It seems like Palm’s new webOS PDK (plug-in development kit) can be used to port over iPhone games in a matter of days — or even hours. Given how fast some iPhone games have turned up on the Palm Pre we’ve kind of suspect there was a little something something going on behind the screen, and our sibling site PreCentral.net confirmed it by way of Digital Daily’s pre-GDC coverage.

As just mentioned, I’ll be at GDC to have a look at what they’re doing. If it’s really just that easy to get your iPhone games onto webOS, then Palm has once again made their platform as frictionless as possible for developers (on top of the web technology SDK and Classic PalmOS emulation). Smart.

Windows Phone 7 Series looks to be packing Xbox Live gaming muscle, so they likely won’t go the same route as Palm… but could Android and BlackBerry? And if developers can keep making great iPhone games and get webOS (and maybe others) as a bonus, is that ultimately better for iPhone gamers, or does it weaken the uniqueness of the platform? If it does, will there eventually be “exclusives” like there are on Xbox and Playstation, or will Apple do more first-party games like the console makers — especially Nintendo — do?

iPhone Games Can be Ported to Palm webOS PDK in “Days”? — The Competition is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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My first smartphone was a Palm Treo 600 and so my last 2009 Smartphone Round Robin “away” review focusing on Palm’s new webOS platform as embodied by the Palm Pre and Palm Pix does not lack for symmetry. Between the two, last year I reviewed the Palm Treo Pro which I quipped was more HTC than Palm, ran Windows Mobile and not a Palm-made OS, and had a keyboard that was hard to consider “pro” level. 3 years of round robin, three totally different platforms from Palm, and only this review for me to try and make my own sense out of it.

Luckily I had the mobile accomplisher himself, our editor-in-chief Dieter Bohn to show me Palm’s new platform and their new devices, and the truly exceptional community over at PreCentral.net Forums to help understand where it’s at and where it’s going.

(And just a reminder, every day you post on that PreCentral.net thread, or any of the official Round Robin threads, is another day you’re entered to win one of six (6!) new smartphones!)

Now let’s get this on…

Previously on Palm

First, this is where Palm stood last year, without a PalmOS device in the competition, represented instead by the HTC-built, Windows Mobile running, Treo Pro:

And now, just one year later Dieter was kind enough to show me the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi running the all new, all different, all Palm webOS:

CrackBerry Kevin and I also stopped by Palm at CES 2010 to check out the new Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus for Verizon:

And here are the rest of the contextual links:

• PreCentral’s Dieter Bohn and Rene (and Phil!) on the iPhone Live! Podcast.
• PreCentral.net Palm Pre review (and all-new Palm Pre Plus review)
• PreCentral.net Palm Pixi review (and all-new updated Palm Pixi Plus review)
• 2008 TiPb Smartphone Round Robin Palm Treo Pro review

Hardware Design

I’m starting with hardware only because every other review started with hardware, and I’m telling you that because I really wish for this one review I didn’t have to start with hardware. But I’m a sucker for consistency.

And the Palm Pre Hardware Just…

Well, it isn’t great. The concept is killer, don’t get me wrong. The river-stone ergonomics are beautiful. The execution, however, especially on the early units, was really unfortunate given how much else Palm got right.

After using the iPhone’s glass screen for years, using the plastic screen on the Pre just feels… not good. The first Pre I tried at a local Best Buy had a screen protector over the plastic, and I found it almost unusable. If I was Kevin I could figure out some witty, spot-on analogy about layers of prophylactics between me and my multitouch but I’m not and I can’t and so I won’t. I’ll just say Palm needs to switch to glass and now.

The Pre is also a vertical slider. It looks like an iPhone slab but pull down and a full physical keyboard is revealed. While this could be a best-of-both-worlds compromise, the lack of an official, built-in virtual keyboard means (unlike the Motorola Android Droid) you have to use the physical keyboard and… it’s not great. A couple of Pre devices I’ve tried didn’t have very solid feeling sliders and all of them had cramped quarters that made the physical keyboard not that enjoyable for me. I had to use the tips of my fingers/nails and still watch out on the top ridge of the display and the sharp edges of the sides.

I’m not sure what they could do to fix it, though Dieter says the new Palm Pre Plus is an improvement in the feel of the keys itself. That, combined with the better build quality control could be part of the answer. I look forward to spending more time with it in the future to find out.

Palm Pixi By Contrast…

Eschewing the slider for their second webOS device, Palm returned to their roots with the front-facing QWERTY. They also returned to the form factor of the Palm Centro, which saw high sales if low margins during the final year of PalmOS.

The device is tiny. It’s deceptively tiny. It’s so tiny that, like in the Dark Knight movie, you half-expect that if Dieter’s Pre ever broke at the mechanism, he’d pull a release, a full Pixi would eject, and he’d just keep on typing. Actually, he’d likely type better because, counter-intutively, the Palm Pixi keyboard feels better than the Pre’s. I don’t know if it’s crazy Pixi magic, or just the better Feng Shui of not having to type inside the Pre’s cavity, but the tiny keys worked well.

