In the months leading to this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, nobody would have thought that a company many people thought would go under in a while would be the darling of the show.
Palm, was in many ways mired in mediocrity for several years now. Its Treo line of smartphones, which at one time was the king of them all, was struggling for market share (heck, it was struggling for attention, what with the likes of HTC and of course Apple offering seemingly better phones). And of course, its Garnet operating system was aging really badly, having technical limitations that most if not all of its competitors have overcome.
Enter the Palm Pre, with Palm’s all new WebOS. In a bid to combat the iPhone’s dominance, Palm’s engineers made a phone with a capacitive touchscreen that is as responsive as the iPhone’s, then also included a qwerty keyboard for those averse to touch-typing. In other words, Palm gives consumers the best of both worlds: multi-touch, plus physical keys.
In the software department, Palm’s all new WebOS boasts of features that Apple’s iPhone could only dream of, like copy and paste, and real multi-tasking.
From a bleak outlook to a bright future in one fell swoop, Palm has recaptured the imagination of the tech world with its new Pre.
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