Van blog.palm.com

The design of the Pre, says Jon R, is inspired by nature. It’s beautiful. And brainy. EvDO, WiFi b/g, stereo Bluetooth, 8 GB of storage, an incredibly fast processor that’s never been used in a phone before.

The touchscreen includes a gesture area that’s gives you enormous control easily. Really thin. More on that later. More features: 3 megapixel camera with flash, removable battery. USB 2 connectivity and mass storage support. Standard headphone jack. And the ever-popular ringer off switch.

And since those cheesy virtual touchscreens just won’t cut it, there’s a slider keyboard. The shape has an ergonomic curvey to it. Easy to use single-handed, or with both hands on the keyboard.

Ed Colligan, Palm’s President and CEO, is explaining that Palm wants to enhance its customers lives. We do this by making technology invisible. And our focus is on mobile — not computers or big-screen TVs. What we’re aiming to do is to make it easy for you to keep all your info — your work life, your personal life — into one place. To do this, we’re launching an entirely new platform — the Palm webOS — that can do this. It can even do some things you can’t do on your desktop PC.

And if you can develop for the Web, you can develop for Palm webOS.

Rizwan Parvez: That’s awesome. That makes it so accessible for so many people.

JZ: Ed’s asking what would a device like this look like, and Jon R is now showing for the first time in public the new Palm Pre phone.

The design of the Pre, says Jon R, is inspired by nature. It’s beautiful. And brainy. EvDO, WiFi b/g, stereo Bluetooth, 8 GB of storage, an incredibly fast processor that’s never been used in a phone before.

The touchscreen includes a gesture area that’s gives you enormous control easily. Really thin. More on that later. More features: 3 megapixel camera with flash, removable battery. USB 2 connectivity and mass storage support. Standard headphone jack. And the ever-popular ringer off switch.

And since those cheesy virtual touchscreens just won’t cut it, there’s a slider keyboard. The shape has an ergonomic curvey to it. Easy to use single-handed, or with both hands on the keyboard.

Matias Duarte is giving an overview of the user interface. Start with the big gorgeous screen with your customized wallpaper image on it.

To start something, tap an icon.  Scroll with a gesture through, say, a contact list.

RP: I can’t believe it!

JZ: The gesture area creates a whole new type of navigation. All basic navigation is just gestures — no buttons to clutter things up.

RP: It’s so smooth — all the transitions are incredibly smooth. There’s no lag. I’m dreaming! This is everything everyone has asked for.

JZ: More from Matias: This is really simple UI. With webOS, your favorite icon can be in the favorites area. But you can move them around with a wave gesture. You have to see it to understand this. (Soon!)

But even more fundamentally, to work on a mobile device, you need a different metaphor than a desktop metaphor from your PC. We use a deck of cards that you can move through with one hand as our basic metaphor. Every app is a card, and you can shuffle through these cards with gestures. And to make sure you don’t lose any data, everything is automatically saved all the time — you want find a save button anywhere in this interface.

RP: Shut up!

More from Matias Duarte: Another key new concept is synergy. Data from one place should connect to data from everywhere else.

RP: Not sure I get the “Pre” name yet.

Matias: When you look up a contact, it doesn’t matter which address book or which app it’s from. And you have easy ways to filter down to just the info you need. Whether it’s calendar or contact info, we want you to get as much info as possible, but keep it limited to only what you need.

RP: The calendar is really clever!

Matias: As Ed said, we see our most brutal competition as pen and paper — that’s the simplicity we’re aiming for here. So if you’re in the middle of drafting an e-mail and switch to something else, the card for your draft e-mail is still a live card that you can get back to with a simple gesture.

RP: This is better than a computer. Everything is seamlessly integrated.

More from Matias: Synergy doesn’t end here. Real conversations are with a person, not with an e-mail address or a phone call or an SMS message. So Synergy keeps all of these organized as one conversation. But as Jon R said earlier, not everything can be done with a gesture, so we’ve given you a great keyboard. And it does more than typing. Matias is searching for Blue Man Group (which plays here at the Venetian). As he types the “bl” the display pulls up contacts that being with those letters. When he types in “blue” there are no matches on the device, so webOS automatically starts searching on the Web and now displays a Google search for Blue Man Group. You didn’t have to even think about what appllication you wanted to launch before you could dive in.

RP: So that’s what Pre is about — it’s fast and intuitive, and almost ahead of you.

Matias is demonstrating the browser by looking at news live on SFGate (the Bay Area news site) – and when you’re doing this stuff live, you never know what the news will be. So he’s stumbled onto a story today about “The Joy of Vole Sex.” The audience seems appreciative.

Now he’s showing off how alerts and notifcations work. Not every alert needs to be urgent, so there is a dashboard that differentiates among levels of urgency. The application resizes to show you more info if needed.

RP: This kicks the iPhone’s butt! It’s totally better. It’s not just pretty — it’s brilliant. It’s very, very smart.

What some other folks are saying:

Peter Ha at CrunchGear: This is like watching a small, old, stinky dog beat a bigger dog. Finally, Palm, finally,

Ryan Block at gdgt: Okay — pause for a mid-show thought: the stuff Palm is showing so far is REALLY exciting. It’s a little early to call this, but it seems pretty clear: Palm is back.

Meanwhile, Jon R is back on stage showing off Touchstone, the inductive wireless charger!