Two companies that get design: iPhone versus Palm Prē

A few months ago Mono­chro­mat­ic Out­look com­pared the iPhone with the Nokia E75, eval­u­at­ing the device with all the fea­tures a user could ask for against the device with a focus on user expe­ri­ence. It was evi­dent that Noki­a’s approach of cram­ming tech­nol­o­gy togeth­er into one pack­age left some­thing to be desired with­out atten­tion to the user interface.

Now for a quite dif­fer­ent chal­lenge: a com­par­i­son of the iPhone with anoth­er device designed with the user in mind. Palm’s WebOS may not have the mar­ket share enjoyed by Apple, but it was craft­ed with a sim­i­lar eye to mak­ing the expe­ri­ence of using it smooth, straight­for­ward, and even enjoyable.

Form factor

Before talk­ing about the oper­at­ing sys­tem and soft­ware design, a com­par­i­son of hard­ware is in order. The iPhone is typ­i­cal of mod­ern smart­phones; a slate, most­ly touch­screen. There are no mov­ing parts save the vol­ume con­trols and home but­ton. Most Android devices have tak­en this form a step fur­ther, employ­ing ever-larg­er screens for movies, games and Web brows­ing. For a hand­held com­put­er, this is a great trend. For a phone, larg­er may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be better.

The Prē’s 3.1″ screen is sub­stan­tial­ly small­er than the iPhone’s 3.5″ screen. Four tenths of an inch may not sound like much, but put the devices next to one anoth­er and the dif­fer­ence is clear. I have to imag­ine that com­pared to the new Droid X’s 4.3″ screen that either of these devices looks like a younger sibling.

The Prē eschews some of the sim­plic­i­ty of the iPhone. The slid­er design and hard­ware key­board make the Prē phys­i­cal­ly more com­plex, at least at first con­sid­er­a­tion. In hand, how­ev­er, it is sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple. When closed, the device feels sol­id and unclut­tered. Because of the curved track of the slid­er, even when the device is opened to reveal the key­board, the lines of the phone still make a con­sis­tent flow. It lends the Prē the appear­ance of being a phone rather than some kind of PDA.

Not that there’s any­thing wrong with PDAs, but since the con­ver­gence of phones and PDAs the trend has been to make phones more like hand­held com­put­ers. I applaud part of that trend, but I want a phone to be easy to hold and sim­ple to use. Com­plex­i­ty, pow­er and large screens can get in the way of a phone’s abil­i­ty to be a phone.

This trend toward larg­er phones is like­ly to con­tin­ue. Bright­hand reports that the next ver­sion of the iPhone will be a larg­er mod­el, with a 3.7″ touch­screen. It’s been a while since I read any rumors that Apple might pro­duce a small­er device, no mat­ter how much I think it would be an improve­ment. The push has been on for some time to make thin­ner and thin­ner devices to make them more pock­etable, but after a cer­tain thresh­olds devices get so large that they won’t fit com­fort­ably in any pock­ets no mat­ter how thin the device is. If you want some­thing that is com­fort­able to hold, thick­er in depth and nar­row­er in width is the way to go.

Software design

Palm took the prin­ci­ples behind a mul­ti­touch touch­screen inter­face a step far­ther than Apple did with the iPhone. iOS’s touch­screen vocab­u­lary is pret­ty much lim­it­ed to tap, tap-hold, drag, and occa­sion­al­ly swipe. For essen­tial func­tions (for exam­ple, exit­ing a pro­gram) you still have to use a hard­ware but­ton on the front. Instead of using a hard­ware but­ton, Palm extends the touch-sen­si­tive area below the screen for ges­tures. You bring up the Launch­er, go «back» a lev­el (in a brows­er but also in oth­er appli­ca­tions) and switch between appli­ca­tions all using ges­tures in this area below the screen, which Palm calls the «ges­ture area». The name seems a bit mis­lead­ing to me since the entire screen is used for ges­tures, but Palm did­n’t con­sult me pri­or to nam­ing it.

As a result, going back to the iPhone and its hard­ware home but­ton seems crude and awk­ward. It’s a small touch and should­n’t be a deal-break­er for any­one, but I have to cred­it Palm with cre­at­ing a sys­tem that immers­es the user more deeply in the lan­guage of gestures.

The Prē was designed for mul­ti­task­ing, where­as on the iPhone hav­ing mul­ti­ple apps open is a recent after­thought. A flick of the fin­ger dis­plays «cards» of each run­ning app which can be scrolled through and closed with anoth­er flick. It’s sim­ple, visu­al, and easy to under­stand. On the iPhone, it’s not imme­di­ate­ly clear which apps are left. To see the open apps, one dou­ble-press­es the hard­ware but­ton, and icons rep­re­sent­ing the open apps appear at the bot­tom of the screen. If the home screen was­n’t dimmed, there would be no way to know we weren’t look­ing at the dock icons. These icons can be scrolled through and select­ed. It’s an ade­quate sys­tem, but app-switch­ing seems like a hid­den fea­ture that was nev­er meant to be used. 

