I’ve now actually touched a Palm Pre. I was walking through Best Buy and, for the first time, they had a functioning model on the floor — not the plastic brick placeholder they usually have around. I stood there poking around at it for about 20 minutes and walked away with a few quick impressions.

1. You never quite know where you are.
There’s no doubt that the interface is quite slick. It feels peppy and rich and — believe it or not — it’s more gooey than the iPhone interface. Maybe that’s just me not being used to it, but I really did want to lick this thing; it’s that much like candy. That said, even after 20 minutes, you never quite know where you are on the thing. Was I in an app? Was I cycling through processes? Where did the calendar go? It seems like there was just so much going on at any one time, that I was never able to focus on where I was, what I was trying to do. In this respect, this is a de-evolution from the Palm OS that I had grown to love with my first Palm III.

2. Cheap.
The thing squeeked in my hand. Every time I slid the keyboard out, I got that cringe-inducing plastic squelch. Maybe it’s designed for smaller, more delicate paws, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was going to fall apart on me. I imagine this is the feeling with many of these sliding-keyboard jobs, and I don’t have experience with many, but this one just felt cheap.

3. Fixed Keyboards.
The last two+ years with my iPhone have broken me from the physical keyboard thing. It took some time, and I don’t think I ever really took note of it before the Pre, but it turns out that I hate tiny phone keyboards now. They don’t change when my needs change. They don’t get all wide and wonderful when I turn the phone into landscape orientation. They don’t pop-up little markers telling me which key I just typed. There are just so many don’ts that I suddenly find it hard to believe they included a hard keyboard at all. The keys were just too small to get any work done, and too inflexible for the needs of the applications on the device itself.

4. Polish.
There is an entry video on the Pre that follows this shiny ball of light floating about a landscape, introducing you to all things Pre-wonderful. The video is presented in portrait mode, or “tallscreen”, so it looks normal as you’re looking at the phone for the first time. When you touch the screen, the video controls fade in, allowing you to scrub through the video and control volume and such. The controls appear on the left side of the screen, sideways, as if you were holding the phone in landscape orientation. I was blown away. It’s one of the simplest bits of polish that I’d never really appreciated on the iPhone — when you turn a video from landscape to portrait, the controls change too — that when I found it missing on the Pre, I was stunned.

It’s a beautiful device on the whole, that shows what you can do with a smaller screen and alternative input methods, but as a consumer, there are so many little paper-cut issues that hit me in just 20 minutes, I have to worry that in three hours, or three days, I’d have plum bled out.

This is why it breaks my heart to read this piece from Eric Savitz over at Barrons finding that it looks like others are in the same boat — not buying the Pre. Competition is good. Product evolution is better. But the clock is ticking, and aside from Best Buy, I have still never seen a Palm Pre in use in the wild.

Eller adds that “with the Palm’s fade,” takeover talk is also likely to evaporate. As the world realizes that the WebOS is “good but not mature enough for developers,” he adds, “Palm’s strategic value to potential acquirers diminishes.”

link: Palm: Pre Sales To Whiff Targets? – Tech Trader Daily – Barrons.com

From NPD this morning:

According to NPD MusicWatch, when it comes to the unit-sales volume of music sold at retail – including paid digital music downloads and CDs – Apple iTunes leads in the U.S. with 25 percent of music units sold, which is up from 21 percent in 2008 and 14 percent in 2007. Walmart (including Walmart, Walmart.com, Walmart Music Downloads) remains in second position with 14 percent of music volume sold at their stores and Web sites with Best Buy ranked third.

via Digital Music Increases Share of Overall Music Sales Volume in the U.S. .

This is where we are starting to see the trouble of Apple’s dominance in the market. Competition is important. Competition drives innovation. Apple, of all companies needs competitors. But the dominance in the market of iTunes and the iPod/iPhone is killing it. I want the Palm Pre to succeed on the merits. I want Amazon to be a killer digital music store (it’s on the way). I believe Apple’s products and store ecosystem are best-of-breed right now. But they can be beat. What is scaring me most about the current state of the digital music market is that before long, the most creative among us may just stop trying.

