Palm gets back into the game with touchscreen Pre, WebOS as the new iPhone competitor

Palm was under serious pressure to hit a home run at CES today—and boy, did it deliver. Running Palm's gorgeous (if belated) new platform, dubbed WebOS, the touchscreen Pre could well be Palm's savior, and perhaps its biggest hit.

So, as for the Pre itself (due on Sprint in the first half of this year, no pricing yet): It's got a big, 3.1-inch 480 by 320 touch display (yes, with multitouch and an accelerometer), weighs in at 4.8 ounces, and comes with a curved, slide-out keypad. Yes, it does Wi-Fi and 3G (EV-DO Rev. A, to be exact), as well as GPS (with turn-by-turn directions courtesy of TeleNav), stereo Bluetooth, 8GB of internal storage, a 3MP camera, a 3.5mm headset jack, and a removable battery.

But the key to the Pre is its OS, and WebOS—previously code-named "Nova"—is one of the hottest mobile platforms I've seen yet, rivaling both Android and Apple's iPhone OS.

At a glance, WebOS doesn't look all that different from the icon-driven, touch-based Android and iPhone platforms; you've got your main, wallpapered home screen, complete with a row of icons along the bottom for your standard e-mail, calendar, and calling features.

I'm also happy with Palm's integrated messaging interface, which combines IM and text chats into a single, threaded conversation.

But Palm's done a few key things differently here, starting with the "gesture" area at the bottom or side of the screen (if you're, say, surfing the Web in landscape mode). For example, if you're browsing an individual contact in the Pre's address book, you can flick horizontally in the gesture area to go back to the contact list, or you can flick up for a translucent window shade of applications. Nice.

More importantly, though, is WebOS's way of letting you handle and sort all your open applications like a deck of cards. If you're composing an e-mail, for example, you can flick up, call open a new application, and then return to your e-mail at any point. All open applications appear as windows (similar to the windows in the iPhone's Web browser), and you can flick back and forth, reorder them, and discard them at will.

That's really cool, and it solves one of the biggest problems that's dogged the iPhone—namely, that its various applications are all walled off, making it difficult to easily switch from, say, the Web browser to the calendar and back again.

WebOS also introduces a concept dubbed "Synergy," which all applications can continuously get info from the Web. The best example: WebOS's unified contact list, which seamlessly displays all your contacts and grab their e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and IM handles from Facebook, Gmail, Exchange, you name it.

And then there's the WebOS "Dashboard": a flexible space at the bottom of the screen for calling, messaging, and appointment alerts. As you're working in other applications, you might see the first line of a text message or IM, or the Dashboard might open a bit bigger for a calendar alert, complete with "dismiss" and "snooze" options. When alerts appear, you're free to keep working in your open application, or you can go ahead and open the alert—and if you want to answer an IM, you can swipe to that "card" in WebOS, and then return to your previous application card. Great stuff.

A few other interesting notes: When you're sitting at the Pre's main screen, you can just start typing on the QWERTY keypad to call up a universal search menu; you'll instantly see any matching contacts, or you can quickly jump to Web results from Google, Google Maps, and Wikipedia.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention "Touchstone," a little hockey puck of an accessory with a killer feature—wireless charging. Just place the Pre on top of the Touchstone device to power it up. Awesome.

It's a lot to chew on—indeed, Palm's press conference is barely an hour old, and already I'm having the same feeling I did after the iPhone's debut two years ago. The Pre—and WebOS—look red-hot, and the two combined may well guarantee that Palm will live to fight another (and perhaps, many) days.

So, initial thoughts? Like what you see? Will developers take to writing WebOS applications? Fire away.

Note: Just to clear up any confusion—the Pre is not Palm's first touchscreen phone, not by a long shot. As any Treo fan knows, Palm has been making touchscreen smartphones for years, although earlier models worked better with a stylus than a fingertip.

