McNamee Pitches Palm's Pending Pre Phone

I try to read or in this case watch any interviews VC Roger McNamee gives because, in addition to being an entertaining character (for a finance guy, afterall) he is often insightful.

Although this video is essentially the elevator pitch for Palm's new mobile cell, the Pre, which is due out with Sprint in the first half of the year, McNamee concisely pigeonholes all the other smartphones (well, the U.S. ones anyway, since we're sadly bereft of Nokia's), something you won't hear from the Apple fanboys at the  NYT and WSJ. (They do realize there is no "save" in an iPhone 3G, don't they?)  

Sounds like Palm's main emphasis with its new WebOS is application integration, including GPS. Here are some of the features, according to McNamee: 

But better than that, it does stuff for you. So when you wake up in the morning, it has taken your calendar — if you ask it to — and downloaded the maps for you whole day, it’s downloaded the wikipedias for the people you’re going to visit and the companies you’re going to see… Why is it on PCs you have to go and do all that?

And when you’re late — get this — when you’re late it — remember, this things has GPS, it has a clock, and it has your calendar. So it not only knows where you are, it knows where you’re supposed to be and when; and so when it realizes you’re going to be late, it says “Hey, not only are you going to be late, but I can take care of it for you. I’ll send an email to your assistant or to the people in the meeting, which would you prefer? And oh, by the way, here’s the map.” This is the beginning of a new wave.

As someone who has set up far, far too many PCs, phones and email systems, if the Pre meets it promise to integrate multiple contact, email sources and calendars -- and do the heavy lifting for you, I for one will be thankful. 

But the devil is in the details: Neither Apple nor Nokia, skilled as each is, could get Activesync to work properly at launch. Blackberry's Storm is a great concept, but buggy and slow. Still, the Pre gives good demo; I'm optimistic. Here's one gushing review of Palm's Pre.

Unfortunately, Roger didn't leak anything about the other phones Palm will be building on its new Lynux OS. Update: There's a thorough pre-release review on Engadget and this video that shows how responsive the UI and browser are. 

Update: More features of the Palm Pre continue to dribble out. Among the more interesting is ability to rapidly take a sequence of photos, rather than waiting for each to process and store. Here is a new video via Softpedia that shows Palm VP Peter Skillman quickly running through features and showing more of what looks like a very clever UI: One-hand operation, scrolling through apps that can run in back-ground (unlike the iPhone), and closing apps by "throwing them off the screen".