I haven’t seen the Hero, and likely won’t get my hands on it for some time now. But judging by the videos in Joshua Topolsky’s review that hit today, I’m not in a hurry. And neither, as it would appear, is Flash:

So Flash is kind of a big deal on new smartphones. The iPhone doesn’t have it, the Pre doesn’t have it, BlackBerry devices don’t have it… but the Hero does. Unfortunately, in our testing, we found the inclusion actually hurts operation of the phone more than it helps. When browsing to a site heavy on Flash (there are many), the browser loading times were abysmal. Furthermore, trying to view videos in-window produced choppy, nearly unwatchable results. You may have a better experience with lighter kinds of content, but in our opinion the main reason to introduce Flash into a mobile environment is to allow for broader media viewing options, and in the current state of this Flash player, you’re not really going to get much mileage out of it.

Watch the video and see for yourself. Loading the Flash movie is an atrocious, fist-pounding experience, and while I thought Topolsky nailed the rest of the review, on this point he was far too gracious. Two things I take out of it:

1) If your customers are clamoring for a feature in a product which you know will deliver a maddening experience for them, don’t deliver the feature. There’s a reason the iPhone doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Blackberry doesn’t have Flash. There’s a reason the Pre doesn’t have Flash. It’s because the experience is abysmal for users.

2) This is more of a damning review for Adobe than it is for HTC. It’s clearly tough to scale Flash down to mobile devices, but it’s been years now and the natives are moving passed “restless” and into resignation that they’ll never get Flash at all. Politics aside, maybe HTML5 is a better bet?

The Official Palm Blog: Palm webOS 1.1 enhances support for enterprise — and beyond

And for my next theory, Palm is making a very simple play for Apple to shut them up by buying the company outright. And they’re doing it the only way they know how anymore: engineering hooliganry. Audacious play, indeed.

Oh, and one more thing: Palm webOS 1.1 re-enables Palm media sync. That’s right — you once again can have seamless access to your music, photos and videos from the current version of iTunes (8.2.1).

Apple Blocks Palm Pre iTunes Syncing | PreCentral.net

No surprise that the latest iTunes breaks the Palm Pre USB hack which allowed the device to sync with iTunes. This is a promise Palm should never have made, and users who bought the Pre thinking this was a viable option to get music on their phones are the folks who suffer.

Who wins? doubleTwist is on that list. Check it out if you were counting on that iTunes sync. This may be a good alternative to managing your media.

The whole piece is, as usual, smart. But this is a sideline quotable moment from Gruber’s piece on Chrome this morning:

So I think Gnome and KDE are stuck with a problem similar to the uncanny valley. By establishing a conceptual framework that mimicks Windows, they can never really be that much different than Windows, and if they’re not that much different, they can never be that much better. If you want to make something a lot better, you’ve got to make something a lot different.

Read the rest here.

There is a lot of gloom out there right now. Easy to let it get you down. Good thing there are people like Perry Gruber spreading a message of hope and strength. He has several talks up on his Vimeo page — this one is almost an hour long, a talk he gave at PMI Portland in May.

This, right here, is why the iPhone has succeeded as a platform in the ridiculously crowded handset space. From MacRumors:

Apple yesterday seeded iPhone OS 3.1 and iPhone SDK 3.1 betas to developers for testing, and users have been digging through the new releases to document new features. Among the changes found so far by readers in our forums, at Redmond Pie, and at MobileCrunch:

– Trimming video clips on the iPhone 3GS now offers the ability to save the edited version as a copy rather than simply overwriting the original file.
– Voice Control over Bluetooth is now available, allowing users to Initiate calls and control music playback via Bluetooth headsets.
– MMS is now enabled by default, but still not supported by AT&T.
– iPhone vibrates when rearranging Home screen icons.
– A “Fraud Protection” toggle is now available in Safari settings.
– iPhone startup and shutdown and app launching times have improved.
– New APIs allow developers of third-party application to access and edit videos.
– OpenGL and Quartz have seen improvements.

