The new Palm Pre is a super wow phone. It has one key breakthrough concept which is constancy of contact even as you switch mediums or platforms. You can watch a brief video of it here and you find a compendium of information at Engadget.
The important thing about the Pre is it's WebOS. The Palm Pre uses Javascript and CSS for it's mobile programming language. That's all you need to know to develop applications for the WebOS platform. If you watch the demos you will notice there isn't much in terms of day-to-day tasks you can't do. I don't think anybody would want to write Photoshop in Javascript (except maybe Adobe) but for the daily use glue apps that we all use everyday email, tv listings, calendar, picking out music, jotting down a note, etc. Javascript and CSS can probably handle it just fine. In fact, the Pre looks great.
The Pre points to the future. Clearly, Javascript and CSS has come into it's own as an application development technology. So much so that it seems that it might be all you need for average business application development.
The Pre also leverages an old concept into a new package. Back in the day, one of the great for the rest of us programming applications was HyperCard. In Hypercard you built "stacks" of "cards" with events attached to elements on the card. It had a spiffy english like programming language called HyperTalk. The new Palm Pre brings back the idea of cards but now they are shuffled into a deck. It's still a compelling metaphor. The cards also represent a significant of amount of connectivity power with some of the apps being pretty wild mashups.
Check out the Pre, it's pretty exciting renovaton and even a little innovative.
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