Palm Pre’s linked contacts: why the big deal?

This morning Palm rolled out the Palm webOS and Palm Pre. One of the items they focused on was communicating with people, regardless of the medium (email, voice, text, chat, smoke signals). Why is linked contacts such a big deal? Because it is the future.

Imagine you and are I are good buds. We email all the time, call and even IM. I have a bad break up with one of my girlfriends and for one reason or another, the police urge me to change my phone number. So I change it on my Facebook page and I move on. Well, because you and I are linked, your Palm Pre (cause that is how you roll, you geek, you) automatically and almost magically updates my number for you. Cool right?

From the release:

Linked contacts – With Synergy, you have a single view that links your contacts from a variety of sources, so accessing them is easier than ever. For example, if you have the same contact listed in your Outlook(3), Google and Facebook accounts, Synergy recognizes that they’re the same person and links the information, presenting it to you as one listing. And if you update a contact on your webOS device, it also will be updated in your various accounts, whether on a personal computer or on the web.

The idea Palm wants stressed is: you connect with the person, not the tech. They look to proving this with the OS and hardware of the day.