Palm Web OS looking good

Today Palm unveiled it's new Web OS amid much fanfare at CES in Las Vegas. My friend Andrew and I watched the proceedings from afar over a coffee. He was in Seattle and I was in Los Gatos and we caught it all via a live blog feed from Joshua Topolsky on the engadget site .
IMHO Joshua did an outstanding job.

There is doubtless going to be a lot blogged and tweeted about the Pre and its OS in the next 6 months so some might wonder why I should bother commenting on it at all. However the one thing that really excites me about this new OS is its underlying paradigm... Over the past year or so we have seen a lot about mashups and how they are changing the way you can consume data. However a lot of the time, the notion of providing a mashable stream has been second fiddle to some primary application be it desktop or webtop. Palm Web OS (it appears) puts the notion of mashing data streams front and center- It is the primary raison d'être of the OS, mashing together the users data streams of interest under its web based applications and presenting them together as a unified experience. A contact card made up of a persons picture from Facebook, their email address from Gmail and their phone number from Outlook. All pulled together and delivered to you by via the phone but never static, always dynamic. It's a very powerful idea that I think will really change our expectations of how computers should relate and relay our information to us. Soon we will be asking "My phone can do this, why can't the computer on my desk?" Of course, given that the applications layer of the OS is actually web based all of this stuff is portable and there is no real reason why it should just be bound to a phone!

In my beginning...

I guess I should explain that I have been a strong protagonist of the mobile lifestyle for nearly 20 years. In 1990 I worked for a company called the Active Book Company in Cambridge UK. They were building one of the first tablet computers which had the form factor of a laptop but had a pen as its primary interface. It one of the first ARM based processors in it and ran the innovative Smalltalk-80 software system making it an exceptionally flexible software platform and very very sloooooowwww. In 1991 Active Book became part of EO. This was AT&T's attempt at a "Personal Communicator" a combination of email, note taker, fax machine and cellphone that you could carry anywhere along with several additional battery packs to make it last more than an hour.

I loved this machine and traveled all over Europe demonstrating it and actually using it as part of my mobile lifestyle. I never could quite understand why ordinary people couldn't master the 140+ gestures the device had for text editing and page turning or why people weren't prepared to radically alter their handwriting for the device to understand what they were writing.

AT&T had great plans for the device and ran adds on major TV networks in the USA showing a girl on a beach using it. "One day you will be able to fax from a beach." was the ads tagline. However, though I've been to a lot of beaches up and down the California coastline I must say that I never felt the urge send a fax from any of them.


One other problem with the EO was it was expensive not just to buy but also to run: simply emailing a handwritten note scribbled on the EO's screen such as "Honey, please put the dinner on. I'll be home in 20 minutes." would cost more than actually stopping off on the way home to buy a 3 course takeout meal due to AT&T's per byte model of email.

Haven't we come a long way! In almost 20 years things have predictably become smaller, cheaper, faster but moreover our access to information has changed radically and with it our expectations...

Disclaimer

The statements, opinions and conclusions outlined on this blog and associated website are those of the author- Rod Crawford. They in no way represent those of my employer or anyone else. They are based on my own studies, research and personal experience. This blog has been developed for the purposes of informing, educating and me having fun. It is not intended to be a comprehensive guide to software development or even necessarily correct! Further, no person should rely on any content on this website/blog or on the opinions or conclusions outlined on this website/blog without first obtaining advice from a suitably qualified professional person. The author expressly disclaims all and any liability and responsibility to any person or corporation, in respect of anything and the consequences of anything, done or omitted to be done by any such person or corporation in reliance, whether wholly or partially, upon the whole or any part of the contents of any of this blog and associated website or any other website referred to on this blog or website.