The huge problem here, however, is that Palm reduced the screen size to fit in that keyboard. This isn’t the Treo 240×240 or 320×320 of yesteryear. In 2009, never mind 2010, screen size matters. Aspect ratio matters. In a post-iPhone, capacitive era how we interact with our device is more screen-dependant than anything else. There are times you won’t need a physical keyboard (watching video, playing games, reading e-books). There’s almost no time when you won’t want the full screen. Sure, it’s only a few pixels shorter, but on a screen that small, the difference is noticeable. It’s like having a 16:9 HDTV for a year or so, then suddenly getting a 4:3 SDTV again. You know what you’re missing.

There’s no easy fix for that easy, unless they jettison the physical keyboard and go with a fullscreen Pixi with a virtual keyboard. Many would hate that, but it’s something I’ve been increasingly considering as of late…

Is the Era of Physical Keyboards Over?

Originally this section was going to be called “the era of physical keyboards is over” but a funny thing happened on the way to writing this review — I kind of changed my mind.

Physical keyboards on smartphones are a strange beast. That a QWERTY button layout originally intended to prevent jamming on ancient IBM typewriters still exists on some of the most modern gadgets today is… either stupefying or a testament to the intractability of consumer typists.

Interestingly, Palm didn’t start off with physical keyboards. The Palm Pilot had no keyboard and used a proprietary form of handwriting recognition. The iPhone doesn’t have a physical keyboard either, and does offer recognition for Chinese character input, but uses virtual keys for most other languages, and sticks to QWERTY for English.

Rumor has it, physical vs. virtual keyboard was a huge area of contention between Apple CEO, Steve Jobs and then-Apple VP and head of iPod, Jon Rubinstein. Jobs didn’t want a physical keyboard, Rubinstein did. And we all know how that turned out — we have the iPhone sans-physical keyboard and Rubinstein has a new job as CEO of Palm.

It should come as no surprise, then, that when the Palm Pre debuted and looked a lot like an iPhone with a physical keyboard, many (and yours truly included) figured it was the iPhone Rubinstein always wanted to build.

He wanted the keyboard so much, as mentioned, he sacrificed screen real-estate on the Palm Pixi for it. I find that absurd. I would have removed the keys and made it an iPhone-nano-esque slab. As I said, until this review, I would have whole-heartedly exclaimed “the era of physical keyboards is over”.

But then I started thinking about the BlackBerry and how the Storm2 is no replacement for the 9700 for their user-base. Just like it took a long time to transition from CLI (command line interface, the text-only days of DOS prompts and UNIX terminals) to GUI (graphical user interface, the windows, mouse, pointer paradigm we see today), it will take a while to transition from physical keyboards to virtual ones. And just like some people (not gonna say neckbeards!) still turn off the GUI on Linux, go pure Terminal on Mac OS X, and ignore WIndows completely, some people have been so raised on physical keyboards, even on tiny little devices, that they wouldn’t transition to virtual even if, from an overall usability standpoint, they could or should.

BlackBerry is the easy example because they’re essentially messaging devices. The iPhone is essentially a big screen you fill with media and apps, so that’s an easy example of where the virtual keyboard fits best (especially Apple’s still unequalled implementation thereof).

And that brought me to the crux of this long, rambling, tangent — what’s the Palm Pre (and webOS in general)? I had the same question about Android and pretty much determined it was Google’s mobile insurance policy. But Palm is a mobile company. It’s not an “also have” like Microsoft. It’s their sole reason for being, and they’re one of the original innovators in the space.

So I wondered again, what’s the Palm Pre? And then I realized Palm told us from the beginning — it’s the fat middle. Where the Treo converged three devices into one, the Palm Pre bridges the traditional, keyboard-centric mobile messaging device with the new, screen-centric mobile platform device.

It’s likely not keyboard enough for a BlackBerry addict, and it’s not screen enough for an iPhone user, but it’s a compromise form factor for those who want the okay-of-both-worlds.

I’m so happy with the iPhone keyboard that I’ll never go back to a physical one. I use my iPhone keyboard far more than I ever used the physical keyboards on my Treo 600 or 680 because it works better for me. Not having to engage forearm muscles to depress tiny keys and hold the rest of the phone stable while I do so is a huge advantage in my book. It’s just effortless and it just works. I won’t be writing novel-length compositions on a BlackBerry anyway, so no argument about volume of typing impresses me. Likewise, I see enough physical keyboarders glancing constantly at their screens that muscle-memory no longer resonates with me as a deal-breaker either. New devices are about consuming information as much as creating it, and even glance-ability requires — you guessed it — glances.

One day haptics may be sufficiently advanced enough that mighty-morphin’, there-and-gone-again virtual-that-feel-like-physical keyboards are enough for everybody. But right now, today, you have legacy keyboarders who’ll never abandon their keys, and devices on Android that still haven’t gotten their software right, and there needs to be a middle ground.

Or to be more succinct — Smartphones are evolving beyond priority messaging devices to priority (data/media/etc.) consumption devices and hardware keyboards are legacy, bolted-on technology comforting for the former but waiting to be obsoleted when technology allows virtual keyboards to better serve the latter (and we’re part of the way there with the iPhone).

