The things this appears to do well are better than the iPhone's -- there appear to be fewer walls between data, and the Synergy stuff is a very nice touch. The OS is built on JSON data sharing, and the webapps are installed locally. For all the sorts of things I do with iPhone apps, a local browser w/local data would be sufficient. What's more, since lots of people are making custom iPhone webapps anyway, it shouldn't be too hard to go a bit further and make them Palm-native to boot.
Games are going to be a big question, however. CSS+JS? Hm.
Yeah, that was my thinking as well. The phone and OS overall look superb, but I was wondering what would happen to games and other applications that just can't be written with HTML+JS. If they left it the way they have, The other thing is that by catering to web developers, they cut out a lot of traditional software developers who haven't or don't want to learn the whole web app system.
1. Yeah, games are probably out until flash gets on this thing. But frankly, the iPhone apps market looks today like what the Facebook apps market looked when it came out. People went in, wrote lots of shit applications (and a small number of good ones), and then the whole market died.
2. Which traditional software developers can't do HTML & Javascript? Frankly I think it's a better option than Objective-C or googleJava.
Don't forget canvas.
But I think what makes Palm so competitive with this is how good of a PDA it is.
Note: the calendar and notification systems are more advanced than what you get on the iPhone and Android in v1. They take better advantage of the available space, are better integrated, and probably (knowing palm's history) will require fewer clicks to do useful things. Palm's always done a good job in these areas, and the competition's been weak.
Also, the GPS application looks like a modern self-contained GPS, not the google-maps-with-a-dot version on the iPhone.
As for using HTML/JS, it's lowering the bar for people to develop, almost to the floor.
Finally, Palm's got a tired, but well-recognized leader name. Which, for enterprises, is a lot better than Apple or Google. I can see the Palm being the place where people go if/when Blackberry fails. The iPhone can stay an iPod-phone, for consumers, and the google phone a stillborn geek device.
http://www.wirelessinfo.com/content/Palm-Centro-Cell-Phone-R...
They actually timed the various user interactions on different phones. I'm not sure of their methodology, but for what it's worth, the Palm Centro came out at or near the top for the organizer and messenging features (but not so well for the dialing features). Hopefully this bodes well for their future phones.