Pre (Palm reborn)

Image from Engadget.com

I didn't want to ride the hoopla behind Palm's new smartphone but when I read about Ars Technica's article on Synergy, Palm's new personal information management system, I decided to jump in the bandwagon right away.

I had been an owner of several Palm PDA models from the IIIe to the Zire71. I followed Palm's growth to become the undisputed market leader and to its unfortunate downward spiral for the past years by squandering its market share and competitive advantage.

But now, with Pre, I am seeing a Palm reborn from the ashes of directionless stupor. Hey, as a side note, that is probably the meaning of Pre, Palm reborn. LOL. Anyway, what gets me this excited is with Synergy. It seemed that Palm has broken free of the repository-based paradigm where data is stored in a PC and it is synched to the Phone. It is instead following a cloud-based paradigm where data modified in the phone is stored in the cloud in whatever service it originated from.

In geekspeak, "Ultimately, webOS acts much like what Daniels described in his interview; that is, it moves away from a repository datasource model to a federated query service model, where the device queries multiple services for state that it then caches locally, before invisibly propagating any changes back out to the cloud." All I can say is WOW!