Apparently the Pre is literally nothing without the cloud, or it’s own cloud anyway.
James Kendrick of the great JK On The Run mobile gear blog recount a bit of a disturbing tale with one of his favorite mobile devices. The Palm Pre.
I knew that the Palm Pre talk to the cloud to do it’s backups and it’s magical syncing with all your social networking sites. But it didn’t realize how dependent the Pre is on that cloud of data and services. I don’t think James did either, until that cloud went down.
Apparently if a Palm Pre cannot get to the Palm cloud to do it’s “nightly” backup and syncing, it does a factory reset. Which effectively wipes the device of all settings until it can reconnect with the mother ship.
That’s right, it wipes your device. No contacts no emails, no applications, it all goes back to factory original settings. You can manually dial the phone and take calls but that’s about it.
That’s a bit frightening. I’m a huge proponent cloud computing, but the one flaw in the cloud is that servers do not have 100% up time. They just don’t. Even the best systems go down occasionally.
Of course most of Mr. Kendrick’s info came back when he was able to get the device to talk to Palm again, but not everything came back. Apparently Palm doesn’t back up things like custom themes, nor any home brew applications.
I’m sure I don’t know the whole storey but seriously Palm, why the factory reset if the device can’t connect? Is this some sort of security system the went awry? If the device can’t connect to do it’s sync/backup, then leave the device in the state it was in, at least until it can connect. I just don’t see the logic in the reset.
If WebOS devices are this dependent on the Palm Profile server… That has to give pause to any Corporate IT people who were considering rolling out gear based on WebOS. And that’s going to be an alkalis heel for Palm.
Click the title to be taken to James Kendrick’s full article.
