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# Family Tech: Palm Pre vs. iPhone

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## Video: Family Tech: Palm Pre vs. iPhone

[Watch (HLS stream): Family Tech: Palm Pre vs. iPhone](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZYUSIKiI.m3u8) (3:58)

![Family Tech: Palm Pre vs. iPhone](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZYUSIKiI/poster.jpg?width=720)

_Published 2009-06-05. Can the Palm Pre take on the iPhone? Josh Quittner tests one out for answers_


---

Jul 27, 2023 1:10 PM UTC

---

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### Tech Time: Everything to Know About the iPhone 6S

---


## Transcript

This week Palm introduced its long- awaited smartphone, the Pre, a very cool phone that gives the other favorite smartphones that are out there a real run for their money. An amazing thing that the Palm does is it allows you to open up many applications at one time. The iPhone can't do that yet although it's rumored that they'll soon be able to. The palm uses this card metaphor; Everytime a program is opened, it launches a card and I can go to my mail, and that is what my mail looks like. And if I don't wanna deal with my mail, I can go to my LinkedIn, you know, and if I want to see what a friend is up to on LinkedIn, I can go right to that.

If I wanna free up some memory space, you know, let's say I don't wanna watch TV, all I do is take the card and toss it away. I just toss it like that and it disappears. It's very cool. It's like dealing cards on a card hand. I wanna watch a movie, there it is, my movie. Another thing I really love about it is this thing that Palm calls Synergy, which is a way of taking all the information that you have in your contacts and mashing it up. So it has pulled from Facebook, G- mail, and MyExchange server, the home phone number, the mobile phone number and the work number of a friend of mine. If I'm looking for something, let's say I'm looking for my friend Adam, I just start typing and it pulls up Adam in any variable that I can think of.

It looks across all of my contacts. Just smartly, it just knows when I start typing a name to pull that information up. Palm has also given some thought to the kind of nifty options that you can get, including this touchstone charging kit. It's magnetic. You don't have to fumble with, if anything, you just put it down there and it starts charging. The Pre has its own app store that allows you to wirelessly download applications. So how does the Pre stack up against the iPhone? And I say the iPhone because I really think it's the smartphone to beat. Well, it's gonna be a pretty interesting race.

I mean this is very much a version one phone, but already it's showing some pretty cool features that I wish the iPhone had. Some things I don't like about the Pre include the fact that the cut and paste function is not so good. I've been wrestling with it and have yet to find it an intuitive interface to grab information and move it around from one application to another. Another thing, and this is not really a fair comparison to make because the iPhone has had over a year's head start, but the iPhone has more than 35, 000 applications. It's gonna take a while for people to start developing for the Palm Pre.

One other thing I noticed about the Pre is it's crashed a couple of times on me. I assume that as the phone gets out there and software upgrades occur, that it will become as stable, if nor more so, than the iPhone, but right now its something that I'm keeping an eye on. Here is perhaps the Pre's greatest trick of all. When I plug it in to the USB cable, it's going to show up on my iTunes, there it is. I've never seen this with another device and it is nothing to make Apple happy, I can pretty much guarantee that. Competition is exactly what the smartphone market needs. So we are all going to benefit here, from falling prices and ever smarter smartphones.

I'm going to stick with the iPhone for now, but I'm going to be watching the Pre very very closely.

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