Palm's past is Pre-logue for a buzzworthy phone

It's a phone. It's a phone that didn't even arrive on Earth shooting out of Steve Jobs'... shirt pocket. So what about the reveal of the Palm Pre proved so intoxicating on Thursday to CES attendees and press?

There are two ways of talking about a phone that very, very few people have gotten even to hold to their year, much less used and gotten to know. We can talk about the features we're promised and the characteristics we saw, and there's plenty to say on that front (and there'll be more in the days ahead -- I hope to have my "hands-on time" tomorrow).

And we can talk too about the very nearly irresistible story, or stories, of the birth of the Pre. Some people are excited to see Palm, a company that defined a genre, refusing to go gentle into irrelevance. Many liked seeing a beautifully designed gadget at a show that generally suffers from being The Show That's Held The Same Week As That One With The Really Well-Designed Stuff. Those actually in the room heard Jon Rubenstein's tale of coming out of hammock-on-beach-in-Mexico retirement to be part of the project and want to know if it was worth it. And who doesn't love an underdog story?

But let's go with the tech, or what we know of the tech so far. The Pre gives us both hardware and software to discuss. The handset is a combination multitouch-QWERTY handset, and it's curved more or less everywhere a phone can decently be curvy. Many on the scene compared it to a pebble -- an appropriately Zen visual for a phone that makes a central design point of being smooth and simple.

I'm not a huge fan of shiny and/or black surfaces for electronics. My Current Loathed Sprint Smartphone (which I used to shoot photos at the unveiling; it thanked me by freezing solid, and I briefly considered throwing the rotten thing at visiting Sprint CEO Dan Hesse's head) suffers from an excess of shine and smudging, and it's not even a multitouch. Pre's work surface, however, is well-done -- a pleasant, not overlarge screen and, below that, a 'gesture area' that's multitouch-competent without really drawing one's attention to the inevitable smudges.

(I'm also awarding a bonus point for being the first phone in world history to have a pretty charger -- another smooth black object that operates on the principle of magnetic induction. I know of very few desks that are sufficiently beautiful; this charger may help.)

I wasn't truly in the Pre-rade, though, until the QWERTY slid out from underneath the screen. There wasn't much snark in the Thursday morning presentation, but Palm's shot at virtual keyboards was well-earned; they're in the main horrible. Palm was able to plow previous design knowledge into this aspect of the Pre design, and it's nice to see that they didn't feel compelled to reinvent every last aspect of the wheel for the Pre.

I haven't gotten my talons on the device to say how it feels behind the wheel, but it's hard not to be awed by the interface, which is bursting with good ideas. A few of them remind one of ideas that have previously been good elsewhere; the undulating quick-launch onscreen bar looks a lot like the Mac's taskbar, for instance. I have no problem with quoting an interface that Just Works.

Your mileage may vary but I clicked right away with interface designers Matias Duarte's card metaphor, especially since Palm's chosen to make it work in accord with their classic three-column interface. Apple's raised the bar extremely high with their hardware/software interop, enforced in part by ferocious control of who can and can't offer apps for their platform. Palm's opened up the apps-dev floor to anyone who can work in HTML, CGI and JavaScript. That's going to bring forth a lot of potential applications, but it means that seamless interoperability of the hardware and the OS will be critical.

The design sensibility we heard about repeatedly Thursday morning was seamlessness -- smooth movement between multiple aspects of the owner's digital life, and along the continuum from personal data stored locally to the Web at large, and from inside your head to outside. The last part, as addressed by the Pre's effective but discreet system alerts, made me feel...how can I put this? I felt like the system understood how much I don't like being interrupted. It gets me. Or it will get me. When I get it. Get what I'm saying?

An emotional connection with a phone I can't even touch yet -- it's what makes people stand on line at the Apple Store for hours before a major iPhone release. It will take no less, plus top-notch follow-through on the promises made and implies Thursday, to save Palm. In the meantime, we've got a promise, a peek at something special, and one heck of a good story.