Some of these simple bullets are a big deal. Non-destructive editing in the simply-fantastic video recorder? Voice control over Bluetooth? Speed improvements? This is a dot-release to a very recent major system update, and some of these features would be big enough to be part of yet another press event.

I’ve had a handset since 1994. Back then I upgraded once a year, a pace which increased over time. In 2003, I was upgrading once ever 3-5 months. I’ve been a happy iPhone user for over two years now and have no interest in changing platforms. I just don’t feel the same level of innovation in the handset market that I get from Apple.

Personally, I haven’t had trouble with AT&T’s handling of the 3GS launch. Days prior to the device hitting the market, the company announced that I would be eligible for the fully subsidized rate for the iPhone, saving me $200 to break my old contract as my plan had outlined when I agreed to it less than a year ago. I bought the phone, it was activated in seconds — not minutes, and hardly hours — and I was calling on it as I left the Apple store on Saturday, launch weekend.

It’s sad to read posts like this. But it’s important to take note when prolific bloggers close their sites. In an era when the vast majority of blogs now drop the intent of becoming a passionate user’s publishing platform, and are now focused on this ethereal drive for monetization and traffic building and [good lord] microblogging, there comes a time when it’s just too hard to keep pushing good content. I’m deeply saddened to see SpeakUp shutter, but completely understand the sentiment that drives the decision.

It’s just too demoralizing to see Speak Up not perform like it used to. And it never will again, because of the expectations I have put on it and the ones that you have all put on it. It’s just not the same. I really feel relieved that we are closing it. Its time has come. It served its purpose and it made its mark. Not many blogs can claim that and we are happy with what it’s done. Time to move on to other things.

Jump over and read the rest of the post, and browse the comments. Then read Byrony’s goodbye, too. It’s worth reading to remind us all the importance of good content and loyal readers. Good to see Armin and team has lots and lots to do to fill the days to come.

This is a great video of the presentation Polish designer Jacek Utko gave at TED this February.

I disagree with his premise that readers are only leaving because they don’t want to pay for yesterday’s news and advertisers are following them. I think the technological shift in publishing is far more pervasive than the disdain for old news. The truth appears to be that people want information when and where they want to consume it, and paper is a chronically inefficient method for satisfying that need.

But this video highlights a stopgap to the inevitable end for print, and I think portends a far more interesting future: whether on paper or online, designers should be given a bigger role in the presentation of information across publications. This is a great example of rethinking the role of design from scratch.

I started working for myself in August of 2007. Before that point — say, July — I had been working as a corporate wonk. The people I worked with, they really knew how to meet.

Things changed for me almost immediately when I went freelance, though, and there were suddenly real dollars associated with my time. Was it really useful having me in a client meeting, for example, when the client knew that it would cost them something just to have me sit there and look pretty? Sure, I would dress up and all, but was it important that I be there? Would I be a contributor?

Ninety-percent of the time, I wasn’t needed. Instead, I’d get an email or a Skype call from a contact with a list of things to think about, a list of things to respond to, and a list of things to actually do. Each of them easy to communicate in a quick call or an email, none of them specifically outcomes of the meeting itself.

I ran a test with a client recently testing this theory on project team meetings. These folks were meeting together twice weekly, two hours per meeting, for status updates. Four hours a week, by nine attendees, is 36 hours of meeting time in a week. My hypothesis was simply that a large part of that 36 hours per week could be put toward actual project work.

So I built a matrix of team members with their annualized hourly rate attached to it. At the end of each day, the meeting organizer — usually the project manager, but could have been anyone on the team — was asked to mark down on the matrix just how much they spent of company money having each attendee in the meeting.

