Today 10 years ago I went to Poland to buy a Phone with pre installed #Firefox OS on. The Phone was a Alcatel One, so very shitty. Two years later I installed Firefox OS on my Nexus 5 instead.
It was a very good concept, but sadly rolled out on too shitty hardware so it never caught on.
Multitasking on the palm pre was so much better than anything else. It’s a damn shame they didn’t lean into that with their marketing.
The fact that the hardware was lower spec (ignoring the design for the moment) definitely contributed to it’s downfall. Apple gets away with it because they are apple. Palm needed to do the same thing apple does, which is convince the public that the phone was designed so well that it completely overcomes it’s hardware limitations, which it absolutely did.
Despite having a lower quality camera sensor, the software produced surprisingly decent pictures and video. Despite having much less ram, you could have a surprising number of apps open at once and instantly switch between them with no lag. And it had a tactile keyboard with a very fun slide to open mechanism.
The only thing that sucked about it was that websites loaded slowly, but that was true of all devices back then. Even now websites still load slower on phones than on PC.
Where it lost me is when it lost YouTube, and it never got an implementation of Swype. Once I got my first Android phone (sharp Aquos crystal, the first bezelless smartphone and honestly another amazing piece of hardware that wasn’t marketed properly) that was it.