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So yesterday Palm finally announced it’s impending new next gen smartphone (the Pre) and their next gen OS (WebOS). All the details are not available yet, but let’s just say from the demo and some brief hands on people are excited. Palm needed a winner and it looks like it has one – a new hardware/software platform with all the bells and whistles that seems to put it in the running for 2nd place with RIMM and Android. It copies liberally from the iPhone (which is a good thing) but also moves beyond it in very interesting ways.

But really, why the hell did they call this thing “Pre”? I haven’t seen an explanation for the naming yet, but I see in blog titles all over the place (like this post for example) “Pre Smartphone”. Um… so, it’s before smartphones? I can’t understand the rationale. Sigh.

Anyhow there’s a lot to like on this bad boy. It seems to have a good camera (at least a 3MP) one and even a flash on it, which should make it pretty useful in a wide variety of situations. It has multi-tasking and I read that they expect people to have 10-15 apps open at any given time, which is pretty sweet and implies some nice horsepower.

Also, Palm always had a nice vision of UI, I’d say second only to Apple’s. This time, though, they’ve trumped their alma mater (much of the new leadership and engineering comes from the iPhone department) with an app launcher that drops down over your current app instead of being a completely separate app in itself. I imagine this will be sort of like calling up that modal iPod control on an iPhone that doesn’t interrupt the app itself. I love this idea.

The extra gesture area below the screen also is an incredibly great idea that I hope Apple copies in some form. Given that these phones have only a single button (or trackball in the case of the Pre that’s what I get for reading Gizmodo, Ben Combee says it’s just a button in the comments below), adding that gesture area opens up the possibility for more generic commands which the iPhone is sorely, sorely lacking. (Yup, one click and two click isn’t quite good enough).

Synergy (it’s showtime, Synergy!) also seems quite cool – bringing your various boxes (contacts, Facebook and Google) into one unified list (without dups, even!). And where Palm pioneered the threaded SMS convos which everyone has copied, they improve on that with a combined SMS/IM box (with the implied built in support for IM) which sounds fantastic. Of course built in GPS with turn-by-turn is de rigeur. All this in a package about iPhone sized and weight – by volume this thing is about 6 cu inches vs. 5.2 cu inches on the iPhone. And the Touchstone wireless charger, well, that’s just cool.

I do, however, have concerns about this thing as well as more questions. My biggest worry is this Mojo Application Framework. They seem to want to develop applications using web technologies like html, css and javascript. While this is clearly a step up from Apple’s original, “just develop web apps!” since Palm will have them local and provide a framework for access to the interesting bits of the hardware, I still have concern that these aren’t going to be the best tools versus actual native binaries.

Smartphones still don’t have a ton of processor power and javascript isn’t going to be the most efficient way to use that. Nor does it generally give one control to maximize the efficiency of memory use. While Palm seems to have things under control what with them expecting people to have a ton of apps running at the same time, I’m still skeptical that this is a good long term development option, especially for games. Given that they also support Adobe’s flash (at least Dan Lyons says so), I wonder if they will add an Air like option for development as well or if they will eventually release another full native SDK as an additional app option. One or the other has to be coming down the pike.

I also had some unanswered questions – how well does this play with the desktop? Does it have a desktop sync with conduits like the old PalmOS (hopefully!). A really important question is how well does it sync with your desktop music? If you have to drag and drop music over to it that would kill it dead in the water for me – it needs automatic syncing with some nice controls to at least one major desktop media manager. I pray it doesn’t eschew the desktop for the cloud as Android does.

It doesn’t play video (and thus I assume doesn’t take video) which is a surprising omission. (Again, thanks Gizmodo for the misinformation, but really thanks Ben for the correction.) It doesn’t seem to be positioning itself in any way as a media center – more as an online hub, which is at distinct odds with the iPhone. Wonder if it’ll pay off or not.

Anyhow this is a serious contender. I wish they hadn’t felt the need to make it a slider – that hard keyboard must add some serious chunk to the phone and really, most people don’t need it no more and you’ll get all the complaining that people want to type in landscape mode. Still the form factor looks good, the design looks good, the ui looks good. I always knew that Palm had great engineering talent and a good UI sense, they just needed someone with vision at the top. I still firmly believe that Colligan needs desperately to go – they seem to be pricing this more than $200 if you believe this conversation with Ed:

My assumption is that Palm (PALM) would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

Remember when he said that the iPhone wasn’t going to just walk in to the telecoms business that he knew so much about? Yeah. Maybe the Pre is a better phone, but in this economic environment when you’re competing against the iPhone which has all the market momentum you could possibly make and Palm’s coming off years and years of sitting with its thumb up its ass, you need to at least have some respect for the competition.

In the end, I think the Pre looks good. Now they need to ship that SDK sooner rather than later and they need to ship the phone sooner rather than later. I think a long period of time between this announcment and those milestones just serves to dillute the current excitement in the air. Anyhow, I’m excited for this thing to be great. I want it to be great. Everyone benefits the more real competition and real innovation there are in this space. With Android and WebOS nipping at its heels, Apple’s going to need to come up with some Mobile OSX goodness tout suite. You know, say, background processing? What do you think? Is Palm back in the race?