Palm Pre: a first look

It's no secret that Palm has been struggling to keep up with the competition and has come under heavy criticism for its lack of innovation and delays in releasing its new operating system. So can you blame me for thinking that Palm might disappoint again? Well, I'm happy to admit that I was wrong. Here are my thoughts on the Palm Pre and Palm WebOS, and on the kind of impact it's likely to have on the market.

The Palm Pre will launch in the first half of 2009 in the US exclusively on the Sprint network. A European version with HSDPA connectivity is planned, but there's no release date as yet.

User interface and OS
The real highlight of the Pre is the user interface and operating system, WebOS. The UI reminded me a little of HTC's TouchFlo interface, with various swiping gestures and cool animated motions, but Palm certainly put a fresh take on it. It's evident that Palm put a lot of thought into the UI, as everything works seamlessly together to give you the best user experience, making the smartphone a genuinely useful tool in your daily life.

The Pre makes multitasking easy with the Deck of Cards feature, which lets you scroll through various applications and toggle between them without having to open and close windows. It's slick, but most importantly, it's easy. I also think Synergy is a huge player, since it brings all your email accounts and contact and calendar information from various sources into one place. Again, it's about simplicity and whether you're a consumer or a business user, you have to love that.

Synergy is a key WebOS feature that links contact and other information that's split across various applications.

Design
To facilitate all this is a best-of-breed design. First, you've got a 3.1in. multi-touch screen that's absolutely sharp and brilliant in colour with its half-VGA (320x480) resolution. Not only can you use the screen to navigate, but there's a gesture area below the display where you can use finger swipes and touches to launch menus, toolbars, applications, go back or advance. My favourite part might be the slide-out full QWERTY keyboard: I'm a huge texter and need physical buttons, so I was more than delighted when I saw that the Pre had a keyboard. The keyboard is similar to that of Palm's Treo Pro; the buttons are a little on the small side, but there's plenty of space between them to reduce any problems.

The Pre has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard with smallish but well-spaced buttons.

Again, looking at the design of the phone, it's clear that time and thought have been spent on the device. The hardware feels solid and not as plasticky as the Palm Centro. When you slide open the Pre, it has a slight curve that makes it comfortable to hold when making calls or even when typing out messages. The touch-screen felt responsive, and on web pages you can pinch the screen to zoom in and out, as on the iPhone.

The WebOS browser supports iPhone-style pinching gestures for zooming in and out of web pages.

Web
Talking of the web, the Pre's browser is pretty outstanding. It renders sites on-screen as you would see them on your desktop, and quickly at that. When asked about Flash, Palm had no comment. We do know that there will be an app store, and Palm will release an SDK to developers. The company reiterated throughout the launch press conference that WebOS was built with developers in mind and is based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Multimedia
As far as multimedia is concerned, the Palm Pre offers a 3-megapixel camera. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to take any photos, but early reports suggest that the quality is pretty good. Disappointingly, the camera won't have video recording capabilities at this time, but those could be added in the future. For music, like the T-Mobile G1, Palm has partnered with the Amazon Music Store, so you'll be able to purchase songs over the air from your Pre.

The rest
The 135g Palm Pre offers integrated Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), Bluetooth 2.1 (with support for stereo Bluetooth), EV-DO Rev. A and GPS. There's 8GB of internal storage, a 3.5mm headphone jack and high-speed USB 2.0. Business users will be pleased to note the email client's support for Microsoft Exchange servers, along with the usual POP3 and IMAP support.

Outlook
The Palm Pre and Palm WebOS isn't necessarily going to revolutionise the smartphone market as it doesn't offer any compelling new features. However, it definitely brings a fresh approach to the way you interact with a device and how it organises information. It also brings innovation and life back to the struggling company and has certainly set the tech world abuzz. Palm has undeniably taken a beating from the media and the general public, so it's good to see the company respond and take action.

The Pre will also be a key product for Sprint. It needs an iconic phone to compete with the likes of AT&T and the iPhone and Verizon Wireless and the BlackBerry Storm, and Pre could certainly be the one to do this for Sprint. Pricing will be key of course, but I suspect the Pre will be priced competitively with the iPhone and Storm. I also think its chances of overtaking the Storm are pretty high. It offers a better user experience and has more consumer appeal. Although there are still some unanswered questions about the Pre, it could prove to be the stiffest competition yet for the iPhone.

Palm took a bit of a gamble announcing the product early at CES 2009 and not closer to its release date, which is expected some time in the first half of 2009. Both Palm and Sprint will have to be careful to deliver on their promise and not delay the phone. Still, the Palm Pre and WebOS has certainly got everyone excited and I can't wait to get some quality hands-on time with the final product.