Palm Pre, Photo from Engadget

Palm seems to have done an incredible work when it comes to UX. While I am definitely not convinced by the ” Web” part of the WebOS, it seems that the user interaction design was done inside a small centralized team and then spread over the applications. The device has several small decisions that shows how much the User Experience design can bring to create differentiation from the competitor. Touch strip on the bottom part, inductive charger that changes the phone answering behavior, centralization of user contacts from several sources and more.

The Palm WebOS seems to have achieved a quite consistent basic experience, and as you can see on this video the power from the OMAP 3430 (that will be the engine behind Maemo 5 devices as well) is really creating a incredible smooth experience.

Anyhow it’s too soon to take any final conclusions about it, but as UX / Interaction designer I can just send my congrats to Matías Duarte and his amazing team. They really managed to take the bar level set by the iPhone to a next level. While it can be a little too early to say that, I really can tell how many effort there was in the Interaction Design there, and there is a clear feeling of a strong team behind it, with a strong creative mind guiding the massive amount of ideas that must have been tailored during the first months of concept work. Add to this a felling of “This is Palm’s last shot, please aim it right!” and you can imagine the pressure to create something that is completely ahead of what people expected.

Anyhow : Congrats Palm for reinventing themselves, and being bold enough to take also the development side one level above (if the WebOS is what I am thinking of, it’s not the iPhone web apps.. approach) from where Android placed it (from C to Java) taking interpreted languages (Javascript) as the main development language.

Now it’s time to wait to use it and to do a full review based on real usage, not on watching videos right?

(Ps: Please let’s not enter the technical aspects of Java being also interpreted or not, etc… you got the point from C to Java to X)