Emerging From Hype, It's Now Time for the Pre to Shake Out the Kinks

Thankfully, the Pre has been received with some great reviews, and it’s truly something that its team can be proud of. But now that the mysterious device is becoming available to the masses, the nitpicking will begin (which is actually a great thing, incidentally).

From Walt Mossberg’s review of the Palm Pre:

In fact, during my testing, one of my downloads from the App Catalog caused my Pre to crash disastrously — all my email, contacts and other data were wiped out, and the phone was unable to connect to the Sprint network or Wi-Fi. Palm conceded the catastrophe was due to problems it still has getting the App Catalog to work with the phone’s internal memory, and explained that this is one reason it hasn’t widely distributed the developer tools. [Emphasis added]

Now, in all fairness, the Pre is a brand new device whose software was written afresh, from the ground up. While this makes it very modern, its WebOS software stack has not as yet been run through any ringers, and it is most definitely a very complicated stack of software. As such, stories like this do not surprise me. In fact, I’m actually anticipating a number more to surface in the coming months. I do not say this disparagingly, by the way — it’s simply a very ambitious piece of kit that Palm are putting to market.

My greatest “doomsday scenario” fear for the Pre is that some disastrous bug in its immensely complex Synergy API is found that starts eating up or corrupting people’s address books all throughout the cloud.

O, Palm — my fingers are crossed that you’ll find (and patch!) any Synergy bugs before the rest of the world does.

And, by the way: congratulations!