The Palm Pre Review

Messaging Done Right

The iPhone perfected text messaging, but as I wrote in my 3G review - the AIM app just plain sucked. It did bring AIM to the iPhone, for free, which was nice but the app proved to me that although the iPhone needed the app store, it also needed Apple to develop apps for it.

Palm wins again with its messaging app. The app is aptly called Messaging and it handles much more than just SMS:

The Messaging app is used for text messages (SMS), AIM and GTalk chats. Of course you can also use ICQ over AIM so we can count that as a fourth option. The real shiny part of the Pre’s Messaging is its ability to switch between all of these mediums in a single window.

Here’s where Synergy is very cool. The Pre knows that Michael Andrawes has a mobile phone that I can text, but it also knows that he has a GTalk account and an AIM account.

When I’m talking to Mike I can start texting him, then if I see him online I can switch to AIM or GTalk. My chat history is saved even as I migrate between services; to me, it just looks like I’m talking to Mike; the Pre (and I) don’t really care via what medium the communication happens, I just care about when it happened.

Now Mike has an iPhone 3G, so he doesn’t really see the awesomeness of what’s going on while I’m talking to him. As long as I’m not inconsiderate with my messaging, I should always catch Mike where he expects to talk to me.

Just like Synergy, there are some issues with the Messaging application.

For starters, there’s no way to set a default way of communicating with a person. If Mike hates using AIM but loves GTalk, there’s no way for me to prioritize the latter. Secondly, the system isn’t smart enough to default to AIM/GTalk if Mike is on one of those services and default to SMS if he’s not.

If I’m having a conversation with Mike and he has to head out, I’d like the Messaging app to recognize that he has logged off and switch the chat mode to SMS if I need to reach Mike while he’s gone.

There’s also currently no support for things like MSN or Yahoo Messenger, but between AIM, SMS and GTalk I’m able to talk to a good number of my contacts (as a sidenote, isn’t it strange how very regionalized the various IM protocols are?).

There’s no excuse for Apple not having offered iChat on the iPhone by now. If you do a lot of IMing from your phone, you’ll love the Pre.

While you can’t multitask within the Messaging app (e.g. I can’t have two cards each with a different IM conversation open at once, although you can have multiple conversations open at once), you can at least multitask in other areas while you’re using the app. For example, I can be browsing the web while I’m talking to someone over AIM without logging out. It seems simple, but it can’t be done on the iPhone today (iPhone OS 3.0 fixes this, somewhat, by allowing background notifications).