That's because it's not mass storage. WinMo phones appear as network devices. When you access the filesystem, you're doing do via some network protocol (webdav?) - it's just support is built into windows to make this seamless.

Apple haven't done anything similar for the iPhone, presumably because users may be frightened of files. I guess it cuts down on support costs... there are webdav style apps you can use for this type of thing (provide a network-mountable view onto on-phone-storage), or you could use mobileme's iDisk cloud storage type thing which I use as a PDF archive that I can browse easily from my phone.

Looks like Palm is pissing off at least one developer with uncertain, black box like procedures for getting apps into the App Catalog. I guess they copied Apple too well there.


Anything like the jailbreak community on the iPhone side for app distribution? I was pretty impressed with Cydia and other efforts to make it easy to run homebrew apps, though the community suffers from drama and fractures quite often.

The comments on that blog post mention a couple of homebrew methods of getting software onto a Pre. The author of the blog also comments on them being a pain in the ass and that normal users won't use it.

With the iPhone's installed base you can get a decent number of people in the jailbreak community. When you're talking about a platform with an order of magnitude less customers and a homebrew process that is not anywhere near as unified or streamlined, you're looking at miniscule numbers.

I want to know who the "normal users" jwz talks about are. The market for the Pre is largely power users to begin with, and a novice can install PreWare or FileCoaster with a relatively simple process that doesn't require rooting the phone, and is about as complex as running an installshield wizard on Windows. (They could really simplify it further with some improvements to WebOS Quick Install, but even the current process is just a few clicks.)

I think he's got some valid points about Palm's crappy attitude toward open source, and while I'm sure the red tape surrounding app store approvals will get better, I sympathize with his plight to get a couple of simple apps going. If you're a developer, you want every opportunity to get your app to as many people as possible, and that means getting on to the official app store.

I hope jwz's post is motivation for Palm to streamline the submission/approval process, but I think he vastly overstates the difficulty of homebrew installation.

Says who, other than jwz and your natural antipathy towards anything from Palm? What about the jailbroken iPhone projects is more unified or streamlined than PreWare?

Just going by what I see as an outsider reading things like this:

http://forums.precentral.net/homebrew-apps/203951-webos-quick-install-contd.html

and this:

http://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Application:Preware#Installation__Steps

Easy enough for me, but not something the average joe would/could do. But I wholeheartedly agree that there are far fewer average joes using a Pre than an iPhone (or touch for that matter).

I've edited the previous post to remove the "anywhere near" as perhaps it was a bit strong. For the iPhone you'll find utilities that both jailbreak and automatically install the app management/repository application(s). You don't need to know anything about repositories yourself nor change/alter anything once you start the process.

The iPhone process isn't exactly very joe-friendly either, but it has more history, media coverage and word-of-mouth which does push a lot of joes into making the leap. A lot of clearly written tutorials, that for the most part say "download this, run this, press a button and you're done"

First-rate companies like RIM write their own software instead of trying to steal someone else's.

Bwah-ha-hah-ha-ha!

Oh, wait. You're serious, aren't you?

Only half... More appropriate would have been "even second-rate companies..." Then it would have been more obvious that I was making a dig at both RIM and Palm.

Totally correct. For all intents and purposes though it does acheive the same effect. My phone and I'm sure many others can provide direct access to the SD card at least via a program called WM5torage. In that case it does appear as a mass storage device but at the same time also prevents the phone from accessing it any more mentioned. Since it's significantly faster it's good for loading up a large amount of data.

We really need a decent open, cross-platform way of accessing a filesystem over USB that *isn't* mass storage. Speed really shouldn't be an issue - most "embedded" devices these days should have no problem doing filesystem management and shuffling data over USB with their 400MHz+ processors and DMA'ed everything. That way, devices get to keep their filesystem private - whatever format it is - and get to access their storage concurrently.

Problem is, the very fact that MSC exists has made everyone lazy

Agreed. I've got a NAS box here with USB slave on it, where the USB slave pretends to be a USB ethernet controller over which it then does NFS/CIFS/etc. Which is a neat hack, but it's also clearly a bit freakoid from a UI point of view, having to manage what are clearly USB devices as if they were on the wrong side of entirely fictitious LANs that your PC is now swarming with.

SCSI OSD is another attempt to solve this problem, and by "solve this problem" I mean "reinvent what CAFS was doing in the 1970s".

Peter

Mmm.. emulated VFAT / Mass Storage might be a decent/indecent short term workaround.

It's not that hard to manage a virtual VFAT (inside the device) on top of some other real filesystem. I don't think anyone has bothered to do it yet, but that's just more reason to go for it.

I keep thinking I ought to prototype it on an empeg first.

Palm continues on their trailer-park development path and once again hacks iTunes support. Why buy the cow when you can steal the milk, right?

Apple could buy Palm with lunch money and just scuttle the company to end this. Might take less time than a court battle and it would be so much more poetic.

Yeah, to the extent now of forging valid iPod serial numbers, along with appearing with the appropriate vendor, device, etc IDs.

I have a feeling that Mr Jobs would not want to give Palm the satisfaction of being bought

Instead of plain cat and mouse, Palm need to be widely and publicly humiliated. It would be nice to see this play out without Apple getting muddy of course. Can't start calling out Palm which will bolster their competitive position. Right now they're an also-ran and it won't take much to cause a stumble they may not be able to get up from.

Maybe it's time for some Microsoft-style strong-arm tactics with the carriers.

At least a funny message popping up when iTunes detects an unsupported device would be nice to see.