(hat Palm didn’t have hardware keyboards when the Pilot was priority PIM device is interesting as an aside. And no, Dieter, I won’t take that back )

Inductive Charging

Palm debuted it with their Touchstone accessory. Cool. Future. Let’s me leave this section on a positive note.

Software Experience

Okay, here’s where webOS is interesting enough that any complaints about the hardware take a back seat. First let’s get something out of the way. We’ve teased Palm about having the former head of Apple’s iPod division as their CEO, and about bringing over a bunch of iPhone engineers to help create webOS. We’ve listed what webOS adopted from the iPhone (and we’re far from the only ones), but it’s important to remember the iPhone wasn’t made in a vacuum. The icon grid as launcher, the tabbed phone app, and other paradigms existed in earlier Palm Pilots and Treos and Apple took them and put them together with a bunch of other stuff for iPhone OS. Likewise, some of the multitouch gestures in webOS are the same as the iPhone (and thank goodness), the way Cards works is greatly expanded from, but visually identical to how iPhone Safari Pages work, etc. In the end, they’ll figure out the legal issues and we’ll say the user benefits from a certain amount of consistency when it comes to these platforms. With that behind us…

HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Palm faced a huge problem when launching webOS. They couldn’t really bring PalmOS developers forward because the platform was different and, unfortunately, the time it took between the decline of PalmOS and the rise of webOS meant a significant amount of developers had moved on. iPhone 2.0, meanwhile, had re-framed the mobile discussion for the second time, going from killer UI in 2007 to being all about apps in 2008, and Palm didn’t have the money or mindshare of Google who was already offering the Android alternative. So what to do?

In a move I called brilliant at the time, they decided to make their UI layer, and hence development environment, out of web-standards — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While they would — and did — take a performance hit by essentially running localized web pages as apps, it meant anyone who knew how to make webApps could fairly easily develop for webOS. (That Palm named it webOS shows how seriously they take that concept).

Apple tried a non-localized version of this with iPhone 1.0 and it’s “sweet” (TM, Steve Jobs, WWDC 2007) WebApp SDK. It failed. But 2009 brought far more robust web technologies, including HTML 5 with SQLite for local storage, CSS3 with animations, and a whole lot more maturity in WebApp development. While Palm hasn’t succeeded with this to App Store levels, no one else has with interpreted SDK (Java) or native apps either. Palm has succeeded to some degree, however, and iPhone 3.0 is now supporting localized HTML 5 apps on the iPhone home screen, while RIM, Android, and others are embracing WebApps and widgets.

It was a gutsy gamble. I still think Google saw webOS, smacked themselves in the Android and raced to make Chrome OS in response. It’s also clearly a first step for Palm. Just like Apple released a full, native SDK for iPhone 2.0, Palm is now offering native plug-ins for games like Need for Speed (something that WebApps can’t do, and even WebGL might struggle to get them to do as well).

It’s not perfect. webOS’ lack of contrast in the UI still flabbergasts me. More practically, it’s sluggish at times, especially on the anemic Palm Pix processor, and it can take far too long for built-in apps like the calendar to launch. It also presents problems for developers who want to hide their source code, although Palm now has a solution that doesn’t involve limiting apps to onboard RAM (something Android and BlackBerry still suffer from). Full GPU support might (though I think likely not) improve that, but hardware is always getting faster and bandwidth is (hopefully) getting bigger. Palm will benefit from both. In a year or two, it will be buttery smooth and still enjoy the flexibility and future-proofing that is webOS’ promise.

Synergy Contacts, Multitasking Cards, and Non-Modal Notifications

Three areas where webOS absolutely kills are their Synergy contact system, their Cards visualization for multitasking, and their non-modal notification system.

Synergy, as far as I can figure out, takes all of your online data points, sucks them in while maintaining them as separate silos, then aggregates them, filters out duplications, and presents you a unified view of the data. So, for example, you have Facebook friends, Gmail contacts, a couple of Exchange accounts, and an old Yahoo! setup. Synergy will take all that, figure out that 700 of them are the same, create a unified contact that has all the information for each of those 700 (while leaving each untouched on their own service), and present you a single contact list containing those 700 as well as all the other (unique to Yahoo! or Gmail, etc.) contacts. I can’t explain it as elegantly as it works most of the time (on occasion it won’t match and you’ll have to do some work to help it), but it’s the future of contact management as far as I’m concerned — with a few caveats.

If I don’t want Google’s terrible, promiscuous email retention polluting my phone contacts (or Facebook messing up my Exchange) that needs to be easily managed (it might be on webOS, I didn’t get into it but hope it is). Also, an easy way to export the final, Synergy-zed contact list for backup — or replacement of other online contact data bases! — would be nifty. That webOS’ approach allows them to elegantly handle multiple Exchange accounts is testament enough.

Cards for multitasking is likewise the future. If you’ve used Pages on the iPhone Safari — where you can keep several web sites available at the same time and easily zoom out, see all the pages, swipe across to change them, and then zoom back in — then imagine that but taken to the ultimate, logical, extreme. That’s webOS Cards. Instead of just web pages, every app including web pages gets its own Card and you can zoom out to see them all, swipe to change between them, and tap to zoom back in. Yes, that means webOS supports multitasking for 3rd party apps, something only Apple apps are allowed to do on the iPhone.

