Nuove features per il Palm Pre (video)

Interessante intervista di Sarah Lacy a Roger McNamee di Elevation Partner, fondo di private equity che ha investito 425 milioni di dollari in Palm. McNamee (che indossa una cintura con tutti gli smartphones sul mercato, uno che di gadget se ne intende) cita nuove funzionalità del Web OS, come la possibilità di scaricare automaticamente mappe e voci Wikipedia per i propri appuntamenti e inviare facilmente messaggi di avviso alla propria assistente o alla persona che si deve incontrare quando si è in ritardo per un’appuntamento.

After describing Palm’s “synergy” method of combining contacts and calendars from multiple locations (including LinkedIn, also a new feature we hadn’t heard about before), McNamee gets into describing the new stuff:

But better than that, it does stuff for you. So when you wake up in the morning, it has taken your calendar — if you ask it to — and downloaded the maps for you whole day, it’s downloaded the wikipedias for the people you’re going to visit and the companies you’re going to see… Why is it on PCs you have to go and do all that?

And when you’re late — get this — when you’re late it — remember, this things has GPS, it has a clock, and it has your calendar. So it not only knows where you are, it knows where you’re supposed to be and when; and so when it realizes you’re going to be late, it says “Hey, not only are you going to be late, but I can take care of it for you. I’ll send an email to your assistant or to the people in the meeting, which would you prefer? And oh, by the way, here’s the map.” This is the beginning of a new wave.

Sounds pretty good to us. Actually, what has us most excited is that if this sort of functionality is in there and Palm didn’t even bother telling us about it during their CES2009 presentation, what other goodies are in store for webOS?

Via New Features to the Pre: Oops I’m late and Automatic Calendar Context | PreCentral.net