The Pre is out over here this month. On O2 again (like the iPhone was originally) so it's automatically a no go for me. Assuming I'm around long enough then I think I'll grab a 4th gen iPhone on Orange next year.

I find it hard to think the Pre would get a foothold over the iPhone unless it was made 'considerably' cheaper than an iPhone.

Just walking round Manchester on an average day I'm amazed at the number of iPhone users of all types, from the people you'd expect like Hoxton'ites and students to business men and women who'd you would usually expect to have Blackberry's.

I watched an interesting documentary on iPlayer yesterday about the 'upgrade' culture we have today. The presenter went to a school and asked a bunch of kids what the one gadget they'd love to own and every kid said they wanted an iPhone.

Personally I could easily see myself with an Android phone (it's certainly better than my HTC winmo phone, which is currently broken). But I'm pretty sure the Pre is likely to be fairly unpopular, especially since the iPhone is going cross carrier.

Looks like the Pre is catching up to the iPhone in one area:

Is there a site that reviews and compares fart applications so I make a rational purchase decision? It's clearly a field with a lot of research and advanced engineering, which makes sense, since there are so many people competing in the market. I don't want to jump on last year's train and look like an idiot to all my friends with the newest and greatest fart technology.

I know that the iPhone has more fart apps, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are better. Should I get an iPhone since there seems to be more fart research on that platform, or is either WebOS or Android a better environment for fart researchers?

I guess what I'm asking is: what is the killer fart app?

I prefer to roll my own. You know, like the kids say, "keepin' it real" Or if I were to post it to Twitter, "@me: kpen' rEalz d00d! http://loserurl.com/m#!ss45g"

Dragging up an old thread....

Our on screen talent got an invitation to collect a FREE Palm Pre today from Harvey Nichols in the city centre. Apparently they gave away over 200 unlocked handsets!

After spending 10 minutes trying to configure one of them I felt like throwing it against a wall. The thing is just shit, it's creaky, poorly built and feels really cheap.

As an epilogue to the story, everyone's putting them on Ebay (they're already unlocked) as they'd rather keep their collection of ancient Nokia's and Crackberries.

I think everyone agrees with you. Palm reported today that sales are lower than expected and that the year's results will be lower than expected as well. Stock has fallen a little bit, but IMO, Palm is still over-valued by a factor 2 to 3 times. There's no way this company is worth over 500M, let alone 1.1B.

If things continue this way, it seems to me they'll be ripe for a fire-sale. The problem is, I don't think anyone is currently interested in buying. Maybe RIM, maybe Motorola (though I don't think they have the marketing expertise to do anything with it).

My personal opinion on all the Palm acquisition talk is that the analysts are seriously underestimating how long it'd take to swallow a totally different software stack and get a product out. It's not like, if Dell or Nokia bought them, they'd be out with anything based on WebOS for a year+ (anything that wasn't just the same box with a different label on it, anyway).

Nokia certainly knows this, being pretty seasoned at the whole mobile game and having rolled out a Linux-based system already. Dell are likely to be aware of this having seen how much effort it took to take a supposedly portable system (Android) and get it shipped even when using processors that it was *already ported to* as the core of their products, and being ninjas at manufacturing.

Basically, acquiring Palm isn't going to be a shortcut to anything much in the mobile space, a market where newness is everything.

Maybe someone with no mobile products at all will swoop in and basically bankroll Palm to the tune of more hundreds of millions, as that's the fastest way to get more WebOS products out there, but then again maybe they'll look and think... what am I doing that's different to what Elevation did?

My $0.02

I haven't read anyone mentioning that buying Palm would give them a quick roll-out of a new product. It's certainly not what I think. But using their current products with some retooling is a lot faster than developing any OS from scratch.

I think it would probably be wasted on Motorola as I mentioned, and for Dell it would be like throwing millions of dollar bills out the window. Dell doesn't look like it has any future in Mobile. They're a quasi-house-hold name for cheap PCs. No one thinks mobile (phone or otherwise) when they think Dell.

That comment from Ed Colligan a few years ago saying that PC guys can't just move into the mobile space was proven wrong by Apple. But I don't believe any other PC company could have done it, even if handed a fully functional OS. Look, Android has been available for a while and we haven't seen any PC brand do anything significant with it in mobile.

I haven't spend much time thinking of the acquisition angle, but as a long-term solution it could be good for someone like Nokia or RIM.

I'm taking the plunge. Since I don't have an iPhone yet, I'm buying Palm.

You might be asking... "The Pre?, the PIxi?" No no no....

I'm buying the company.

You see, in a little while, Palm stock will apparently be $0 Time to scoop up all those shares. Though I don't know... I may wait until the price hits -$3 or -$5 and take some cash along with the stock certificates.

I'm not sure how an analyst sets a target of $0. Now, if they predict it's going to be delisted, that's one thing, but a stock can't be trading at $0.

Things don't look good for Palm any way you slice it however.

Well, Palm is still around, now integrated with HP, and a WebOS 2.0 product in the pipeline.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/19/palm-gets-official-with-webos-2-0-and-pre-2-hitting-france-on-f/

Tony, still using the Pre? And if so, anything exciting about WebOS 2.0 that will keep you on the platform? And is the Pre 2 on your radar as an upgrade?

So many people have simply forgotten about Palm and WebOS already, after the big amount of hype it had during the development cycle. It really feels like Android took the attention away. I personally see a lot of interesting features in WebOS that would be nice to see in other platforms. A high amount of detail and refinement seemed to go into the OS, something I can appreciate even if it's not my current mobile platform of choice.