It works well on the Palm Pre. It works mind-bogglingly well on the Palm Pre Plus (Dieter had 50 apps up all at once). It works so well, in fact, it kind of makes me sad I can’t drag and drop elements from one Card to another. Why give me that fantastic visualization, why make a windowed multitasking interface for a small screen, if the biggest advantage of doing it — drag and drop — isn’t implemented. Unless, of course, that’s the “next step”. I’ll keep my eyes peeled for webOS 2.0…

Notifications, in terms of webOS, means once again I have to complain about the iPhone’s current, modal implementation. Modal, if you’re not familiar with the term, means that once the notification pops up, you have to either “dismiss” (and lose it forever) or “view” (and interrupt whatever you’re doing) immediately. There is no later. And if another notification comes in, it obliterates the previous one entirely. With webOS, like Android, you’re told about a new notification but you’re free to ignore it and the system will just keep track of them for you until you choose to take a look at them. That difference means everything, especially when you start getting a ton of notifications coming in.

Conclusion

It’s not all rosy for Palm, webOS, the Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, and their mobile strategy going forward. Sprint exclusivity might have guaranteed Palm some money but it doesn’t seem to have given them the sales they needed. They’re hitting Verizon now, and AT&T soon, but if they’d gone on Verizon sooner (before the Droid) they could have had a much bigger impact. Unlike Apple, Google, or Microsoft, they don’t have billions in the bank or other businesses to prop them up. Unlike RIM or Nokia, they don’t have entrenched business or international market share to ride. It’s going to be an uphill battle for Palm. That they’ve accomplished and innovated so much in just a year is an outstanding accomplishment, however, and means I’ll be cheering as they battle up that hill.

For iPhone users, switching to webOS means you gain a physical keyboard and those nifty Synergy, Cards, and notifications. You’ll also gain a more “open” system as Palm has treated hacking webOS in a way Apple almost certainly won’t for the foreseeable future. We didn’t really get into the whole homebrew (think jailbreak apps) and patching culture of webOS, or Palm’s efforts to reach out and embrace developers, but kudos to them for doing it. If that’s something that’s important to you, and Android/Google is a non-starter, it’s certainly another plus in Palm’s column.

As I write this, however, Apple might just be on the verge of announcing iPhone 4.0, and that just might “invent” multitasking for iPhone users. Better contact and notifications might be on tap as well. Hey, maybe even an iPhone on Verizon. The soonest we’ll know is this Wednesday’s “Come see our latest creation” event, otherwise Apple usually shows off new software in March and new hardware at WWDC in June.

I’m not saying wait and see before you leap to webOS or another platform. I’m just saying… wait and see.

The biggest thing about this year’s Round Robin is that every device-maker brought the competition. Apple is still ahead in some areas, but they’ve been overtaken in some others. Apple having to catch up… that’s good for iPhone users, and it’s good for everyone.

Things are exciting again!

Palm Pre, Palm Pixi, webOS Review from an iPhone Perspective — Smartphone Round Robin is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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While I look for iPhone stuff at CES, Dieter and the PreCentral.net crew went over to Palm’s presentation, and got the goods on 3D gaming, video recording, Verizon, and more — PreCentral.net’s Here are the highlights:

• Palm CES live blog coverage
• webOS 1.4 coming in February
• Palm Pre Plus, Palm Pixi Plus exclusive to Verizon with tethering
• Flash 10.1 for webOS
• Video recording for webOS
• 3D gaming with native APIs(plug-in development kit).
• Open distribution for webOS apps
• AND… PreCentral webOS App Gallery goes LIVE! (Congrats guys!)

Check it out and let us know what you think. Big news for Palm? Too incremental? Competitive enough for 2010?

Palm at CES 2010: 3D Games, Video webOS 1.4, Recording, Verizon, and PreCentral — The Competition is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Happy New Year and welcome to the iPhone blog’s 2009 TiPb Editor’s Choice Awards for the very best (in our opinion!) iPhone and iPod touch apps and accessories released in the last year!

Smartphone of the Year: iPhone 3GS (by default)

We’re not really doing Smartphone of the Year since, unlike our sibling sites, Apple has so far seen fit to only release one new iPhone each year. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t think the iPhone 3GS isn’t terrific. It is. Even if we consider the smartphone space as a whole, even if we put it up against the best Android, BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm, and Windows have to offer, while it might get bested — even eclipsed — in certain specs or feature sets, there’s still nothing that brings it all together in so appealing a mainstream package as the iPhone 3GS.

From its butter-smooth interface now with “s as in speed” to its singular build quality to its incredible ecosystem to its 120,000 apps for anything and everything, even if we did do this category — which we’re not — the iPhone 3GS would still be our pick for Smartphone of the Year. So there.

Competition of the Year: Palm Pre and webOS

Make no mistake, the Droid, the BlackBerry Bolds and Tour and Storms, the Nokia N900, the Windows Phone HTC HD2 — each brought it in their own way (hey, it’s why we do the Smartphone Round Robin), but each mostly brought it with hardware specs like 480p displays, or services like free navigation. They made good things better.

