Thanks to the eagle eyes of the PreCentral.net forum membership, that latest Palm Pre Podcast video revealed more than just the back gesture and double tapping. We quickly glimpsed the YouTube app that we saw earlier, but before that was opened, we got to see something even more fun: icons for the Pre NASCAR app, App Catalog, YouTube, Documents to Go, Adobe Reader, and a generic "Sprint" app that we suspect might be some sort of Account management app ala T-Mobile's Android app. While we knew that App Catalog and YouTube were going to be there anyway, it’s still nice to see them actually in place.
But those other two: Documents To Go and Adobe Reader. While we can’t read the labels for those icons, the former should be recognizable to any Palm user from the past five years, and the latter, well, we all know that one as the PDF icon. Presumably, this means that the Pre will have the full document editing support that was hinted at by Inside Sprint Now, as well as the ability to natively view PDFs.
Thanks to miles4000 and Kyusaku for the spot!
Comments
Niiiiiiice, how is THIS for a Monday morning!!!!
It's just another Manic Monday ;)
And even though we already kinda knew this stuff would be there, it's nice to see it ACTUALLY there.
If this phone is 90% bug free and has minimal lag time, I think there are going to be some VERY happy customers!!!
It would be really nice to see Palm hit one out of the park and generate some great PR once the Pre is actually in user's hands.
Were Documents to Go and the PalmOS emulator written using Javascript/Mojo, or are some developers being allowed native access to the Pre?
I am willing to bet that Docs to Go, Classic, Adobe reader were able to use core system API for those programs to be written.
The Mojo API may allow programs to read file data so it may not be needed for Docs to Go or Adobe, but Classic for sure probably needed core API.
Classic is confirmed to have a deeper access to the phone than the Mojo SDK.
The other apps I see no reason why they couldn't be built off of Mojo. I think Palm using the term "web apps" didn't really tell people just how much access to phone functions the SDK has.
Though not confirmed, I doubt the other apps are written using Mojo (which is different than saying they *could* be built using Mojo). For ease of porting and for Intellectual Property/licensing reasons, it would be much easier to take existing Linux versions of Acrobat reader and Docs2Go than starting from scratch using Mojo. Being CSS/HTML/Javascript, Mojo source is in the clear. Other than obfuscation (which doesn't fix the problem - it just makes reading the code harder), there's still no documented way to keep prying eyes off Mojo code.
So, very likely, all 3 (Adobe, DataViz and MotionApps) are being granted special access to the OS or possibly to an alpha version of a native C SDK.
WOW!!! This looks outstanding and really gets my hopes up that this will definately give Apple some trouble. I don't have adobe on my BB! Wicked!
TeckieGirl40
Erm, the iPhone has had a native PDF viewer inbuilt since the original iPhone launched. It also has had native Word, Excel and Powerpoint viewers also.
What it cannot do is edit those documents natively without extra software but that is available via the App Store if you want it.
Just wanted to point out this mistake on your article. Of course having free inbuilt document editing is much nicer :)
I look at the iPhone they have displayed in the store, and there is no out of the box Word, Excel, nor Powerpoint viewer application software. Am sure that you must purchase a Microsoft bundle from the AppStore.
Daniel you're correct, a PDF viewer, MS-Word-Documents-to-go have to be purchased separately for the iphone. There is a difference between native (an app which is already on the device at launch) and having to purchase an app through a 3rd party.
The iPhone DOES have a native Word/Excel/Powerpoint/Acrobat viewer built-in.
The difference between the Pre and the iPhone, is that there isn't a separate App for viewing these files on the iPhone. When you receive an attachment of one of these file types, and attempt to view it, the iPhone automagically pulls up the viewer.
Quickoffice (from the App store) allows Word/Excel editing on the iPhone.
One would assume the Pre will recognize file types and open the corresponding editor.
I would assume that you can open the viewer/editor application and find and open the PDF/file you are interested in. This is much better than the iPhone where you can only view your file if it came through an email.
Side-loaded files will not appear anywhere, like they would on a computer, unless you have an application that knows where the filetype is on the device.
I see... so basically the only way to access a DOC on the iPhone is to go to the email app and click on the attachment. This means that side-loaded files will not appear anywhere, like they would on a computer, unless you have an application that knows where the filetype is on the device, hence Pre's native document viewer/editor apps!
Neeeto .. is that a YouTube icon?? (insert smile)
Docs to Go and Acrobat Reader, fine, now give me a good Solitaire game and I'll put my Treo 755p to bed for good.
hmmm PALM_INC hasn't posted anything in twitter for a while. Must be something huge coming up soon... :)
Exciting stuff...
Raza Imam
"a die-hard Blackberry user with a soft spot for the new Palm Pre"
I hope you can actually sync the Pre with iTunes. That would make it easy to transfer files from a computer therefor making it a great multimedia device. Premium Linux hosting account with DDos Protection designed for small and medium websites.
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