Dear Palm,
I’m very excited about your new Palm Pre. No, I did not buy your first generation Palm Pilot. I did, however, buy one of those first generation Handspring devices. Yes, the Handspring, made by those guys that left Palm to start a new company. A company you later bought, because they were doing it right. I cut my teeth on a Handspring. At the time, it was a life saver.
Fast forward to now. The Pre promises to do exactly what I want it to do. It will bring all of my contacts and calendars together into a central device. It has a solid Web browser. It has a great interface without excluding the value of a keyboard with tactile feedback. It even makes phone calls.
Other devices make similar promises, but the Pre and WebOS appeal to me for a few other reasons. First, WebOS is based on Linux and there’s strong developer support planned. My understanding, thus far, is that this will be a fairly open device. This is good. Second, WebOS itself looks to be a really slick implementation. The clever use of screen space and intuitive interface smells a lot like that innovative flavor I tasted with my old Handspring.
The other day, I finally realized that the Pre solves a lot of the problems I seek to solve with a netbook. And that’s when it struck me, why not put WebOS on a more netbookish piece of hardware? Increase the screen size, improve the keyboard, and poof - a really awesome netbook.
In one comparison of the iPhone and the Pre, I read a really profound point. Apple squished OSX to fit onto a phone. Meanwhile, Palm built WebOS custom for the phone. My thoughts, why not beef WebOS up a touch for a netbook?
Palm, please rock the netbook world with a custom piece of slick hardware running WebOS. Keep the multi-touch display. Let the lid flip over like a tablet PC. Give it a usable keyboard. Give us a nice splash of ports and card readers. Toss in some other surprises. Have fun. You know you want to!
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