The Palm Pre comes to Sprint

I turned to my new favorite gadget non-blog, GDGT to listen in to the keynote that would really tell us if Palm would make it for another year... or not. I was originally less than impressed. They showed a phone that was smaller than the iPhone and multi-tuch. This was odd considering once again, the one thing people are not asking for is a -smaller- iPhone. Then they did something I did not expect to see, they slid it up and showed a full QWERTY keyboard, and demostrated how you could do gestures right on the face of the device for navigation. Navigation, you see, is built into the device and not a collection of buttons that might be in different places like they are on the iPhone. The new platform WebOS is basically a glorified javascript engine, so all applications are as easy as writting a webpage. Just like that. I was sold. You see, the Apple iPhone opened new doors for everyone. It showed the hardware companies that good hardware with the same shitty software as five years ago, will not fly anymore. This pushed some companies like Blackberry to completely rethink their stance on software and release updates like the Blackberry Storm. The companies that are struggling a little bit more were able to just decide to use an open source platform for the same work, as HTC and Motorola pledged their support for Google's Android platform. Other companies like Microsoft decided their Windows Mobile platform is without flaws, so they'll do nothing. Palm decided they were going to take all their work in-house. They were going to pool their resources and do what they did a few years ago when they released the Palm Pilot. They did well. The OS is light, and powerful. Since it just shuffles through information and not 'applications' it can just search through all of the information it has stored in it and when it finds nothing it automatically goes to the internet. It has Exchange support built in from day one. It is the first phone I have actually wanted since I bought my iPhone. It will force Apple to once again innovate and try and bring some of these advances to the iPhone. A few weeks ago I made fun of Sprint for saying they did not need the Android, they obviously did... They did something better, they got WebOS. This year just got interesting in the realm of portable devices and its week two!