Palm missed an oppor­tu­ni­ty by not includ­ing an on-screen key­board in WebOS. Both WebOS devices, the Prē and the Pixi, have hard­ware key­boards and I’m sure that Palm’s design­ers con­sid­ered a soft­ware key­board super­flu­ous. That’s arguably true on the Pixi, but on the Prē the key­board is hid­den until the user pulls it out from behind the touch­screen. An onscreen key­board would make it pos­si­ble to use the Prē with­out ever slid­ing the device open. I under­stand that some peo­ple aren’t com­fort­able with an on-screen key­board, but there are good rea­sons to pre­fer one: onscreen key­boards can be used more quick­ly and with less effort than an array of tiny push-but­tons, and the act of slid­ing the key­board out is slight­ly awk­ward. The sense of using a left­over tech­nol­o­gy felt when push­ing Apple’s home but­ton is felt more intense­ly every time the Prē must be phys­i­cal­ly opened and  mechan­i­cal but­tons pushed in order to type.

There is a vir­tu­al key­board avail­able to be installed, but it is lit­tle more than proof of con­cept. It requires the user to install a «home­brew» patch to the oper­at­ing sys­tem and takes three full sec­onds to start. When the key­board does appear, Palm’s infe­ri­or type-cor­rect­ing algo­rithms become more obvi­ous than when using the hard­ware key­board, per­haps because it’s eas­i­er to miss a key when typ­ing on a smooth screen.

The avail­abil­i­ty of «home­brew» apps is a nice ben­e­fit to using a WebOS device. In con­trast with Apple’s dic­ta­to­r­i­al con­trol over what apps are avail­able and Google’s lais­sez-faire approach (which has giv­en rise to ram­pant mal­ware) Palm has pro­vid­ed a cen­tral soft­ware store for approved apps but does­n’t make it dif­fi­cult for more adven­tur­ous users to install beta ver­sions or home-made soft­ware, or even patch­es to the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself. Sure, jail­break­ing an iPhone isn’t that hard either, but it has only recent­ly been made clear that jail­break­ing your iPhone is legal and Apple still uses scare tac­tics to keep peo­ple away from the option. 

Visual design

Both com­pa­nies have made visu­al­ly stun­ning devices. Palm com­mis­sioned David Berlow of Font Bureau to design a font just for WebOS devices. It’s called Pre­lude and it’s a clean geo­met­ric sans-serif font. Pre­lude is a hand­some face, but its geo­met­ric lines are a bit imper­son­al and mechan­i­cal for a device that is oth­er­wise smooth and round­ed. Palm should nev­er­the­less be cred­it­ed both for com­mis­sion­ing a cus­tom type­face and for trust­ing Berlow with the task. My crit­i­cism here is that Berlow’s affec­tion for geo­met­ric sans-serif faces dis­tracts from Palm’s over­all vision for WebOS.

The Palm Prē’s and (with the excep­tion of the iPhone4) iPhone’s screens have the same pix­el res­o­lu­tion, but the Prē’s screen, as not­ed ear­li­er, is sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er. The Prē’s icons, though they appear larg­er in screen­shots, are approx­i­mate­ly the same actu­al size as the iPhone’s. Where the iPhone’s home screen looks crowd­ed and almost clut­tered by com­par­i­son, the Prē has breath­ing room between its Launch­er icons. While that means that there are few­er icons vis­i­ble, it also makes for a more relaxed envi­ron­ment in which to inter­act with the device. On aver­age, Apple (as well as the third-par­ty devel­op­ers of iPhone apps) has bet­ter-look­ing icons, but the envi­ron­ment car­ries unpleas­ant visu­al ten­sion except on the iPad where the larg­er screen affords Apple the option to leave space between the icons.

This trend some­times seems to go too far with the Prē, how­ev­er. Some of the screens feel over­ly sparse. The menus and net­work­ing sta­tus pop-ups, for exam­ple, take up more room than they should.

Satellite computer versus cloud device

Palm’s WebOS is so named because of the «Syn­er­gy» fea­tures which take data sources from around the Web. One’s local con­tact data­base is auto­mat­i­cal­ly kept in sync with one’s Gmail, Face­book, Yahoo and oth­er address books. Cal­en­dar­ing is han­dled the same way. WebOS is designed nev­er to sync with a desk­top com­put­er but instead to get all your per­son­al infor­ma­tion out of the Cloud.

Apple has their own MobileMe cloud ser­vice with which the iPhone will sync, but for the most part, the iPhone does­n’t rely on the cloud. It expects users to sync with their desk­top address book, desk­top cal­en­dar and so on.

