I had not come across this video until now, but a quick watch will reveal a couple of things about Palm’s webOS that weren’t mentioned at the Consumer Electronics Show. First of all, the guy in the video is Roger McNamee, the uber-gadget-geek that heads Elevation Partners, the venture capital firm that includes U2’s Bono, and owns a fair chunk of Palm. Not that we’ve cleared that up (and that’s not new, but everyone talks about Bono), the interesting part.
The video starts off with McNamee describing “synergy”, Palm’s way of saying that webOS will be able to synchronize your contacts and calendars virtually, including social networks like Facebook and business professional-oriented LinkedIn. After that part of the video comes the new stuff. As PreCentral transcribes it:
But better than that, it does stuff for you. So when you wake up in the morning, it has taken your calendar — if you ask it to — and downloaded the maps for you whole day, it’s downloaded the wikipedias for the people you’re going to visit and the companies you’re going to see… Why is it on PCs you have to go and do all that?
And when you’re late — get this — when you’re late it — remember, this thing has GPS, it has a clock, and it has your calendar. So it not only knows where you are, it knows where you’re supposed to be and when; and so when it realizes you’re going to be late, it says “Hey, not only are you going to be late, but I can take care of it for you. I’ll send an email to your assistant or to the people in the meeting, which would you prefer? And oh, by the way, here’s the map.” This is the beginning of a new wave.
Unbelievable! When the Palm Pre is released, it will live up to smartphone simply being defined as smartphone. It will use GPS and data synchronization to manage your life without you even knowing it. This is another area where the Pre is way ahead of the iPhone. Apple has been patenting everything it can think of lately including “personal assistant” features such as Palm’s. But Apple is way behind. At the earliest Apple could bring the “personal assistant” to the iPhone with its next major update but given that it has just passed through the patent office, it’s unlikely.
Almost as likely as Steve Jobs’ brainchild coming out with a line of touchscreen-compatible winter gloves before Sprint and possibly Vodafone get the Palm Pre!
via precentral
