The Inevitable Comparison: 3GS vs. Palm Pre

In response to my Pre review, many of you posted that the article read more like a comparison to the iPhone or a list of things for Apple to improve. I wrote it as such because I felt that while Palm out-innovated Apple in many ways, it fell short in just as many. At the same time I felt that Apple had much room to improve given the impact of the Pre, while also holding its advantages over the Pre. In short, neither device is perfect and both companies have much to learn from the other. It wouldn’t be fair for me to exclude the Pre from this article, as the iPhone 3GS delivers speed but lacks the functionality of what Palm has done with the Pre.

It’s a wonder what a year makes. Apple originally shied away from enabling background tasks on the iPhone because it didn’t want to compromise performance or battery life. The latter made sense, but the former didn’t really jive - the more we asked of the iPhone, the slower it got. In particular, its performance took a dive once the official App store launched along with the 2.0 firmware. Since then, the iPhone hasn’t exactly been fast - especially compared to some newer smartphones.

Apple’s solution to the background tasks problem was server-side push notifications. Take the most popular example: AIM. Since Apple doesn’t allow 3rd party applications to run in the background on the iPhone, if you’re in the middle of an AIM conversation and lock your phone, go to the home screen or launch another app, your connection to AIM is lost and your screen name logs off. You won’t get any new messages until you log back on.

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With the iPhone OS 3.0 the AIM app can use Apple’s push notification servers to keep the connection active. The minute you close the AIM app on the iPhone, the connection between your phone and AIM is severed but kept alive by one of Apple’s push servers. Any new messages that are to be delivered to your phone go to Apple’s servers, which know your phone’s IP and whereabouts. The servers then push the message to your phone and you see it like a SMS notification on the iPhone:

Sweet, right? It’s great for receiving a single message, but it’s horrible for actually maintaining a conversation. To respond to the message I have to click view message, then wait for the AIM app to launch and log me in and only then can I begin typing. Now let’s assume that I quit out of AIM because I had to do something else, or even worse, let’s assume that I left AIM because I had to send a text message. I’m now switching between two messaging apps to carry on two different conversations. It’s cumbersome.

As AIM messages pile up, the counter on my AIM app icon increments to let me know what I’ve got waiting for me.

Switching between apps is made much faster on the 3GS, this whole process is far more annoying on the 3G or original iPhone because actually launching the AIM app takes far longer. It’s a better overall experience but still no where near the seamless setup that Palm offers. If you mostly text/IM people on your phone, then honestly, forget the iPhone and get a Pre - Apple simply doesn’t do the best job here any longer.

Sending IMs and switching between apps on the Pre, the way it should be done

The iPhone OS needs a drastic revamp. The OS was designed very well for what the first iteration of the iPhone was created for: single tasking with SMS, email, web browsing, phone calls, music playback and browsing through photos. Add several pages of apps to the OS and try to multitask between them and the OS quickly shows its limits. Although Apple has added a very sweet Copy/Paste interface to the iPhone, that’s about the extent of how well you can work between apps thanks to Apple’s no background tasks limitation.

Palm got the implementation of a multitasking OS down right with the Pre, but the performance levels just aren’t up to snuff. Take using the dialer app for example. Animations are choppy and there’s a noticeable lag between when you tap a button and when the app responds. That just isn’t true of the iPhone and definitely not true of the 3GS; responsive is the key word here and Palm lacks it.

Unfortunately, what the 3GS has in responsiveness it lacks in productivity. The more I use the 3GS the more I wish I was able to run more than one application at a time. What I want is a phone that multitasks like webOS but with the speed of the 3GS. I believe that both Apple and Palm are capable of delivering such a device, I’m just unsure which company will do it first.

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