Jon Rubinstein is no stranger to success. He was the engineer that architected the iPod, Apple’s single most successful product for years, until the iPhone was released in 2007. After more than fifteen years working with Steve Jobs, Jon Rubinstein left Apple in 2006. Around ten years earlier he had returned to the company with Steve Jobs and the rest of the NeXT crew. In those early years as a senior Apple executive he helped design some of the computers that turned the company around. The original iMac, the G4 Cube, the Power Mac G5 and of course the iPod. When he took on the position of CEO at Palm, he was shown significant confidence by those bankrolling the company’s new existence. Yet, Jon Rubinstein had not proven himself as a great CEO, but a great engineer; his long experience, his time close to Steve jobs and the other talented top executives at Apple would have definitely been much needed qualifications and experiences, however his lack of managerial experience at the CEO level was cause for concern, given that Palm was a company given a second chance.

Pre. An interesting curiosity and a failed delivery.

In early 2009, Palm announced the Pre, its latest device in the first running WebOS, a brand-new operating system for mobile phones that promised significantly improved user experiences, a low-barrier development platform based on Web technologies, and a much more aggressive marketing strategy, capable perhaps of competing face-to-face with Apple, Google and the other companies fighting for smartphone domination. Despite several months of building hype, a couple of (really bad) ads, and good coverage by the press, by the time the device was out in the market, the initial enthusiasm about it had waned. The Pre was an interesting device, yet it was also flawed in many ways: early hardware issues and slow software were detrimental to its failure, as was its absence from the market. It was a time when the iPhone was crossing the boundaries from an innovative, friendly, next-generation ‘phone’ to the powerful mobile computing platform most have come to love, a platform that encompasses the consumer, enterprise, gaming and lifestyle realms. Pre remained an interesting curiosity, a device with an innovative yet incomplete operating system, few applications, extremely little marketing and practically no mind share in the general public.
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Prelude is the font bundled with WebOS in HP/Palm’s Palm Pre. I first saw it, and wrote about it, last summer, a bit after the device went on sale. Back then I wrote that the font was fantastic, but didn’t include any non-Roman characters. Apparently I was wrong.

Eighteen months passed since then, a time during which Palm Pre was quickly consigned to history as an interesting curiosity, Palm was acquired by HP, WebOS remained a promising, fascinating even, operating system for mobile devices. While I downloaded the WebOS SDK back in the day, I quickly lost interest given that Palm did the lousiest job bringing the Pre to Europe — it was never available in Hellas and very few carriers, electronics chains and retailers carried it throughout Europe. Subsequent variants and revisions of the device were also totally absent from the market.

I did keep an open eye, however, as I find WebOS truly interesting. The other day I read this post on the Palm Development Center Blog. Apparently Prelude now includes support for more alphabets than I previously thought. Among them was Hellenic.

Extracting the Prelude font from the emulator image is very easy, using scp after the emulator has completed booting. I tried the Prelude fonts on my main linux workstation, the machine I spend more than 85% of my time daily. The results were frighteningly bad.

Prelude is a gorgeous font, but the hellenic glyphs look ridiculously bad. They seem like they were designed by someone other than the original designer; or the original designer has no clue as to how hellenic glyphs are designed. I mean look at this lowercase omega, or that totally out of place lowercase alpha. Like a distant, uglier cousin of Futura, that got lost and found shelter in a different font. In addition to being very ugly, with absurd metrics and an æsthetic feel that’s totally different to that of the Roman glyphs in the font, the hellenic glyphs betray complete ignorance of the hellenic alphabet. Needless to say, hellenic in Prelude look like a botched, hurried job, aimed at providing the bare essential support for hellenic, probably added at the last minute, bunched together with cyrillic and eastern european glyphs, for the sole purpose of giving HP/Palm the opportunity to claim international font support in their upcoming products. In reality, hellenic characters in Prelude have very little in common to their roman counterparts. And this is a shame not only because Prelude (for roman characters) is a fantastic font, but also because fonts, contrary to software, are not iteratively designed at the rate that software is and chances are that the botched hellenic glyphs currently found in Prelude will be on HP/Palm devices for a long time to come. What a shame!