Palm did what Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft couldn’t: build a better experience than Apple

from Scobleizer -- Tech geek blogger by Robert Scoble

When I sat down at the beginning of the Palm Pre announcement press conference I was expecting to watch the death of a company. Palm? Give me a break. It would NEVER do anything interesting and Nokia, Microsoft, RIM, and expecially Apple were about to kick it into the deathbin of history.

I was wrong. WAY WAY WAY wrong.

Palm just did what Nokia and Microsoft and RIM couldn’t do: deliver a better experience than Steve Jobs did.

“Give me a break Scoble, you are drinking the shiny new object Koolaid,” I can hear you saying.

This is why I didn’t post a blog about it all day, even though everyone else did. I wanted to let the Koolaid wear off. I went back to the Palm booth again tonight just to make sure what I saw this morning was real.

I learned even more stuff that just blew me away.

From Palm? Give me a break!

Nokia’s devices that I saw last month just suddenly seem so lame.

Why? Well, when you look at the Nokia N97, which will be out at about the same time as the Palm Pre, you see that they also have a nice UI, but it falls apart when you click down into apps and try to do things. Palm doesn’t fall apart. Click down and you keep getting shocked.

Palm’s bet on social networking integration is a game changer. Click into a contact and you see people’s Facebook info and other info from their social networks. That is huge and not many people will get it.

Palm’s web browser is easier to get around than the iPhone’s is. Dave Winer will like some of the touches that were integrated here.

Are you surfing the web and alert comes up? Your web page doesn’t disappear. Really nice touch.

Are you a developer? Everything is based on standard webstuff. Javascript. Et al.

Cut, copy, and paste. Anymore to say?

How Apple centric is the new Palm team? Well, Chris McKillop is director of Software at Palm. He worked on the iPhone team (showed me pictures of me and my son buying iPhones at the Palo Alto store). One of the PR people at Palm did PR at Apple. Jonathan Rubinstein, who runs the Palm Pre team and led off the announcement, was a key person in development of the iPod and lots of people followed him from Apple to Palm, I heard from several people today.

Here’s some videos.

Peter Skillman, director of new product experience at Palm, shows the out of box experience and how the device’s size compares to the iPhone.
A piece of the announcement event today where they showed off some of Palm Pre’s web features.
Here’s another video of Peter showing off what he thinks the coolest things about the Pre are.

Anyway, the bottom line is Palm has a real winner here. It shows that you can never count a company out. Even one that looks like it’s already out of the game.

Vertical wall sourced from Palm by Photokit

Ed: Where's the recurring revenue? Will Sprint share? Apps share? Music share?

• Match iPhone cool: Zoom/unzoom, touch accelerometer, Wi-Fi
  
• Beat iPhone: contact integration, simpler Palm Pre apps, better camera, keyboard
• Weakness: Sprint, music
• Unknown: video, execution on delivery

Winner - iPhone and Palm

Loser- Nokia, Motorola, WinMob, RIM 

Engadget Integrates Photo Gallery with Blog Post

Ed: Engadget is a leading technology website. They have integrated their photo gallery into the body of their posts. Previously, most present the gallery in the sidebar and with content that does not reinforce the story.

The code is a hack job, with no platform nor scalability. Photokit^tm is going to be hot! (http://boomer.exitmercial.com). Stay tuned.

by Darren Murph, posted Jan 10th 2009 at 3:12PM

WiFi cameras are far from new -- over the past couple of years, we've seen P&S after P&S arrive with minimal functionality that would allow it to sync pictures with one specific online photo portal (or similar). Sony has stepped up the game for cameras to come with the Cyber-shot DSC-G3, which is the first of its kind to include a web browser for logging into pay-hotspots and uploading to practically any photo sharing site on the web. Popular Science got to handle one for a few weeks, and in the end, they were in love with the idea but hesitant to praise the execution. The T700-turned-wireless took satisfactory pictures, but the browser experience was less than awesome. You can hit the read link for all the dirty details, but unless you're willing to deal with "agonizingly" slow load times, you're probably better off waiting for the next revision. Or for some other company to whip out a bona fide competitor.

Gallery: Sony Cyber-shot DSC-G3 launches: world's first WiFi camera with web browser

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CES: Does the future of TV lie in gesture-based control?

from VentureBeat by Dean Takahashi

Gesture control is one of the most exciting new technologies at the International Consumer Electronics Show this week.There are a variety of companies — inspired by the Nintendo Wii’s gesture control and the iPhone’s multi-touch screen — that are developing new ways to interact with gadgets. Hand, arm or figner gestures — like waving your arms around in circles to make something happen on the screen — are being used in everything from phones to game consoles.

But the TV may be a big market for these technologies. TV remote controls are getting so complex that consumers need a less-intimidating way to navigate through all of the data — movies, stored TV shows, music, and pictures — that they can access on their connected TV sets.

“Gesture control is going to be the next big thing in TV remote control,” said Paul Liao, chief technology officer of Panasonic’s North American division.

Panasonic has its own EZ Touch remote with touch screens on both ends of a remote where you swipe your fingers across a screen. That’s a pretty simple use of gestures. But it’s quite possible that these remotes don’t go far enough. Some radically different approaches are being tried by the companies in the videos below. These new technologies require the development of sensors, user interface software, and hardware for making sense of the data coming in from the sensors.

Here are videos I took that may show you the future of TV. Are you ready to say goodbye to the remote control? These three demos at CES show how to use gestures to control the TV. The first video shows the Hitachi TV that is connected to a Canesta 3-D depth camera, which senses a moving object. You can wave your hands around in front of the camera to make things happen on the TV, like changing the channel or navigating the menu...