The Palm Pre looks like it will be an amazing piece of kit, and webOS, Palm's new mobile operating system, sounds light years ahead of the now decrepit Palm OS. However, as a long-time Palm OS user (I got my first Palm OS device, a USRobotics Pilot 5000, in May, 1996), I've come to rely heavily upon, and truly enjoy, several applications that may not be ported over to the webOS-based Pre.
Here's a short list of 5 applications that I'll miss when I migrate to the new Palm Pre (assuming it doesn't come with something equivalent):
1) Capital & Function Key Customizer -- A utility that greatly increases the usefulness of my Treo's keyboard is KeyCaps600, which enables capital letters by press-and-hold and enables symbols by double-pressing the key. This is much faster than hitting the Shift and Symbol buttons prior to the keypress. Given the Pre's hardware keyboard, something like this would be a natural project for the aspiring programmer.
2) Mode / Profile Manager -- Profiles is a utility that does some amazing things. First, it lets you set up different hardware profiles, which determine how the phone works (e.g., backlight level, ringer volume, vibrate mode, etc.). For example, I have a "Meeting" profile that turns off the volume for all purposes, but enables vibrate for calls, text messages, and other notifications. Doing all those things separately would take many steps, but Profiles combines them all into a single switch. Second, Profiles lets me automatically switch among these hardware profiles manually or automatically based on triggers (e.g., calendar events, time of day, etc.). For example, I have a trigger set up to completely silence the phone and disable vibrate at 10pm so as to keep inbound calls and text messages from waking up my wife. It then re-enables all those alerts at 6am. It's incredibly handy and I'm really hoping that kind of functionality is included with the Pre...or comes out shortly after it's launched.
3) Button Customizer -- I've gotten totally spoiled by LudusP, a utility that lets me remap many of my 700p's hardware buttons. I imagine someone is already working on a way to make the Pre's one hardware button (apart from the physical keyboard) do more things than just bring up the app panel...at least I hope so.
4) File Browser -- A powerful file management app makes light work of moving, deleting, and copying media files and other content. With 8GB of onboard storage, the Pre better have a decent interface for managing all that stuff.
5) Backup -- An automated backup utility, like Backup Man, will be impossible to replicate since the Pre has no expandable storage / flash memory card slot. Hopefully, its "cloud" functionality will make this moot...hopefully.
The Pre looks like it will be an incredible device, but there's always room for improvement...or at least customization.
