Palm Pre - Not So Much

Let me begin by saying I have not actually touched and played with one of these phones. Maybe that would change my opinion. I'll write again once I've had a chance to touch and use one.
All of the Palm Pre reviews came out today. They are mostly positive. One of the best was on Engadget. It was in depth and fair. I read several reviews as to not be slanted by one reviewer in my early opinions. I have been very curious about this offering from Palm since they announced it over 6 months ago.
We have had and used Palm devices in our home. They were the best things available at the time. I agonized about biting the bullet and spending money for one of my own. I never did. None of the models I tried ever really hit the sweet spot of my expectations for a personal device. Once the line between PDA and Mobile Phones started to blur my curiosity started picking up again and I was hopeful that a device would surface that I could be happy with. As many of you know that did happen for me. It was in the form of Apple's iPhone. Although far from perfect especially in it's first version it was very usable and to be honest life changing for me. It changed how I live my life. I have gripes and complaints and even had to use the warranty on my first model after almost a year due to a screen defect that popped up.
I have watched with interest as one "iPhone Killer" after another has come and gone from almost every handset maker on the planet. None have measured up, not even close. The initial info from Palm was good and seemed like maybe this could finally be some competition for Apple. It is. Competition is a good thing. It will make Apple innovate faster and work harder and hopefully not let them get complacent with a wildly successful market changing device.
However, today after reading reviews and watching videos of the device being used by real people I don't think they quite hit it out of the park. I think it will be successful. Time will tell if it will be successful enough to save Palm. Maybe. What it will do is finally put the Windows Mobile pieces of shit out of our misery. They should just go away now. Thanks for playing yet again Microsoft. The Pre is good and will undoubtedly get better if they are allowed years of time to iterate. The single largest thing their success hinges on at this point is their ability to get an app store and a library of apps that even comes close to what Apple has done. They are off to a stumbling start already on this point. The Pre launches on Saturday June 6th and they do not even have the developers SDK ready to release and probably won't for months. This could kill them. Yes, Apple was a year before they released their SDK but the difference is they had no competition at the time. Palm does not have that luxury. Everyone has an app store for their smartphones up and running now. They are launching this phone with 12 apps. Yikes. The comparison to the 40k apps in the iTunes app store is staggering.
So, here is the meat of what I think about the phone. The UI is beautiful. Very much an Apple-like experience and it gets directly compared that way in EVERY review. So, this is not just me saying this. There are parts of the UI where it seems like the Palm engineers were trying to be too clever for their own good in trying to differentiate and 'outdo' Apple. This just makes the UI cluttered and clunky. I watched probably an hour and a half of demo video and I am now thoroughly confused about how to use this phone. Palm even admits that there is a learning curve. Doh! Wow, you will never hear Apple say that about any device they produce. The "learning curve" on the iPhone is picking it up and turning it on. I have handed my phone to several decidedly non-techie people and they instinctively know how to do things. It's just dead simple. The Pre cannot be labeled this way. There are fast swipes and slow swipes and there are on screen gestures and a special off screen gesture area. WTF? Are you kidding me? It seems like the biggest item that reviewers and Palm are touting is the ability of the phone to have more than one app running at once. Well, in practice this falls down fast. If you watch an iPhone user and a Pre user you will think they have the same feature in this area. Technically, right now, the iphone's apps aren't running concurrently but they launch so fast that you can't tell the diff between 'switching' apps on the Pre and launching apps on the iPhone. Pre apps take up to 10 seconds to launch according to every reviewer. Wow, I cannot imagine tolerating that on my iPhone. The occasional large game may take that much time to load up on the iPhone.
I watched the cut and paste demo on one of the videos and had to laugh. The reviewer had to actually put the Pre down on a table in order to complete the multi finger key presses necessary to complete a copy and paste. I haven't actually seen how iPhone will implement this feature but the Pre implementation looks crazy to me. There is a special orange button on the keyboard that must be slid out to perform this feature. Although there are menu items for cut/copy/paste but the reviewers showed the menu items in an app that had no text to cut and paste. Hmm? That was odd. Again, even after watching all this demo it isn't clear in my head how to use this thing.
Next, something else I noticed on the videos that I cannot be sure of until I actually use one. The Pre uses a "deck of cards" metaphor for app switching by placing a box with the app or browser windows on screen that you can flip through. Problem. These cards are small and hard to see on the already smaller than iPhone Pre screen. That could be really annoying if I am constantly holding the phone right up to my face so I can see anything. Also, with the smaller screen and many of the little "audio players" and "event notifiers" etc. that come up on the Pre I'm not sure my fat fingers could hit such small targets. It's already hard enough on my iPhone and it looks like the Pre is expecting tiny little fingers to be using their phone. That would be a DEAL BREAKER for me. Throw the phone down in disgust and never come back. It can look great and even be clever and innovative but if I can't see it and can't USE it then it's a no go. We'll see how it performs when I can touch one.
I had some other thoughts but I'm already going long here. In summary I think the Pre is a worthy competitor but it looks like Palm cut some corners in the hardware components and tried too hard to be different and clever. They overshot the mark a bit I'm afraid and my guess is this phone will be a distant 3rd or 4th to the iPhone/BlackBerry/Android crowd at least for their version 1 offering. If they last another year and can put out a version 2 we'll see how much better it is. Of course by then their competitors will be on versions 3 and 4 and 5 etc.