Those of us who don’t want our per­son­al con­tact and cal­en­dar infor­ma­tion out in the cloud will pre­fer the iPhone for this rea­son. Third-par­ty soft­ware (Mark/Space’s The Miss­ing Sync) enables the Prē or Pixi to sync direct­ly with a desk­top com­put­er, but that adds $40 to the total cost of own­er­ship unless you want to keep your address book and per­son­al infor­ma­tion on Google’s servers.

Camera

The qual­i­ty of a cam­era is prob­a­bly the least impor­tant fea­ture on a phone, but always hav­ing a cam­era to take snap­shots with is very handy. I often pho­to­graph receipts so that I don’t have to car­ry them around with me. It seems worth­while to make a cur­so­ry com­par­i­son between the cam­eras on these devices. There are many mod­els of iPhone and two mod­els of Palm Prē, but I’m com­par­ing the Prē Plus with the iPhone 3GS. Both devices have near­ly the same res­o­lu­tion (1520 x 2032 for the Pr? Plus and 1536 x 2048 for the iPhone 3GS) so it seems like a fair fight.

The Prē’s cam­era has an LED flash (a fea­ture found on the iPhone4 but not the 3GS) but that is the only win the Prē has with the cam­era. Its fixed-focus lens is a wider angle than the iPhone’s, which tends to make for more dra­mat­ic images, but it also means you have to get clos­er to your sub­jects. The iPhone’s soft­ware has a zoom fea­ture, but the image qual­i­ty is degrad­ed if you zoom in very much.

The Prē’s cam­era will not zoom, but it’s just as well. The image qual­i­ty of the Prē is about that of the iPhone when the iPhone is zoomed in all the way. It’s ade­quate, but the iPhone clear­ly has the supe­ri­or sen­sor. In these two pho­tos, it’s easy to see that the Prē’s image has a real prob­lem with artifacting.

The Prē also has a fixed-focus lens, which means it can­not adjust to sub­jects that are near­er or far­ther. An image tak­en clos­er than a cou­ple feet away will there­fore come out blur­ry and out of focus. See the images of the two devices at the top of this arti­cle; the Prē’s pic­ture was tak­en with the iPhone and the iPhone’s pic­ture was tak­en by the Prē. Note how much sharp­er the image tak­en by the iPhone is. 

Con­clu­sion

If you want a hand­held com­put­er, the iPhone with its immense col­lec­tion of apps and well-designed user inter­face is the bet­ter choice. While Apple has tak­en great pains to dis­tance them­selves from the New­ton, they seem to be going in that direc­tion more and more. Despite the supe­ri­or mul­ti­task­ing capa­bil­i­ties of WebOS, the scales tip in favor of the iPhone because of the iPhone’s pre­dic­tive and auto­cor­rect­ing text entry and because there’s a much wider array of appli­ca­tions for the iPhone despite Apple’s stran­gle­hold on the iPhone app market.

The Prē on the oth­er hand, makes a bet­ter phone and com­mu­ni­ca­tion device. Though it los­es points for the key­board, the soft­ware design makes com­mu­ni­ca­tion tasks (tele­phone calls, text mes­sag­ing, instant mes­sag­ing and email) sim­ple and con­ve­nient. The Prē can’t com­pete with Apple on robust, mature appli­ca­tions, but there are a few good ones out there. Palm’s focus when mak­ing this phone was, odd­ly enough, that it work as a phone. There’s no doubt it is a smartphone, but it is a phone first and foremost.

The Prē is get­ting a lit­tle long in the tooth. While it per­forms accept­ably, it is not as snap­py as it should be. Palm under­clocked a 600mHz proces­sor to 500mHz in the Prē. There are lots of peo­ple out there over­clock­ing their Prēs for this rea­son. A cou­ple years ago 500mHz may have seemed ade­quate, but the goal is to have the device dis­ap­pear so that the user does­n’t have to think about it. Hav­ing to wait through tran­si­tions or for data to load means not just think­ing about what’s hap­pen­ing, but being painful­ly aware of the process.

The lat­est spec­u­la­tion from Bright­hand sug­gest that HP and Palm may have a new device avail­able short­ly. That’s good news for WebOS users not only because it would pro­vide an upgrade path with pre­sum­ably faster hard­ware but also because any chance of WebOS gain­ing decent mar­ket share hinges on cap­tur­ing the minds of smart­phone buy­ers with new mod­els. Palm needs to relaunch the brand in peo­ple’s minds once again, and the only way that will hap­pen is when new devices hit the market.

If this spec­u­la­tion is cor­rect, I’m hop­ing that they release their device in the next cou­ple of weeks. That’s how much time I have to return my Prē to Ver­i­zon. I’d hate for a fan­tas­tic new device like that to come out while I’m wait­ing out a two-year con­tract on the old­er model.