Palm Pre and a possible future of communications
After reading this review at ArsTechnica on the Palm Pre, I expect to like it more than the iPhone, at least for what the review covered. What it didn't mention, though, and one thing that would be important to me when I finally do get a smartphone is the web browsing ability. It should be as capable as my other computers. Sure, it's small, so it has a small screen and a small keyboard. That's not what I'm talking about. Once upon a time I tried to get an address from a Facebook event with an iPhone (or something else similar), and I just could not navigate to it within Facebook's main site (pages don't render correctly) or its iPhone site (the links just aren't there). I've had very little exposure to the G1, so I don't know what that one's like for this.
It'd also be nice to be able to push phone calls to the background. Then I could talk to someone via a headset, and if there was something like a URL that I wanted to send them, I could IM or email it instead of spelling it character-by-character. Invention-of-the-day: you could even send a little blip of info at the start of a conversation (phone, IM, email, whatever) with the other contact info1 and the other modes could then be started extremely easily. Imagine being able to IM text to a call center on your phone instead of having to speak it!
1: For security or anti-spam purposes this could be created on-the-fly as a short-term-use thing like Discover does with credit-card numbers for not-fully-trusted online stores.
It'd also be nice to be able to push phone calls to the background. Then I could talk to someone via a headset, and if there was something like a URL that I wanted to send them, I could IM or email it instead of spelling it character-by-character. Invention-of-the-day: you could even send a little blip of info at the start of a conversation (phone, IM, email, whatever) with the other contact info1 and the other modes could then be started extremely easily. Imagine being able to IM text to a call center on your phone instead of having to speak it!
1: For security or anti-spam purposes this could be created on-the-fly as a short-term-use thing like Discover does with credit-card numbers for not-fully-trusted online stores.