Palm brought it with a whole new OS, one that combined amazing visualization for multitasking with brilliant notification handling, and sidestepped the developer divide by using web technology as their SDK. If the iPhone woke up a complacent smartphone industry, Palm made sure they stayed awake another year. Sure the hardware could have been harder core and there was that whole iTunes sync brouhaha, but that combined with the “years in the desert” to go from PalmOS to webOS, made Palm even more of a comeback story, and who doesn’t root for Rocky? That’s why the Palm Pre is our competitor of the year!

Apple Innovation of the Year: $99 iPhone 3G

Last year Innovation of the Year was easy: the App Store. Now, two-billion downloads, well over 100,000 apps, and almost universal imitation not just from the Android Market, but now from BlackBerry App World, Microsoft Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm webOS App Catalog, and who knows what else, it’s still far and away the market leader, if the idea itself has long passed being led. Not that Apple didn’t try in 2009, with the iPhone 3.0 Sneak Preview Event the undoubtedly innovative in-app purchases (including free apps no longer needing to stay free) and accessory access via the dock and Bluetooth. Push notification tops the candidates list as well. It isn’t he full-on multitasking some still demand, but it covers 90% of the functionality at 20% of the battery drain (ahem) and hey, even some multitasking smartphones don’t handle push notification yet.

But no, we’re going with something more important even if less interesting. The $99 iPhone 3G. Sure, it’s last year’s model, but it’s got the latest iPhone OS 3.x on it and most importantly it redefined — and disrupted — what was considered a budget smartphone and forced every other platform and player to lower prices and reconsider the — frankly crappy — handsets they offered for cheap. Up front cost shouldn’t mean much to people on contract for $2000+ over two years but it does. Getting under $100 was huge for Apple. And for consumers, who’s previous budget choices were the likes of Palm Centro, BlackBerry Pearl, or WinMo… whatever, it was huger still. That makes the $99 iPhone 3G our Apple Innovation of the Year.

App Store App Innovation of the Year: Augmented Reality

Last year Google Mobile snuck in some private-API wizardry (later made all nice and legal by iPhone 3.0) to make voice search so good we thought we were in Star Trek. This year Apple announced accessory access and all sorts of new API’s and developers certainly didn’t disappoint. Some of the most amazing new iPhone Apps weren’t new to mobile, however. RedLaser reads barcodes and finds competitive prices amazingly well, but Android had that first. Likewise Qik is finally streaming live, but geeks were doing that from the N95 a couple years ago. Still, with everything from the latest Apple Remote to Zipcar, it’s harder then ever to single one app out.

So we’re singling out a category — Augmented Reality. Take a live camera view, add location services and — one day, visual recognition — and layer data on top of it. Hold your iPhone camera up to a restaurant and the menu pops up for you to read. Point it west and see the tweets of the physically closest people you follow. Point it at your friend and get a reminder you owe him $5. We’re not sure if it’s just trendy concept or will really, truly prove functional one day, but just like Google Mobile made us think of Star Trek, this combines several cutting edge technologies in such a way that it makes us think of a dozen sci-fi heads-up displays and gorramit if we don’t want that future today.

UI Gem of the Year: Tweetie 2 “Pull Down to Refresh”

Too small to be the overall innovation of the year, this category is for the tiny little tweaks that never the less make all the difference. Lots of developers continued to make drop-dead gorgeous iPhone apps in 2009, including Tapbots’ latest Pastebot, Twitterrific 2’s ability to hide so much functionality behind so sensible a layout, and Facebook 3.0 finally showed how to do massive social networking right on a local app, and Apple even rolled out new Voice Recorder and Compass app interfaces. It was something much simpler, however, much more insidious that got inside TiPb’s user experience this year.

Yeah, it’s totally Tweetie 2’s terrific “pull down to refresh”. Apple built the wonderful, tactile feeling elasticity of the “rubber band” effect into iPhone 1.x but never did much with it. Developer Atebits took it and made it a simple, intuitive way to request new data from an internet server — in this case update your Twitter timeline. That many of us now try to use it to reload a page in Safari, or get new messages in Mail, or refresh anything and anything that feels like it should refresh when we pull down shows just how simple and intuitive it is. Sometimes it’s not the big once-and-a-while’s that make the difference, it’s the little use-it-all-the-times.

Camera App of the Year: ReelDirector

iPhone 3GS brought a much improved camera and video recording, amazingly improved photo software, and even trim-able video recording. A lot of apps took advantage, both of the old gear and the new. Leanna covered five fantastic ones earlier, and since then a couple have even come around to offering video for the iPhone 3G.

But if video is the new still, ReelDirector ups the ante from Apple’s trim to full-on (for a mobile) video editing. From titles to transitions, soundtracks to Ken Burns effects, it may not be Final Cut Pro but it’s definitely a fun first cut.

Productivity App of the Year: Documents to Go Premium

Over two and half years in and some are still foolish enough to call the iPhone a toy. Unless, of course, they mean the iPhone can make even productivity work more fun than it has any right to be.

