Edible Apple

With the Palm Pre set to launch in just 3 days, a lot of people are wondering if the Pre will be able to give the iPhone a run for its money.  Our take, in a word, is “no”.  At this point in time, almost everything the Pre offers is already available on a number of other smartphones.

That said, one of the Pre’s touted selling points is “Synergy”, which Palm says will enable users to integrate contacts and schedules across a number of different platforms, such as Outlook, Gmail, and Facebook.

While ‘synergy’ might be a useful feature for some users, it also has the potential of creating a clusterf**k of information.  More often than not, people treat varying media communication tools differently.  I, for example, might be willing to add anyone to my Gmail contact list, but might be more selective about who I become Facebook friends with.  On the flipside, I know some people who are facebook friends with over 1,000 people, but only really email/chat/talk to about 5% of those people.

What Palm’s synergy might not take into account is the simple fact that many people keep separate media accounts on purpose, and that automatically integrating all of that information together might do more harm than good.

MyPre points out:

With the Pre synchronizing from Facebook, long time Facebook users with tons of friends that they really don’t know or communicate with will find their contacts section on the Pre stuffed. JKontheRun recons if the Pre then synchronizes with Google Contacts users will end up with Facebook not-friends all over their myriad of contact databases.

For all I know, the Pre will let users customize how the Pre pulls information from different sources, but wouldn’t that customization process defeat the purpose of Synergy in the first place?