The Palm Pre is a PDA phone that is designed to sync with your life. It has features that allow you to pull your different online calendars into one view, as well as pre link all of your contacts from different sources into one place. Not only that, the Palm Pre also delivers incoming messages and notifications in an intuitively subtle way. The Palm Pre sports a design that has a slide out keyboard for faster and easier texting, as well as a full widescreen then the keyboard is closed up and rotated to browse through music, websites, photos and videos.
Specifications
The Palm Pre measures 59.5 mm x 100.5 mm x 16.95 mm (W x H x D) in dimension and weighs approximately 135 g. It runs on a Palm webOS platform operating system. The Palm Pre is also compatible with Dual-band CDMA 2000 networks and 3G: EvDO Rev A networks. There is a vibrant 24-bit colour touch screen display that measures 3.1 inches diagonally with a HVGA resolution of 320 x 480 pixels. Other input devices include a physical full QWERTY keyboard. The Palm Pre also has email features including Microsoft Exchange email with Microsoft Direct Push Technology, as well as support for POP3/ IMAP for Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, Hotmail and other email service providers. As for messaging features, the Palm Pre comes with integrated IM, SMS and MMS. For added convenience it also has a built-in GPS navigator. There is also a 3 mega pixel camera with LED flash and extended depth of field. In terms of sensors, the Palm Pre features ambient light, accelerometer and proximity sensors. Supported media formats include MP3, AAC, AAC+, AMR, QCELP and WAV for audio files, MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264 for video files, as well as GIF, JPEG, PNG and BMP for image files. The Palm Pre also has wireless connectivity features including support for Wi-FI 802.11 b/g with WPA, WPA2, WEP, 802.1X authentication, Bluetooth wireless technology 2.1 + EDR with A2DP stereo as well as Bluetooth support. In terms of memory, the Palm Pre comes with up to an 8 GB capacity, with approximately 7 GB worth of memory available to users. Not only that, it can also be used as a mass storage device as USB mass storage support is provided. The Palm Pre also comes with a MicroUSB connector with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed. There is also a 3.5 mm stereo headphone jack on the body. In addition to that, there are also Palm Synergy features including aggregation for Facebook, Google, Microsoft Office Outlook, LinkedIn, Yahoo! Mail, Google Talk and AIM Instant Messenger. Besides that, Palm Synergy also has the ability to group all your conversations with the same person in one chat-style view so that you may continue the same conversation even on another platform, as well as see who’s online right from Contacts to start a new conversation. Not only that there is also a universal search function that is able to search through user’s applications, contacts, dialling information and web. Activity cards include third party and ROM applications accessible as movable, multi-view cards. This feature allows you to keep multiple applications open as well as ability to move easily between your email, maps, photos, websites and more, treating them as activity cards so that you can flip through them, move them around or even throw them away off screen. Other Palm services include over-the-air backup, restore, remote erase and software updates. The Palm Pre is also compatible with Palm Touchstone Charging Dock. The Palm Pre also features intuitive notifications that appear as notifications at the bottom of the screen in order to alert you about text messages and calendar appointments without complete interrupting current activity.
Reviews
“The Pre may have hardware that’s worse than the G1/G2, but the whole package—the software and the hardware—isn’t bad. It’s good. It’s different. That’s something we can get behind. I can’t wait to see what Palm gets dealt in their next hand.” (Gizmodo, 2009)
“To put it simply, the Pre is a great phone, and we don’t feel any hesitation saying that. Is it a perfect phone? Hell no. Does its OS need work? Definitely. But are any of the detracting factors here big enough to not recommend it? Absolutely not. There’s no doubt that there’s room for improvement in webOS and its devices, but there’s also an astounding amount of things that Palm nails out of the gate.” (Endgadget, 2009)
“It’s slicker than using Symbian, arguably more pocketable than its top rivals the HTC Hero and iPhone and a valuable and valid alternative to the ever-expanding sea of Android phones we seem to be pelted with on a weekly basis these days. Updates would be welcome, but this is a good start.” (ITPro, 2009)
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