Documents to Go, which updated their flagship app to Premium and added PowerPoint editing and Gmail attachment support at almost the last minute gets our vote. Even though Apple still hasn’t provided a universal document repository, or file picker (the way the picture picker works for images), Documents to Go continues to push the boundaries of what an Office-style app can do on the iPhone.

Social App of the Year: Twitter Clients

If Facebook had gotten push notifications, if Skype had actually gotten 3G access, this category might be even harder to decide than it already is. Likewise notification enabled IM clients such as BeeJive that now has group chat is a social powerhouse.

But those iPhone twitter clients just. won’t. stop. We already mentioned Tweetie 2 and Twitterrific 2, but there’s also Birdfeed, and both Twitbit and SimplyTweet made it into our staff picks of the year. And yeah, TweetDeck is on the iPhone now as well. In addition to the general-purpose clients, we have apps like Birdhouse that excel at writing and Reportage that make reading manageable. Heck, even Twitter’s own WebApp got a great makeover.

Twitter exploded in 2009, and the quality of iPhone Twitter apps exploded right along with it. They’re all so good, again we can’t pick just one, so we’re naming them all the social networking apps of the year!

Navigation App of the Year: Navigon Mobile Navigator

Another of app category made possible by iPhone 3.0 is turn-by-turn GPS navigation, and it didn’t take long for top of the line, premium-priced market leaders like TomTom to come on board (and with car kits!), and subscription services like the TeleNav-powered AT&T Navigator have come on board, but low-cost, crowd-sourced alternatives have also flourished. And even with the 800lbs gorilla of the newly announced Google Maps Navigation staring them down all searchy and free, they’ve continued to update and innovate.

Navigon’s MobileNavigator has been helping push the pace of those updates and that innovation. Whether it’s text to speech or live-traffic, this maps-on-board solution took iPhone 3.0’s APIs and didn’t run — it drove.

Action Game of the Year: N.O.V.A

If there was a theme to iPhone and iPod touch gaming in 2009 it was the maturing of the platform that brought both big franchises and games very much akin to the big franchises. There are literally too many to list (though Jeremy started and Chad focused in on FPS‘ a while back).

But N.O.V.A brought “Halo” to the iPhone. Maybe we should have found something more original, more uniquely dependent on the iPhone’s specific technologies. But N.O.V.A brought “Halo” to the iPhone.

Racing Game of the Year: Real Racing

Given the accelerometer, racing games are just such a natural fit for the iPhone and iPod touch that it’s no wonder there are so many great racing games for the platform (Chad’s picked out a top 5 already!) And with iPhone 3GS and iPod touch G3 level horsepower and OpenGL 2.0 no doubt there’s even better ahead (hey, we’ve seen a glimpse of it already).

For now, however, Real Racing is where it’s at. Our 2009 Grand Prix winner is also a racing game of the year.

Puzzle Game of the Year: Ramp Champ

A lot of great puzzle games have hit the iPhone, from Peggle to Stoneloops to Bejeweled 2 and Tetris, to well almost every great puzzle game that could come to the platform. In 2008, however, Trism showed you could do an iPhone-proper puzzler and do it incredibly well.

Ramp Champ took a flick at it in 2009, with gorgeous graphics, one of the best implementations of in-app purchases to date, and arguably too much challenge for its (or rather its players) own good. There maybe puzzle games with bigger brands, more levels, and perhaps even better physics, but when we think about what we love most about iPhone software — indie developers, attention to detail, love of UI — Ramp Champ lands squarely in the bullseye.

Jailbreak App of the Year: ProSwitcher

Even post-iPhone 3.0, Jailbreak continued to fill gaps in functionality like theming, BT keyboards, lockscreen widgets, notification management, and — of course — unlocking the iPhone 3GS. If Apple won’t do it, it’s been proven time and time again the Jailbreak community will.

ProSwitcher did the same, but looked especially great doing it. Take a Jailbroken iPhone, add Backgrounder to get your multitask on, and then manage the whole thing with Safari Pages-style — and yes, webOS cards-style UI candy.

Bluetooth Headset of the Year: Blueant Q1

Apple raised the stakes in 2009 by adding iPhone 3.0 support for A2DP stereo Bluetooth — sort of. Apple forgot to add all the proper control protocols, so you can’t skip tracks, but boy can you still rock out. Now iPhone and iPod touch users can enjoy music (and adjusting volume), and excellent products like the Motorola S9-HD and the Jabra Cruiser speakerphone.

And if that wasn’t enough, our pick for BT headset of the year, the Blueant Q1 got an update — really, how often to BT headsets get firmware update?! — to enable A2DP. It’s a premium product, just like the iPhone, but with voice control, and support for two phones (for you dual wielders), it’s also a fantastic one.

Case of the Year: Otterbox Defender

Apple can’t win. They change the design of the iPhone 3G and people with iPhone 2G cases complain their old accessories don’t fit. They keep the iPhone 3GS in the same duds, and people complain it’s boring. But at least the case makers could concentrate on better rather than different, and better they have. From the soft-stylings of the iSkin solo to the gloss of the Case-mate Barely There Chrome and the utility of the Golla bag, there’s definitely a “case for that”.

