This is to notify all Exun Members that there will be a meeting on Friday, 16th January, 2009.
It will be held in the break in Computer Lab IV.

Palm was under serious pressure to hit a home run at CES today—and boy, did it deliver. Running Palm’s gorgeous (if belated) new platform, dubbed WebOS, the touchscreen Pre could well be Palm’s savior, and perhaps its biggest hit.

So, as for the Pre itself (due on Sprint in the first half of this year, no pricing yet): It’s got a big, 3.1-inch 480 by 320 touch display (yes, with multitouch and an accelerometer), weighs in at 4.8 ounces, and comes with a curved, slide-out keypad. Yes, it does Wi-Fi and 3G (EV-DO Rev. A, to be exact), as well as GPS (with turn-by-turn directions courtesy of TeleNav), stereo Bluetooth, 8GB of internal storage, a 3MP camera, a 3.5mm headset jack, and a removable battery.

But the key to the Pre is its OS, and WebOS—previously code-named “Nova”—is one of the hottest mobile platforms I’ve seen yet, rivaling both Android and Apple’s iPhone OS.

At a glance, WebOS doesn’t look all that different from the icon-driven, touch-based Android and iPhone platforms; you’ve got your main, wallpapered home screen, complete with a row of icons along the bottom for your standard e-mail, calendar, and calling features.

But Palm’s done a few key things differently here, starting with the “gesture” area at the bottom or side of the screen (if you’re, say, surfing the Web in landscape mode). For example, if you’re browsing an individual contact in the Pre’s address book, you can flick horizontally in the gesture area to go back to the contact list, or you can flick up for a translucent window shade of applications. Nice.

More importantly, though, is WebOS’s way of letting you handle and sort all your open applications like a deck of cards. If you’re composing an e-mail, for example, you can flick up, call open a new application, and then return to your e-mail at any point. All open applications appear as windows (similar to the windows in the iPhone’s Web browser), and you can flick back and forth, reorder them, and discard them at will. 

That’s really cool, and it solves one of the biggest problems that’s dogged the iPhone—namely, that its various applications are all walled off, making it difficult to easily switch from, say, the Web browser to the calendar and back again. 

WebOS also introduces a concept dubbed “Synergy,” which all applications can continuously get info from the Web. The best example: WebOS’s unified contact list, which seamlessly displays all your contacts and grab their e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and IM handles from Facebook, Gmail, Exchange, you name it. 

I’m also happy with Palm’s integrated messaging interface, which combines IM and text chats into a single, threaded conversation.

And then there’s the WebOS “Dashboard”: a flexible space at the bottom of the screen for calling, messaging, and appointment alerts. As you’re working in other applications, you might see the first line of a text message or IM, or the Dashboard might open a bit bigger for a calendar alert, complete with “dismiss” and “snooze” options. When alerts appear, you’re free to keep working in your open application, or you can go ahead and open the alert—and if you want to answer an IM, you can swipe to that “card” in WebOS, and then return to your previous application card. Great stuff.

A few other interesting notes: When you’re sitting at the Pre’s main screen, you can just start typing on the QWERTY keypad to call up a universal search menu; you’ll instantly see any matching contacts, or you can quickly jump to Web results from Google, Google Maps, and Wikipedia.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention “Touchstone,” a little hockey puck of an accessory with a killer feature—wireless charging. Just place the Pre on top of the Touchstone device to power it up. Awesome.

It’s a lot to chew on—indeed, Palm’s press conference is barely an hour old, and already I’m having the same feeling I did after the iPhone’s debut two years ago. The Pre—and WebOS—look red-hot, and the two combined may well guarantee that Palm will live to fight another (and perhaps, many) days.

So, initial thoughts? Like what you see? Will developers take to writing WebOS applications? Fire away.

The coverage of Steve Jobs of Apple and his health woes is starting to remind me way too much of the old Generalissimo Francisco Franco jokes on “Saturday Night Live” in the 1970s. Back then, Chevy Chase would report that “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead”–a dark-humored play on the drawn-out coverage of Franco’s declining health, in which newscasters had solemnly reported that Franco was still alive.

So, we are told, is Steve Jobs. We know this because a terse and somewhat grumpyletter was issued from the Apple mothership in Cupertino, Calif., today, over the signature of Dear Leader himself. In this letter, Jobs acknowledges that he’s lost a great deal of weight in the past year and says doctors have finally figured out what’s causing it–it’s a hormone imbalance. And now he’s being treated for it, and he should start gaining weight again soon, and he hopes to recover by spring. And, as Jobs finishes up in his letter, “So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.”

Left unaddressed were fears that Jobs has suffered a recurrence of the pancreatic cancer for which he underwent surgery four years ago. Today’s note doesn’t mention cancer at all. From this we are presumably meant to infer that Jobs does not have cancer again. That at least is the message Wall Street took from the news, as Apple shares popped four bucks today, to $94.

The fear began last June when Jobs appeared at a conference looking gaunt and frail. Soon after, word leaked that Jobs had undergone new surgery in spring of this year. In July, Jobs gave an off-the-record interview with a New York Times columnist in which he began by insulting the guy–calling him a “slime bucket”–and kinda sorta maybe said he wasn’t really seriously ill. The frenzy heated up again a few weeks ago when Apple announced Jobs would not give his annual keynote speech at this week’s Macworld conference.

The larger issue here and the one that Apple is failing to address in any meaningful way is the question of succession at Apple. Jobs says only that he will remain in charge for the time being. Who is his heir apparent? No one knows.

Compare this to the way Microsoft managed the handover of the company from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer. Gates, you’ll recall, was every bit as synonymous with Microsoft as Jobs is with Apple. Yet Gates managed to slide out of Microsoft with no disruption. Microsoft accomplished this by setting up the transition years in advance, giving Ballmer the CEO post and letting him get more exposure even while Gates stayed on as the figurehead and official outside representative of the company. By the time Gates did step down officially–in June of 2008–his departure was almost a nonevent.

Jobs, by contrast, seems determined to hang on at Apple no matter what. See, in the world of Steve, it’s all about Steve. Not about Apple. Not about its shareholders. Confronted with sincere concerns about his health based on obvious symptoms of decline, he responded first with silence, then with insults, and finally with a grudging letter explaining his illness and grumping that “I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years.”

When he finally does go, he will be remembered as a tremendous genius and a petulant, selfish narcissist with an overly grandiose sense of himself and a sadly limited view of the world. And oddly enough Bill Gates, his arch nemesis, will go down in history as the classy one. Yes, Gates might have made crappy software, but at least had the good sense to know that there was more to life than personal computers, and that the world did not revolve around him. And at least he will have devoted the last years of his life, and all of his billions, to helping the poorest people in the world–not playing petty cat-and-mouse games with reporters and Apple fanboys at Macworld trade shows.

With Macworld 2009 around the corner, we might be seeing of what is to come.Horrible if you ask me. Though it might have been photoshopped. Macworld 2009 is also going to be the last Macworld in which Apple as a company is going to take part in. Steve Jobs will not be giving his quite famous keynote presentation, fueling more rumors about his ill health. Philip Schiller, Apple senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, will take the CEO’s place.

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