I got to develop for and use a Pre at a previous job and it's subpar. It feels kind of cheap, the screen is too small (physically, resolution is fine), the hardware keyboard is worse than some software keyboards, and it's a little bit geeky to be mainstream. A phone shouldn't have modifier keys, imo.
That said I think webOS itself is great. Put it on some good hardware and I'd seriously consider buying one.
You're entitled to your opinion, I guess, but every phone made with a QWERTY keyboard has had modifier keys.
The Blackberry has Shift, Alt and Sym; Nokia has shift plus an blue numeric shift, and the iPhone has Shift and "123".
I'm honestly not sure how you'd even have a phone without modifier keys; there's just no good way of cramming enough buttons in the right layouts onto the phone without them. At bare minimum, people want upper and lower-case QWERTY for text entry, the telephone-style 123/456/789/0 number pad for phone numbers, plus a reasonable number of easily-accessible symbols. Even with an on-screen keyboard, I don't think you're going to do it without modifier keys or something like them, and I think you'd be hard pressed -- given the familiarity users have with modifier keys -- to do better.
If we're kvetching, though, why don't more phones allow you to enter phone numbers as alphanumeric, and do the conversion to numbers behind-the-scenes? I shouldn't have to fire up some 3rd party app in order to dial "1800 GO FEDEX" ... I should be able to type that right in like any other number and have the phone figure out that G=4, O=6, etc. The Blackberry lets you hold down Alt and type, but that's awkward and doesn't let you easily recognize a miskey. It seems trivial, yet no manufacturer seems inclined to fix it.
Well, I meant modifier keys that require holding more than one key at once. I feel that's a bit different than shift on the iPhone, but I'll concede that technically even the iPhone's shift is a modifier. My issue is then with simultaneous modifiers (for lack of a better term).
I dislike Nokia's blue-number thing and I doubt I'd like BlackBerry's alt and sym since they sound like the Pre's orange and sym. iPhone's shift and "123" are just easier to use than my n810's shift and blue shift, and easier to use than my old HTC's shift, blue shift, control, etc.
It certainly does come down to preference. No argument there.
As a geek if I find something cumbersome or awkward I can almost guarantee that most of my less geeky friends & family will feel the same way about it though. I think it's a legitimate drawback to the Pre's tiny keyboard, and I don't even have large fingers.
Because so many people in the market for iTouches don't own a cell phone?
I agree that the cost is the reason, but saying that it's $3k cheaper is seriously misrepresenting things. The marginal cost of getting an Android phone over a normal one is $30/month for the data plan, so $720 in America and I guess $1080 if you're in Canada (that sucks, btw). And then you can probably subtract $50 or $100 or so because you'd probbly pay a bit more for an unsubsidized iTouch-oid than for the subsidized phone.
For me, it's relevant because I'd like to learn how to build apps for WebOS and Windows Phone 7, but I make my living developing iPhone apps, and I'm not about to sign a 2 year contract with another cell phone provider for the privilege of building for a platform that may never amount to anything.
Cheaper for developers... not users. I might not switch away from iPhone for my personal use, but if I could pick up a palm for a few hundred bucks, I might write an app for one. As a mobile developer, you have to dest on-device and the price of supporting many devices can add up quickly.
I agree. Android as well. Android is doing pretty well, but I have a lot of friends (in high school/college) that really want Android devices, but can't/won't pay the $30/month for data. Many of them have iTouches instead, and would love a an Android iTouch-like-device as their next mp3 player.
As I've said before, the problem is: Who is going to sell that device to the customer?
Google has no direct-to-consumer sales worth talking about. Phone carriers sell Android phones because they make money on the contracts; without the contracts they have little incentive to stock, market, or sell an Android equivalent of the iPod Touch. So who's going to step up to compete with the Apple Stores and the iTunes installed base? The same electronics companies that blew their years-long headstart in the personal music player business?
I think Palm really, really needs an unlocked, 4-band GSM phone that's not world-proof. The US may be a huge market, but the rest of the world would like the possibility of buying press and pixies. And I am sure Palm wants to sell phones.
I wonder how Google, with its competing Android platform must feel about this. That is to say, are chrome and android for that matter more like the Nexus 1: designed to push other companies forward, or more like standalone products of their own? Or maybe Google is being even more forward thinking about it and realizing that they can derive competitive advantage from both scenarios.
I don't know much about node.js but have always heard about it in a server-side context - does anyone know what role node is going to play in the webOS ecosystem?
In WebOS, "apps" are written in html/css/js, so it makes sense to have the capability of running a standalone js engine like node for GUI-less apps (background services).
Bradly, I think he meant that this is really exciting. There aren't many ways that its not exciting. Hence there are very few ways it's not exciting. And then omitted the "very" in the sentence.
I don't think he meant "there are 3 ways this is not exciting".
The PDK uses the same tech as iPhone apps, they've already shown it's trivial to develop a game for iOS and port it over. That makes them much more competitive than Android, and already webOS has many more games available.
Just look at http://palmhotapps.com for a leaderboard of apps including many great games, that have already been ported to webOS or written from scratch. We not only support JS/HTML, but also C/C++ -- the best of both worlds.
I can't believe, but they finally got it and release c/c++ development kit, which means you can develop something really useful, instead of html/js BS.
Instead you could've said something to the effect of, "I'm excited about the C/C++ development kit as I've wanted to work on a project that does X and needed C/C++ because of Y."
But it isn't a negativity at all. It is my opinion. I'd said long ago, that making apps in Javascript for a phone is a ridiculous idea, and was nothing but a marketing illusion (they will tell you that Javascript is the most widely used language in the world just because any schoolchild wrote something with getElementById at least once.)
But when you look at this approach from an system engineering point of view, you probably will see, that it is artificial abstraction level, with enormous overhead, and it wasn't designed for this purpose. (What's good for a PC cannot be pushed into ARM-world. That is why Flash for Android is a failure and why Android also released a C++ DK. ARM systems still cannot afford the overhead of all those artificial layers, such as Flash or other popular PC stuff.
Of course, with V8 which is producing an optimized native code for an ARM cpu, situation will look a little better, but still, you need an efficient resource management and control (think that there is no swap).
So, clang++ is the obvious answer (that is why Apple spend money to it), but ordinary getElementById developer cannot understand and code memory management. That's why all marketers are trying to push garbage-collecting artificial blobs.
The good side is that if you learn how to program you can use appropriate tools (C/C++).