And if we’re talking case, and we’re talking protection, the Hummer of cases, the battle-armor of protection, is the OtterBox Defender. It’s not for those who just want a sticker or a skin, a splash of color or the smell of fine leather — it’s for those who want their iPhone survive. And it’s our case of the year.

EPIC FAIL of the Year: Capricious App Store Rejections

No doubt the App Store is such a smash hit that even Apple was unprepared for the tsunami of submissions they’re now facing. The numbers are staggering, but not as staggering as the growth rate. But choosing to be a gatekeeper comes with it the responsibility of being a good gatekeeper. It’s Apple’s store and they can fill it’s virtual shelves with what they want, but when the developers who make the apps those shelves are being filled with lose faith — when they no longer trust Apple’s rules, or realize there are no consistent rules being enforced, even if Apple and mainstream users don’t lose out, the platform does. Sure, they’ve made some small improvements inside iTunes connect and with the RSS feed, but they’re slow to the point of being arduous.

Some developers have been frustrated enough to leave the iPhone. A few returned only because the competitions’ development environment, install base, and user experience wasn’t competitive enough… yet. But that “yet” could change at any moment. And if the best and brightest developers are making the best and brightest apps for Android rather than the iPhone, that’s not a loss to Apple’s bottom line, it’s a loss to their heart.

That’s why rejected App Store apps, specifically the capricious, opaque way in which they’re continuing to be rejected, is our epic FAIL of the year.

Story of the Year: iTablet

We’ve mentioned most of the other big stories already — the still amazing Jailbreak journey, the still disappointing App Store rejections. And then there was the leave of absence, and triumphant return of Steve Jobs.

But iTablet/iStlate was the story that wouldn’t quit, however, and the rumors, speculation, and rampant geek want built and built throughout 2009. We’re not even sure actually announcing the device (which may just happen in 2010) could have been a bigger story — anticipation is just that powerful. Whether (more likely when) it ultimate comes out, Apple’s mysterious, mythical, magical, maybe iTablet is our story of the year.

Bring on 2010!

Well, that’s it — TiPb’s Editor Awards for 2009 gone and done! What will we see in 2010? Who knows, but we’re excited to find out!

Did you agree with any of our picks? Disagree? What would YOU have given the nod to? Feel strongly about it? Tell us — or tell us off — in the comments! (And we’ll have our next Readers’ Choice Awards coming up later in 2010 so you can put your apps where your opinions are as well!)

Happy New Year

–The iPhone blog team

2009 TiPb Editors’ Choice Awards is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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So according to sibling site, PreCentral.net, Palm is now updating all proud Pre and Pixi devices to webOS 1.3.5, but among the list of features we can’t help but notice…:

• App limit fixed.
• App Catalog downloads continue even after leaving the app’s page.
• App purchases have been expanded to US territories (sorry Europe, Canada, etc).
• Switching between days in Calendar is now faster.
• Sprint Navigation can be launched from a Contact.
• Palm Profile app restores happen in the background, letting the user get to the phone faster.
• Future webOS updates can be downloaded over 2G wireless (1xRTT).
• Notifications now work in landscape mode (which has strangely lost the rounded corners).

…the utter lack of iTunes sync hackery. Congrats Palm! Here’s hoping you can enjoy some OpenGL gaming in the near future, and a Verizon launch asap.

What, wait, they’re getting on Verizon before the iPhone?! And another update while we still wait for iPhone 3.2 iPhone 4.0!

(I know Palm — and Dieter! — did this deliberately just to mess with us during the Smartphone Round Robin!)

The Competition: Palm webOS 1.3.5 Brings Speed, not iTunes Hackery is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Our friends over at PreCentral.net bring word that Palm has launched a beta version of their browser-based IDE (integrated development environment) for webOS called Project Ares (sounds Manga, harkens to the Hellenic god of war — nice!). Supports Safari, Chrome, and Firefox (no mention of Internet Explorer?).

You can simply fire up your browser and go to http://ares.palm.com/, sign in with your developer account, and get coding.

Apple’s iPhone SDK and IDE, evolved from the very mature Mac Xcode and Interface Builder, and the Cocoa Touch frameworks are often cited as reasons for the App Store’s success and the quality and consistency of some of the very best apps. So, providing Palm webOS developers with similar tools (and frameworks?) is smart. And how utterly appropriate for a platform ballsy enough to be webOS, programmed in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, to be ballsy enough to move their IDE to the cloud. How Palm keeps out-Googling Google in the mobile space is amazing.

We throw the horns up in your general direction, sirs.

(We’ll also reference back to Apple’s PastryKit JavaScript frameworks, and wonder aloud again whether Apple will make it public, along with a Dashcode-style IDE for iPhone WebApps to go along with it? And would they — or should they — ever make it similarly cloud-basd?)

The Competition: Palm Launches Ares Beta, Browser-based webOS Development Environment is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Sure, okay, since Palm has been faking iPod status to provide iTunes sync for a while now, and Apple has been updating iTunes to stop them every chance they get, when a new version of Palm’s webOS comes out and it DOES NOT re-enable that sync, it’s news. Right?

So, to be clear, neither the newly introduced Palm Pixi candybar or the just-updated Palm Pre can sync with iTunes 9.0.2 (though older versions of iTunes 9 might still work).

