Thousands of developers have participated in the Mojo SDK early access program since it began in early April. New applications are in the pipeline for the Palm App Catalog, and the App Catalog submission process will be opened to all developers beginning this fall.

First an overview. The Pre uses a “card” for each actively running program. You can switch between cards at any time by hitting the center button.  When you’re looking at the screen, the programs all look like cards, so it’s not that much of a stretch to call them that.  The point of these is to easily switch between programs without needing to close any.

Hit the jump for a few thoughts on specific features and for more of my literary witticism.

Keyboard

They changed the layout of the keyboard from the Treo/Centro, and in my opinion it’s an improvement. The comma and period are now primary buttons, and there’s a [Sym] key that brings up a list of commonly used symbols so you don’t have put in a symbol that you think looks like the one you want and then hit the [alt] key to see if you won the prize. If you’ve used a treo/centro then you know what I mean.  I’ve seen a few people complain about the size of the keys, but I’ve gotten used to the Centro ones and are no longer an issue. The thing I don’t like about the keyboard though is its thinness. The part that you hold is fairly thin and makes it tough to grip the phone properly, especially in one-handed operation.

5-Way Button/Gestures

Psyche! They killed the 5-way button and they killed it good.  That little button opened up a myriad of directions you could move something, be it the screen or a text cursor.  And by myriad I mean 4.  So of course the Pre improved on this by adding something way cooler, right? Yep, they added a single button to the screen. That doesn’t select things. Wow was that anticlimactic. Well, they’ve brought back the gesture pad from the old Palm V days, if that makes you feel any better. Probably the most useful part of that is the “back” gesture, which takes you back a screen, pretty self-explanatory. The “flick” gesture, in which you push cards off the screen is actually pretty neat, makes me feel like I’m in The Minority Report, but with less creepy kids chained up.It allows you to quickly push cards up and off the screen, effectively closing the program.

I have a theory that that “center” button that doesn’t really do anything except bring up all your cards was originally intended to be like the Blackberry Curve’s roller ball, but Palm ran out of either time or money. Look for them to do something cool with it in the future. That’s a threat, by the way, Palm.

Oh, say you wanted to move your cursor in a text field but didn’t want to erase everything you’ve typed since the spot you needed to edit?  They have a solution for that! Hold down the alt(orange) key and slide your finger on the screen in the direction you want to move it. It now takes 2 hand (or 1 incredibly skilled one) to move the freakin’ cursor. Needless to say, the Konami Code just got a lot more hard. Just the way I like it.

UPDATE: Apparently if you type in [upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart] in the launcher it brings up developer mode where you can connect a computer running the Palm SDK and get access to the phone. Huh. Guess I’m psychic after all.

Synergy

The Synergy system of the Pre synchronizes all of your contacts (and calendars) into one place, whether they be from Facebook, Google, Outlook, or your phone. This can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how close you are to your Facebook friends. If you’ve clicked [accept] to every invitation from slobbering teenagers who think the hot girl in the profile picture is you and not your fiancee (and your name happens to be Dana), you’re probably not going to like Synergy much. See, there’s currently no way to select which contacts you import into your phone, they’re all there. For me this was fine since I had to recreate my Facebook profile after college so all those people who you had classes with but don’t talk to anymore don’t really apply.

One of the cooler things I’ve found with Synergy is the ability to have a conversation with a person via SMS, AIM, GoogleTalk, whatever, and it recognizes that person as the same and records it all as one conversation so you don’t have to hunt between AIM convos and text messages for the address of the party that you weren’t really invited to but are going anyway. That’ll show them!

Battery

So far the battery life has been a bit dismal, but that is likely due to the fact that I’ve stayed signed into AIM, received emails as soon as they came in, watched a few YouTube videos, and had an hour-long conversation, most of it using a bluetooth headset. Oh, I also took a few pictures of my cat. He didn’t like them though so I had to delete them.  However, I fully charged it before I left work, and 5 hours later, the battery is at 11%. I’m hoping that after a few battery cycles I’ll get a bit more life, but if not, I’ll just have to either have a charger at home and one at work or else cut down on the amount of things running at any one time.

More to come later.

Ya know, instead of being a pretentious ass and assuming people understand what the hell I’m talking about in my comics, I’m going to use this space to educate people.  That was part of the original Lexicon that I haven’t yet published, but will get to sometime. And awwayyy we go!

Palm – this company made the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) popular with their Palm Pilot in 1996.  Most of the other PDAs and Smartphones today are based loosely on the advances Palm made in the 90s with these devices. However, recently, they have been overshadowed by the sheer volume of Microsoft-based PDAs, not to mention the ubiquitous iPhone by Apple.  Their success with the Palm Pilot led to other devices, some that became very popular, and most others did not.

Palm Foleo – One of Palm’s less best ideas. Basically this thing was barely smaller than a laptop, about the same size as the Apple Macbook Air. I know you’re thinking, oh hey, that’s cool, I wonder why it didn’t catch on. Well, the problem is that it didn’t really do anything.  You sync it with your smartphone and you can read the emails on a larger screen that are stored on the phone, not on this device.  So you’re lugging around a $500 (yes, I said $500) device that allows you to read the emails that are already on your phone. Needless to say, it didn’t do well.

Palm Treo – This guy is what has kept Palm afloat for as long as it has. It uses the Palm operating system (which is a plus for many people), a built-in keyboard, email and phone functionality.  They eventually relented and released Windows Mobile version, but a great deal of people have Treos and love them.  The eventual successor to the Treo is the Palm Centro and the Palm Treo Pro, one aimed at the younger crowd that doesn’t want such a large phone, and the other aimed at the Blackberry crowd. One of my favorite features of these phones that I will love Palm forever is the ability to turn the ringer from loud to vibrate via a single toggle switch on the top of the phone. I use this all the time to make sure my phone doesn’t have its ringer on at an unfortunate time.

Palm Pre – This is Palm’s silver arrow aimed right at the processor of the iPhone. It’s also Palm’s last gasp before it goes belly-up. While the Centro and Treo Pro are beloved by many, those are pretty all Palm has left at the moment, and there aren’t THAT many people who haven’t gotten suckered into AT&T’s service contract by our good friends at the fruit stand.  It promises everything that the iPhone has and more, including Palm’s new Web OS, which looks pretty slick. It still an actual keyboard with tiny buttons that you can poke at with your thumbnails which I still prefer that over a keyboard on the screen. Assuming this guy does half as well in the reviews as everyone (especially Palm) is hoping, I’ll likely pick one up to replace my Centro. If not, it’s off to the Crackberry cult for me, or maybe one of the phones supporting Google Android (lol), but I don’t see an iPhone or a Windows Mobile phone for me in the near future. If you really want to know why I don’t like those, ask, but I’ve already rambled enough.

If you’re still with me, good job! Please leave a comment so I know that at least someone got this far.  Let me know if my vapid attempt at education has been useful to you, or at least entertaining.

In conclusion, Palm has everything to gain and/or lose with the Pre, so they’re going to be throwing all their marketing budget at this one device that could potentially bring Palm back as a real contenter to the Smartphone market.