At first, we didn’t tell the team members that their time was being measured this way. After the first week, the project manager had tallied over $1500 in meeting money that he’d spent on a week of status meetings.

The second week, we filled in the rest of the team.

OK, the results were pretty predictable. When team members are aware of their cost to the project, the cost of their time, they get creative with their activity. By the fifth week, status meetings were back to weekly, and down to a half hour each. Their Basecamp use went way up, email task assignment blossomed, and project work became the real work of the project — not just more meta-project meeting-filler.

Seth Godin has a quick rundown of meeting do’s and don’t’s that is pretty clever. Check it out and see if you can make your meetings irrelevant.

I’ve been having this on-going conversation with my dad — old news man that he is — about the galactic reset going on in the print news media. This morning, mom forwarded me this link to an op-ed from Daniel Hannan in the Telegraph. It’s an interesting read, illustrating in particular that we are not alone, and that UK media are just as strapped as we are when it comes to covering all the stories that really need covering.

Twenty-four hours ago, I made a three-minute speech in the European Parliament, aimed at Gordon Brown. I tipped off the BBC and some of the newspaper correspondents but, unsurprisingly, they ignored me: I am, after all, simply a backbench MEP. When I woke up this morning, my phone was clogged with texts, my email inbox with messages. Overnight, the YouTube clip of my remarks had attracted over 36,000 hits. By today, it was the most watched video in Britain.

How did it happen, in the absence of any media coverage? The answer is that political reporters no longer get to decide what’s news.

If you haven’t seen it, head over to AcousticConversations.com and check it out. That is, if you like music. And if you have a pulse. This is the latest post from the blog on the show.

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I’m in San Jose right now. Did you see that coming? What with my clever title and all? To be fair, the tune I have in my head is actually from “Rent” — and let me say this about that: This show breaks me right the hell down. I’m not kidding.

There’s a new release of the show, I believe celebrating the final Broadway performance. It’s a taping of the current Broadway cast, on stage, doing their thing. You can rent it in iTunes now, and I just can’t recommend it highly enough. The current cast is absolutely stunning, and the show continues to inspire today.

As I was saying, San Jose. Yeah, this lame travel schedule has thrown my posting schedule a scooch, but there IS news here, so better late than never.

Acoustic Conversations with Matt Vrba live in the feed

The first time I caught Matt Vrba was some two years ago, singing in a parking lot next to an RV that was pumping out baked beans and burgers. It was a company picnic. A company picnic.

[Chinese monks are walking through the airport right now. In my head they are Shaolin and could kill me by looking at me. In reality, they cannot find their way out of the airport. Attempting to do a good deed by showing them out.]

So, two years ago, Matt Vrba was ingratiating himself by playing solo for the ungrateful unwashed at a company picnic. Now, two years later, he’s relocated to Nashville and we get to catch him on a tour of the Pac Northwest, witnessing him ingratiating himself on our show.

A lot can change in two years.

And yet, the music that originally stuck with me is here and better than ever. This guy has a fantastic story to tell, and he completely kicks it with the live tracks we’re giving away right now. So go, now, open iTunes and update your feed for the show. Watch those tracks trickle onto your computer. Drop them on your iPods and Sansas and … whatevers … and kick it with Matt Vrba.

Want more of Matt? Visit his site at MattVrba.com.

What’s more important than that? Buying music!

If you like Matt, or the other artists we’ve profiled, remember this: A GREAT way to support the show is to click right over on the “Store” link in the top-right corner of the site and buy their music! That’s right, live and in color, straight to you courtesy of Amazon.com, you can buy music, AND fund the show, AND support the artists all at the same time! So help us out, us creative types battling a flagging economy, and buy some great tunes. You won’t regret it. Neither will we.

As ever, thanks for your support, and stay tuned for more great musicians coming this month!

It’s about time.