I've been reading coverage of Palm's new device, Pre, which is being presented at CES this morning, trying to figure out whether this thing can be a real iPhone competitor (or killer).
Because, you know, it's not about the hardware anymore; or perhaps even the feature set. Every decent smartphone nowadays has WiFi and 3G connectivity, a GPS chip and a lot of memory. You can't beat the iPhone in this area, at least not by a lot. Furthermore, when it comes to features, you can have a great notes and calendar application or a fantastic browser, but it's hard to top the iPhone's applications because they already work so well (better, in many cases, than those of its competitors).
The iPhone can do all that; theoretically. But right now, it doesn't. The Pre seems to be way better with this regard.
Add to this the fact that Pre's interface seems to be even faster, fluid and responsive than the iPhone's, and you have a very interesting device and platform.
However, whether Palm will be able to motivate developers to start creating applications for Pre's platform, dubbed WebOS, (and under what terms; we all remember Apple's restrictive policies towards developers) remains to be seen. If they do, Pre will be one of the most interesting mobile devices of 2009.