Palm Pre and a possible future of communications

[inferno0069]

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

Comments

[rmjwell]

My guess is that of everything you are asking for the last one to arrive may be the "push phone call to background" as that requires the network (hello, my corporate masters!) treating phone traffic as just another piece of digital traffic. Which they aren't doing now for fear of losing phone revenues to Skype or some other VOIP provider.

[ejwu]

WTF, why do so many LJ themes make it a pain to leave comments. LJ's iconography is not well ingrained in me when I'm used to clicking the labeled "leave a comment" link. The "talk" icon that I assume would leave a comment is actually a link to the exact page I'm already on. Thanks a lot, LJ.

Uh, LJ theme ranting aside, I'd bet it's broken on the G1 as well. I tried finding the map from the facebook page for mtbg's housewarming and failed horribly. Either facebook is trying to render differently for mobile user-agents (which I hate), or it's just broken. I know that certain javascripty features in Facebook or broken in Chrome, and the G1 also uses Webkit, so that may be it, although I'm pretty sure the map feature did work in Chrome.

[lizardwizard]

Being in the business of making a site render differently for mobile user-agents, I feel obliged to respond. The proper way to do it, done by both my site (google.com) and Facebook, is to offer a mobile-optimized version (perhaps feature-poor relative to the desktop version) with a link to the desktop version. I'd also wager that you love mobile-optimized websites when they're done right, but you hardly notice those because they don't get in your way, whereas the mobile-optimized sites that are feature-incomplete cause you a lot of annoyance and stick in your memory.

[inferno0069]

Even offering a full site that fails to render correctly and a mobile version that lacks features fails sometimes, like in my and likely his scenarios. Perhaps Facebook didn't realize that the users of its mobile site might want to look up addresses and maps while on the way to Facebook events and therefore away from their primary computers.