ramblings

I’m a proud owner of a Palm Pre, circa June ‘09.  My phone is now getting a little long in the tooth compared to what phones are coming out now.  I’m really liking the Nexus One and the Droid.  Having just heard about the new Windows Phone 7 Series that Microsoft just announced,  that has seriously my interest peaked as well.

I’m very happy with my Pre and only have a few small quibbles with it.  Occasionally the phone slows down, I’m assuming due to background apps, but I’m not sure.  I would like the app loading to be a little faster, for simple apps like the calculator it should be lightning quick to load.  I would also have liked a louder speaker on the phone when either using it as a speakerphone or playing music over the speaker, it’s just not quite powerful enough.

Now onto what I would love to find in the next Palm phone.

To really show that Palm is back, they need to show that they have both ends of the spectrum covered.  They wowed everyone last year with the introduction of the WebOS platform and now they need to knock everyone’s socks off with some new high-end hardware.  They need to be first (or at most, second) to market with a 4G handset.  It appears that the HTC Supersonic will be first with an integrated 4G modem, but if Palm comes out with a 4G radio I believe that will be the biggest sign that Palm is truly coming back.

Secondly, they need to up the screen specs.  Palm needs to increase the size to at least 3.7″, up the resolution to at least 800 x 480 and go AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic LED).  Since the Pre has the gesture area below the screen, it allows them to run a slightly smaller screen but new generation device screens are more than 20% larger and come with many more pixels.  OLED would help offset the larger display’s power consumption, but more importantly, it would at least match the screen quality of the current top-end phones available today.

Third, take a page from Google’s playbook and add voice-to-text for any text fields.  This is a fantastic evolution of speech recognition.  There have been countless times that I would have found that very convenient to be able to speak what I need typed.  In addition to this they need to get an on-screen keyboard; many times I have need to type something short and quick into my phone and I wanted to do it one-handed but that is not very feasible with the slide-out, physical keyboard.

While I don’t expect, yet still hope, that all of these changes are in store for the next Palm phone, I hope that they will soon start releasing information on the next device – my year is almost up and I need a new phone.  I believe they need to continue pushing the envelope if they want to stay relevant and carve out a niche for their future success.

Till Next Time