Palm Pre demo and my thoughts on social networking integration in mobile phones

Interesting. 

For a pre-production model, this appears to be fairly stable and fluid. The calendar isn't very much different from what I get with Google Calendars, but the integration of messaging directly into a contact card certainly looks like the future of communications. Looking from the Android perspective, it would be pretty useful if developers could add social networking plug-ins to the Contacts application, such that I could add a Facebook account to my global settings, and it would display a list of all my Facebook contacts. From this list, I could select a contact and associate it with an existing contact card, or create a new one, whereupon it would import that contact's email address and phone number and form an association with that person's Facebook profile. Opening a contact card would then no only display the typical contact information, but would also display Facebook updates from that person, from which I can write on their Wall (and carry out Wall-to-Wall communications), send them a Message, Poke them, view their photos, and comment on their updates (and be notified if someone replies to the comment) Using such plug-ins, I would also be notified if there is an update to that person's contact info, whereupon I would be asked if I wish to add the new info to existing data, replace existing data with the new one, ignore the update, or have it remind me again later (like a Snooze button) The advantage that WebOS may have over Android in this instance is in the heavy use of CSS, xHTML, Javascript and AJAX which may allow developers to easily and quickly add new UIs and features to the WebOS. Which bring mes to my last observation -- back in 2001, I had extensively discussed the future of the smartphone OS being on-device relational databases and web services, such that user interfaces and applications can be created to interact with these databases and services, and that the OS that the user is exposed to is really a collection of web applications running on the device, interfacing with the on-board GSM/3G/GPS radios to provide bearer and data services that would support these web applications. Since a core OS is still needed, and with CSS/xHTML/Javascript/AJAX being the key programming cornerstones, it would not be unreasonable to see Java being the cement that forms the foundations and holds individual components together