Samsung Moment vs. Palm Pre
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This is more of an OS comparison than a hardware comparison, but I’ll touch on hardware a little. Mostly though, I want to compare Android 1.5 to Palm WebOS 1.4. When the Samsung Moment gets the Android 2.1 OS upgrade, this could be a completely different discussion.
I’m not sure I’m ready to say Palm webOS is a superior OS to Android, but as a Palm fanboy and a web developer, I think it’s pretty slick.
One of my biggest gripes about Android 1.5 was lack of support for Google Apps. A year or so ago I convinced my coworkers that we should migrate to Google Apps to handle our email. I was very disappointed that Android’s Gmail app could not support multiple accounts. I’ve even read that I could not have used my Google Apps account as my main account on Android — that it had to be an @gmail.com account.
Even my old Blackberry had a dedicated app for a Google Apps email account!
Supposedly Android 2.1 will allow multiple accounts in Gmail. Maybe somebody could confirm or deny that for me. Looking forward to it….
Meanwhile, I was impressed with webOS’s Gmail handling in the emulator. webOS’s Synergy feature is pretty cool — quietly commingling your email, calendar and contacts from various accounts all into one view. They can be viewed separately as well of course, but having one inbox will all your unread email is pretty cool.
All that being said, I’ve run into a problem with webOS’s email which I will discuss separately.
Everything Else
So email was my main motivator for switching ( at least temporarily ) to webOS, but what about all the other stuff? Well, the Palm Pre is definitely smaller and lighter than the Samsung Moment. I miss my nice wide horizontal sliding keyboard on the Moment though. The Pre’s keyboard is not bad and I can hammer out an email pretty quick ( even with my giant sausage thumbs ), but its a tad cramped.
The phone itself is better on the Pre. I live in a basement and get a horrible signal anyway, but the Moment was barely usable as a phone in my apartment. The Pre does much better and I don’t get “hold on dude… you’re breaking up” all the time.
The web browser is at least as good as Android’s, and maybe better because of Pre’s multitouch support. Zooming in and out on large web pages is pretty slick.
Moving around in webOS is really cool. Once you get the hang of the swipe and flick gestures, you can get around really quick. Sure, Android uses gestures too, but flicking webOS’s “cards” around is much more fun.
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