“Synergy” means no need to “save” or “sync” on Palm’s pre

In an interview today, Palm's Matt Crowley spent a few minutes talking about one of my favorite hobby horses, the metaphors of "sync" and "save" when applied to the cloud. With "Synergy" on its new pr? phone, Palm has ditched both metaphors entirely. "There's no metaphor of sync, save, push—there's no button," Crowley said.

Users just make changes to their data (contacts, calendar, mail, etc.), and Palm's webOS handles committing those changes to whatever canonical data source it is accessing in the cloud. And herein lies the most important difference between the webOS and Apple's iPhone OS: the iPhone was originally designed under the assumption that the canonical source of a user's data (contacts, calendar, music, tasks, etc.) is a Mac. Palms webOS, in contrast, presumes that cloud-based services are the canonical source for your data (with the possible exception of media, which we don't know about yet).

Of course, Apple has since added over-the-air sync capabilities the iPhone, and it recently even added the ability to purchase media over 3G. But the device as a whole sort of "presumes" this tether—and by "presumes" I don't mean that it requires a tether, but that the device and the ecosystem that it's a part of still has "tethered sync to a Mac" as a default mode of use, with "untethered sync to the cloud" being something that you can do if you sign up for MobileMe.

Palm's webOS does not presume any sort of tether at all. The company has totally ditched the idea that you will use this phone in conjunction with a specific "main PC" that contains the canonical, authoritative repository of your data. Instead, webOS draws seamlessly on a variety of data services—not data repositories, but cloud-based services that actively feed the device both data and critical context.

This is a deep, fundamental break with both the iPhone and previous, repository-based smartphone usage models, and it's important enough that other smartphones are bound to follow. In fact, let me hand the mic over to HP's Russ Daniels, because he did a great job of talking about this concept in-depth in a recent interview with Ars:

"...my phone is not authoritative for my contact information. The phone has a local cache of information that it gets from Outlook. But Outlook's not authoritative for my contact information, neither is Gmail, neither is my Vonage, neither is Grand Central, neither is the six or eight other things that I have in my life that think they are.

"What none of them do is the simple thing of, 'tell me the URL for your contact service.' Additionally, it has to be a service, not a repository, because in fact the contact information that's relevant for me includes the global address list for HP, and I have to be able to have that invoked... I can't replicate that data and keep it synchronized, so I need to be able to use a federation model behind this single endpoint to answer those kinds of queries...

"So when I think about the authoritative data source, it should be in the cloud. And it's a service, not a repository, so I can deal with the complexities of the real world where there are many potential data sources. However, I have to get every piece of software that's involved to do the right thing—to delegate responsibility—rather than acting like they're independent owners and whatever they have in their local state is good enough."

(By the way, if you missed that interview, go and read it now. Russ's extensive, big-picture discussion of the cloud turns it from an overused buzzword into an actual collection of useful technical concepts.)

Ultimately, the exact mechanism for moving changes of state between the device and the online information services to which it connects (cloud, IMAP e-mail, IM, Twitter etc.) will depend on the particular service. Some services ask the device to poll, while others push out updates—it all depends on the transport. But the user will never see any of that, since it all goes on behind the scenes under the heading of "Synergy."

Note that I should have asked about Synergy's impact on battery life, because from a power savings perspective, it's probably better to have a single, shared model for handling state changes (like batch updates) than to have the kind of free-for-all that Crowley seemed to be describing.

Ultimately, webOS acts much like what Daniels described in his interview; that is, it moves away from a repository datasource model to a federated query service model, where the device queries multiple services for state that it then caches locally, before invisibly propagating any changes back out to the cloud.

Further reading:

• Palm's announcement: Palm strikes back with new OS, pr? handset at CES
• Our first hands-on with the device: Resurrection on video: hands on with the Palm pr?
• Our exclusive insider review of Palm's Mojo SDK: The pr?'s got Mojo: a developer speaks about Palm's new SDK
• Ars talked with Palm and learned about the device's touch screen, processor, media capabilities, and app store: Ars talks to Palm at CES, gets under the hood with the pr?

Listing image by Jon Snyder, Wired.com