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webOS School to give live "developing for webOS" webcasts

Iowa Code Camp ramps up on tomorrow, and the folks from webOS School are going to be presenting 3 sessions all about programming for webOS. If you can't catch the presentations in person, there's good news: they've decided to offer their presentations at the Code Camp for free, online, in the form of webcasts. Here's what to expect:

* Intro to webOS: 9:00 am - 10:15am
webOS is the newest mobile development platform. Specifically for the Palm pre and pixi, webOS is a mobile development framework based strictly on JavaScript, CSS and HTML. If you have used any of these in the past then you have a head start on developing in webOS. If you want to really jump into webOS or you want a glimpse of what developing in webOS is like, this session is for you. This intro to webOS will cover the basics of the framework, how to get started and the major points you need to know to get off on the right foot.

* Intro to webOS UI Widgets: 10:30am - 11:45am
This session will go over the basics of working with user interface components (widgets) in webOS. It will cover the basic widgets you will use in almost every application and will also cover some of the advanced widgets you will need.

* Intro to webOS Services: 12:45pm - 2:00pm
All applications need data and webOS applications are no exception to that rule. In this session you will learn several types of ways to retrieve and work with data within your webOS application. This will include working with local storage as well as retrieving data asynchronously from servers. And let's face it, it would suck to develop on phones that don't give you access to their cool services like GPS, the address book, calendar and other things. Thankfully you can access these things and more using Mojo's services via webOS calls. This session will cover the basics of making service calls.

In addition to what's listed in the above descriptions, I'm told that they'll be writing two applications to help demonstrate the concepts they'll be talking about: the first is an interactive game, the second is an app that will showcase the services available in webOS.

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eXo WebOS Technology

eXo WebOS : a revolutionary and intuitive interface

Because portal users want to use latest technologies, eXo Platform developed a revolutionary portal interface: the eXo Portal WebOS. The aim of eXo WebOS is to reproduce the environment of classic operating systems, where you can easily find your useful applications and organize your work space through desktop windows that can be maximized or minimized. Application windows can also be moved in the desktop and from a desktop to another enabling you organize your working environment according to your preferences and requirements.

While you can easily launch applications through the “Mac OS-like” dock, you can edit your preferences in a simple way through the “Windows-like” start button. Moreover eXo WebOS enable you to quickly switch between your virtual desktops and to arrange each according to your environment preferences.

eXo WebOS comes with 3 skins for the usual and WebOS layouts:

• an eXo skin
• a Mac OS like skin
• a Vista like skin

eXo WebOS : a user oriented solution

eXo WebOS, like eXo Portal, is accessible from anywhere at anytime. Installing and updating applications is no longer a problem as nearly no computer knowledge is needed and thus, anyone can add services in less than two minutes. Users can use portlets developed by the company, install third party applications using JSR 168/286 standards.

Moreover Widgets use is a hot topic in the consumer area, they are now part of PC or Mac desktops. Little by little they are entering the enterprise world to provide information on the IT system status. In eXo Solutions, widgets are natively part of the Portal product to provide a simple and easy way for users to get information and notifications on their applications. They complete the portlet application that target more transactional behaviors. In fact widgets inside the WebOS layout have exactly the same granularity as the Mac OS widgets.

eXo WebOS : Technology and Adaptability to your portal

Thanks to an extensive use of Web 2.0 technologies (AJAX and Javascript), it is now possible to reproduce inside a browser the complete behavior of a typical Operating System such as Windows Vista or Mac OS. Applications are built using W3C standards and leverage the Portlet API specification which defines a common set of rules to build WebOS applications.

Based on eXo Portal, the eXo WebOS interface brings to your company the same benefits:

The eXo framework enables your IT department to build flexible SOA based solutions, and to be scaled to your organization whatever its size. This flexible solution lets your company adapt to fast changing environments by enabling you to easily deploy the services needed tomorrow, all at significantly lower costs. It supports major industry standards like portlet technologies JSR 168/286 and Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) with bridges capabilities for JavaServer Faces (JSF), Spring, Struts and JSP. Its flexible deployment architecture offers options for efficiently sharing portal resources and managing portal security. Security capabilities in eXo Portal simplify integration and deployment.

Thanks to single sign-on (SSO), which can be combined to a LDAP server epending on you security requirements, you are able to easily manage authentication and the personalization of content from services depending on who you are and your role within your groups. eXo Portal leverage a unified service that manages users, groups and the relationships between them. That information can be stored in a database or in a LDAP directory (including Active Directory). eXo Portal relies on Java standards (JAAS) for propagating the user identity and roles from the directory to the application server.

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