Meanwhile, PreCentral.net’s own Derek Kessler has a suffered through for a year. Of course, this gets the iPhone part of the blame:

But I’m afraid that Apple has also changed the mobile computing space for the worse on the features front. Apple made it acceptable to launch a phone without all the standard phone features intact.

Derek excuses Apple somewhat, the iPhone being their first foray into the smartphone space. He’s not as forgiving with Palm, who’ve had decades of Pilot and Treo experience.

Given Palm’s financial position and the limits of all human resources, I’ll ask on their behalf what I asked on the iPhone’s in 2007 – what feature that was implemented would you have had them not implement, so they could have implemented something else instead? Would you have waited 2 years for cut and paste so you could have a great music app at launch?

Give the full rant a read and let us know what you think!

webOS 1.3.1 Did NOT Restore iTunes Sync, but is That the Least of Palm’s Worries? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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As part of the commentary on Jamie Zawinski leaving the Palm Pre for the iPhone (linked in the previous post), Daring Fireball adds:

Apple had a similar idea to WebOS for the iPhone, where certain apps would run as Dashboard-style widgets, written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Apple abandoned the idea in the six months between the iPhone’s January 2007 announcement and when it went on sale at the end of June, concluding that performance for such apps was unacceptable and that they should go native Cocoa across the board. And Apple was only going to do it for small apps, like Weather, Stocks, and Calculator, not the flagship apps like Calendar and Mail.

Of course, web technologies have improved since 2007, especially JavaScript rendering. Usability and performance complaints aside, Palm embracing web developers in order to incentivize adoption of their platform was a smart strategy. Still, it’s interesting to see Apple’s reaction to it back then, and their decision to go 100% native. (Especially considering they’re now being criticized for not having widgets).

Did Apple make the right choice, do we still want widgets on the iPhone, or is HTML5 and SQLite in Safari making them redundant?

Apple Was Going to Use Palm WebOS-style Widgets for iPhone in 2007, Abandoned Idea Due to Performance is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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Acceleroto, makers of the iPhone apps Air Hockey [$0.99 - iTunes link] and Air Hockey Free [Free - iTunes link] have written an interesting post on the differences between developing their app for the iPhone App Store vs. the Palm Pre App Catalog. Some take away:

• They charge more for the webOS version due to lower volume expectations
• iPhone and Palm Pre are “remarkably similar” hardware-wise
• They already knew Objective-C, but Javascript wasn’t difficult to pick up
• iPhone is native, webOS is interpreted, so there’s a difference in execution speed (more important for game developers)
• Getting code onto the Pre is faster. Debugging is much more difficult than iPhone.
• Had to “skinny up” iPhone code to get 30-fps for webOS.
• Multitasking and garbage collection impacts performance
• Since webOS apps are “web pages”, touch events are handled as mouse-clicks and aren’t as smooth
• No sound yet, because the requisite timing isn’t possible.

So, as we’ve heard before, development for non-intensive apps is likely quicker and easier for the Palm Pre, but more intensive apps, like games, are still a challenge. Doubtless Apple will continue to work on making casual apps easier to deploy, and Palm on making deeper apps run better.

The full post also includes the backstory of how and why Air Hockey was ported to webOS, and shown off as part of the Palm Pixi introduction. Give it a read, and then let us know what you think.

[Acceleroto via PreCentral.net]

Acceleroto on Developing Air Hockey for the iPhone vs. Palm Pre is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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While TiPb is still waiting for an iPhone 3.1.1 bug-fix update, not to mention iPhone 3.2 betas to start dropping, it looks like the competition is getting their OS on this week:

• Palm webOS 1.2 didn’t re-enable the iTunes hack (kudos Palm!) but did bring some nifty new features including Amazon MP3 downloads over 3G, the foundations for paid apps in the App Catalog, improved cut and paste, and much more.
• Android 1.6 Donut is expected to hit now’ish as well. A new Android Market is coming with it, but not multi-touch — at least not yet.
• BlackBerry OS 5.0 still doesn’t seem to be official, but is leaking out all over the place (would that Apple had such porous pipes!). It’ll make your Berry more Berry, though it doesn’t seem to integrate a real browser yet, despite what the commercials say…
• Windows Mobile 6.5 might be on 30 Windows Phones by 2010, though even Ballmer is finally admitting Windows Mobile 7 should have been out this year. Bottom-line, it’s a skin-job, and even though it looks hawt’er than a old style centurion, it’s still a machine on the inside.

What does that mean for the iPhone? Even if RIM looks locked in stasis, Palm and Microsoft appear to have up-hill battles re-gaining their traction, and Android is still slowly ramping up, Apple can’t afford to coast. A new OS from RIM, a Palm-style rebirth from Microsoft, and webOS and Android gaining marketshare are all possibilities. Many of these updates have interesting new features that hopefully Apple is looking at and working their own magic on.

So, let’s get on with the 3.2… and 4.0. March is only 6 months away, after all, and Apple needs something else to wow Smartphone buyers with at the next SDK event…

The Competition: Palm webOS 1.2, Android Donut 1.6, BlackBerry 5.0, Windows Mobile 6.5 is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

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