I was one of about 400 attendees at Palm's CES press conference announcing their new phone and operating system. The audience showed an enthusiasm for the product usually reserved for Apple announcements. The new Palm Pre looks like a slightly shrunken iPhone with a more sculptured look, but with two features the iPhone is sorely missing. A slide out thumb keyboard and a removable battery.
And it's no wonder there's so much similarity to the iPhone. There's been a mass movement of Apple executives, marketeers, and engineers to Palm, that traded security and a tough work environment for risk and doing the next great thing. And it shows. Everything from the out of box experience to the two-finger zooming touch screen is reminiscent of the iPhone.
The similarity ends with the Pre's imaginatives new WebOS that offers powerful integration and access to your information, whether it be in Outlook, Google, or Facebook. Yet it's as easy to use as Palms of the past with a new way of accessing open programs called Cards.
Palm still has a ways to go to recover from years of little innovation. They need an application store, they need to deliver a reliable product, and they need to move millions of units. But based on what I saw, they're doing what few imagined they could do. That's coming out with the first real competitor to the iPhone that in some ways even surpasses it.