In Part I of our review of the Palm Pre and webOS, I attempted to place Palm's new mobile phone within its proper context as a cloud messaging device. The focus of that installment was on showing how Palm plans to do for social networking and cloud-based messaging what the BlackBerry did for business email and what the iPhone did for portable media. In this respect, Palm is ultimately aiming at the business market, which is dominated by RIM.

But there's no denying that, whatever Palm's ultimate goals with their nascent line of webOS-based phones, consumers are still evaluating the Pre and the iPhone side-by-side. And this is appropriate, because the Pre is the first phone to actually take the iPhone as a starting point and build on it, as opposed to merely attempting to ape certain aspects of Apple's groundbreaking interface.

So in this installment, I'll shift from the Pre/BlackBerry discussion of the Part I to a more detailed contrast with Apple's iPhone. The iPhone contrast is useful from a UI and usability perspective, because the webOS represents an attempt to take what worked in the iPhone's interface and adapt it to a different information management paradigm (more on this below).

Ultimately, all comparisons and contrasts with RIM and Apple products aside, this review is an attempt to evaluate the Pre on its home turf—as a cloud communication device and mobile multitasking application platform. There's another installment to be written about the Pre's media capabilities (photos, bluetooth stereo, audio and video playback, battery life during media playback, etc.) and how well it does or doesn't fit in the iLife ecosystem, and if there's demand for that I can do it as a third installment.

Starting points

Many of the comments on Part I of this review are perfect examples of the fact that our focus on where a particular device is now—or where it might go with the next update—often completely crowds out any memory of where that device started. In the iPhone's case, whatever Apple's mobile may have evolved into, its origins are very straightforward: in the keynote that introduced the iPhone to the world, Jobs described the device as a fusion of three products: a "widescreen iPod with touch controls," a phone, and an "Internet communications device". And thus it remains; the iPhone is a widescreen, networked media player that also does a bunch of other stuff, telephony and Internet included.

The Pre, in contrast, was introduced by Rubenstein as a cloud messaging device that also does a bunch of other stuff, media playback included. And this primary messaging orientation has had as deep an impact on every aspect of webOS as the iPhone's media orientation has had on the iPhone OS.

To take a step back for a moment, it's useful to contrast where the iPhone and the Pre started out in the areas of connections and sync, interface, and multitasking.

iPhone OS

Connections and sync : Tethered to a single computer (later to a single MobileMe account), and linked to a set of application-specific data silos. The data silos are a finite repository of structured data that is organized for browsing.

: Tethered to a single computer (later to a single MobileMe account), and linked to a set of application-specific data silos. The data silos are a finite repository of structured data that is organized for browsing. Interface : A single touchscreen, designed for browsing, display, and object manipulation.

: A single touchscreen, designed for browsing, display, and object manipulation. Multitasking: You're supposed to be doing one thing at a time.

webOS

Connections and sync : All data comes from a service, not a repository.

: All data comes from a service, not a repository. Interface : A hardware keyboard/touchscreen combo that expects you to search, filter, and query to locate records.

: A hardware keyboard/touchscreen combo that expects you to search, filter, and query to locate records. Multitasking: Multitasking is presumed from the start, since the communications apps run as background processes.

The contrasts above represent the lens through which you can view nearly all aspects of the two devices' respective designs, both the good and the bad. But there's an even deeper, more fundamental contrast expressed in the lists above, and it goes to the heart of how we organize and discover information.

Yahoo, Google, and the Wheel of (Web) Reincarnation

One of the established truths of the past 50 years of computing is that the same basic problems crop up over and over again in different forms, so that technological advances are less of a linear march forward than they are a sort of spiral that turns the same corners again and again, but on a different level with each rotation.

The same dynamic is at work on the Web, and in my 15 years of using the Internet I've seen the experience of information discovery and management move back and forth between two distinct paradigms. The first of these paradigms is exemplified by the early Yahoo! directory, and I'll call it the structure-and-browse paradigm. The idea here is that with a small enough data flow, you can manage incoming information by structuring it yourself, the way that Yahoo! used humans to sort newly created webpages into categories, creating a kind of giant card catalog for the Internet. You then browse the resulting structure in order to find what you're looking for.

There's a threshold, though, beyond which the volume of data is so high that structure-and-browse becomes a losing battle. It's at this point that the second paradigm, which I'll call collect-and-query, becomes the best way to deal with the mass of unstructured data. This latter paradigm is exemplified by Google's approach to information discovery, and it always comes second because it involves swapping human effort for a combination of storage (=collect), bandwidth, and compute cycles (=query). So these resources have to become cheap enough relative to person-hours to make this tradeoff work.

The contrast between the iPhone OS and Palm's webOS exemplifies the latest turn of this wheel, driven by the same dynamic of ever-cheapening processor cycles, bandwidth, and storage.

To recap a bit from the previous installment of this review, the iPhone—and, indeed, the entire Apple ecosystem—presumes that your contacts exist as an information repository, the canonical copy of which exists either on your Mac or on the company's MobileMe servers. It's up to you to actively curate this repository, adding structure to it by putting contacts into groups and generally organizing the repository so that it's easily browsable.

This structure-and-browse approach is a great, time-honored way to manage a finite collection of digital objects (media files are the best examples), and Apple has perfected it across its entire line of products, including the iPhone. Browsing structured data is, in fact, the default mode of interaction with every single Apple product—from the Finder to iTunes to the iPod and iPhone.

Palm's webOS, in contrast, is built around the collect-and-query paradigm. The current crop of default apps presume, fairly consistently, that the first thing you'll do by way of interacting with them is to begin typing on the hardware keyboard. Maybe you're looking for a specific contact, app, or Web history item—regardless, webOS wants you to start typing, even in situations where you also have the option to browse.

At the core of this approach is the global search menu, which Rubenstein rightly made a big deal of in his CES keynote. If you open the Pre and start typing, global search starts combing your apps, contacts, Web bookmarks, and other on-device directories, and if it can't find a match there it offers you the option of searching Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter.

webOS global search screen

Note that if you start typing on the keys that double as a number pad, it gives you the option to dial a number first:

In the screenshot above, you can see that the search box interprets my input as both the number 5 and the letter "F" simultaneously.

As we go through the major features of the Pre, we'll see this collect-and-query approach play out time and time again, in the way that different applications work. And in the few places where it's conspicuously absent, we'll notice the omission all the more.