The Null Device
2009/10/20
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:
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 still can't reliably sync my phone to my Mac.
- Peformance is a joke.
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.