taste and I think it won’t be long until we see a successor of the Prē with a touch screen keyboard, utilising the promising Swype technology, which will hopefully also be available system-wide on the iPhone soon.

The camera

Its digital camera is a real weak point of the iPhone. It’s slow and far too sensitive to motion, most photos are blurry. The Prē features a 3 megapixel camera with a built-in LED flash which will hopefully provide for better photos. Unfortunately, I haven’t found any information indicating whether you can record films with the Prē or not.

Mac OS X vs. webOS

On the iPhone you can only run one application at a time for whatever reason, despite the multitasking-capable operating system. According to Palm, the Prē has been built with multitasking in mind. You can leave applications open, switch between them and even receive notifications from them when they are in the background, without distracting you too much from your current task.

Furthermore, the Prē promises to integrate the web wherever possible. For instance: The contact list not only shows you your locally stored contacts, but also the ones from Facebook, GMail and the like and combines the duplicates. Nice!

Above all, the Prē supports copy & paste. Yay!

iPhone SDK vs. Palm Mojo SDK

Only a few details have been released on the Palm Developer Network about their new software development kid named ”Mojo”:

Palm webOS applications are easy to write using Mojo, a new application framework based on the HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript standards that web developers already know and love. WebOS applications are installed and run directly on the device at native speed and have access to a wide range of device services.

Being able to develop applications for the Pre with my everyday means sounds exciting and has the potential of attracting hundreds of thousands other web developers. But Palm has yet to sell a decent number of their device to really be interesting to them, which will not be an easy task.

Conclusion

The Prē promises to be an exciting device and has the potential of being a serious competitor to the iPhone. If it proves to be as good as Palm advertise, I definitely will consider trading my iPhone for it. But it also remains to be seen, how Apple react to the Prē. At best, they will finally remove those silly restrictions from the iPhone and add features like the USB mass storage support.

More about the Palm Prē

• Official product site at palm.com
  
• ”Palm Pre overview and impressions from CES” at palminfocenter.com
• ”Palm Prē multitasking” and the ”Palm App Catalog” at Mashable
  
• ”In a nutshell: Palm Prē vs. iPhone vs. G1” at Gizmodo
• ”Hands on with the Palm Prē” at MobileCrunch
• „Palm Prē/webOS launch roundup” at Engadget

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I really don’t…

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