The Phone That Dealt Cards: What the Palm Pre Found a Decade Before Apple

In January 2009, the man who walked onto the stage at the Las Vegas consumer electronics show was Jon Rubinstein, once Apple's hardware chief. What he held was no Apple product but a pebble-shaped phone called the Palm Pre. The applause in the room was for the last gamble of a company everyone had written off.

Designer Matias Duarte opened several apps and flicked through them like dealing cards, every one of them still running. They stacked up on screen and vanished with a single motion. Nobody in that audience knew they were watching the birth of a gesture they would repeat dozens of times a day.

The iPhone was two years old and its touchscreen had rewritten the industry, yet it could run only one app at a time. Apple framed the limit as a choice, with Steve Jobs citing battery life. Palm instead put multitasking at the center of the phone and solved it with a motion that needed no button at all.

The gap was measured in years: the card view reached the iPhone in 2013, the swipe-up motion in 2017, while Palm had demoed its deck of cards back in 2009. The reflex billions of people now perform without thinking arrived on Apple phones almost a decade late.

Less than two weeks after the show, Apple's operating chief Tim Cook warned that anyone copying its intellectual property would be pursued. He never said Palm's name, though every question pointed at the Pre. A company Silicon Valley had buried had rattled Apple into a public patent threat.

The roots go back to 1992, when Jeff Hawkins spent weeks rehearsing with a wooden block and a chopstick stylus in his pocket. That rehearsal produced the 1996 Palm Pilot, built on doing a few jobs superbly, and it sold at a furious pace. Together with Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan, the team seized two-thirds of the handheld market.

At its 2000 listing the share price multiplied and the company's value neared 53 billion dollars, ahead of General Motors and McDonald's. The bubble burst days later and 98 percent of that value evaporated within two years. The deeper wound dated to 1998, when the three founders, refused a spin-out, founded Handspring and rivalled Palm with its own operating system.

The founders' keyboard-equipped Treo of 2002 kept the firm alive while Palm split into hardware and software arms in 2003 and spent years even buying back the rights to its own name. Asked about Apple rumors in November 2006, chief executive Colligan said computer makers could not simply walk into the phone business. Seven weeks later Steve Jobs walked on stage with the iPhone.

Seeking someone who thought like Apple, Palm brought in Rubinstein in 2007 with private-equity backing. He first cancelled the Foleo laptop add-on, then hired interface designer Duarte. The team worked sixteen months in total silence, junked the old kernel, and built webOS from zero on Linux with an interface written in web technologies.

The June 2009 launch missed everything: the phone sold on Sprint alone and took almost a year to reach rival carriers. The hardware lagged the software, cards stuttered, and the store opened with 18 apps against tens of thousands on Apple's shelves. The ads confused more than they explained. HP bought the firm for 1.2 billion dollars in 2010, the TouchPad died within 49 days, and webOS passed to LG in 2013, where it lives on inside smart TVs today.