When the Palm Pre hits the streets sometime this year, geeks and ordinary mobile users alike will finally get to touch the magic, which is great, because we certainly weren't touching any magic at CES. We got to look, but Palm was pretty adamant about not letting anyone who wasn't a Palm employee get their mitts on it. This is understandable, because the demo units were clearly more "mock-up" than true "demo."
A lot—perhaps even the majority—of the Pre's functionality was missing or not working reliably, and many features were only "working" in the sense of "if I press these three buttons at once it triggers a fake incoming SMS from 'Jim Coworker' about that party on Friday." But we all went along with it, because those mockups were so great to look at. Nonetheless, the whole experience left me wondering, "so when this comes out, what are we going to realize is wrong with it?"
For reasons that I'll outline below, I'd like to suggest that the answer to the above question is a common one for a first-generation (or, in some cases, a second-generation) smartphone product: the battery life will disappoint many users.
Not your father's smartphone CPU.
The 65nm TI OMAP3430 that powers the Pre is no joke--it's the kind of beefy media SoC that you'd expect to see in a portable media player, where you can pair it with a bigger battery. Indeed, it's used in the Archos 5, and some Googling turns up plenty of talk from the GP32X community about using it for one of their devices.
As you can see from the block diagram below, at the heart of the 3430 is an ARM Cortex A8 core, and in fact this SoC was actually the first to market with the A8 core back in 2006.
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