Palm recently announced their Palm Pre. It does look shiny and there will now finally be competition with the iPhone (since so many other companies have failed thus far). However here is the problem, Palm is mudslinging at the iPhone saying it is too slow because it is running Mac OS X. Yes Apple says it’s running OS X, but it really isn’t. The iPhone OS is only running the Kernel of OS X. For those who don’t know what this is, it’s the very central program that runs on your computer that allows for everything else to run together nicely. Anyhow, running the OS X kernel on the iPhone should be no problem at all as it is (or apple claims that it is) a microkernel. This means that they are only using the part of the OS that handles memory and scheduling. So, this kernel should be very fast and memory efficient. To conclude, Palm’s claim that the Pre is faster than the iPhone may be true, but it is not for the reasons that they have said.