CES: Palm Introduce the ‘Pre’ Smartphone

Posted by Jen

January 9, 2009

pre So the name doesn’t exactly excite me. What’s wrong with a cool and exciting name for the brand new handset? Tsk! If only I could name phones….

The Pre is a somewhat attractive slider smartphone with rounded edges and a large 3.1inch touch sensitive (320×480pixel) HVGA display. Reports on screen quality are positive, describing it as bright, colourful, crisp and clear.

The phone weighs 135grams and is 16.95mm thick. It runs on the Palm Web OS operating system which is designed to seamlessly integrate all your web content into one interface.

It is designed for multi-tasking (give it a go lads!) and allows you to switch between multiple applications with ease. There will also be an App Store for further application downloads, accessible only via the phone. Reports praise the responsiveness of the handset and its user interface.

Enabled with 3G and WiFi, its applications are connected to the web and are constantly updated. The browser is smooth and responsive, rendering full web pages in less than 10 seconds. With an accelerometer, simply flip the handset horizontally to view web pages lanscape.

It also features GPS, Bluetooth 2.1 and EDR with A2DP, and a microUSB connector with high speed USB 2.0. The Pre has an 8GB internal memory; however I’ve not seen anything about a microSD slot for expansion.

It supports MP3, AAC+, AMR, QCELP and WAV audio formats and there is an Amazon Music Store app. that lets you preview and download tracks. Supported video formats include MP4, H.263 and H.264. It also has a 3.5mm stereo jack so you can hook it up to a speaker system or use your own headphones.

The Pre features a 3.0 megapixel camera with LED flash and supports GIF, JPEG, PNG and BMP image formats. The camera is reported to take good photos, giving rich colour even in average lighting. Unfortunately it does not take videos, what’s that about? Apparently Palm is looking at this feature for future upgrades.

Connect with contacts via SMS, MMS, instant messaging and email. Communication is grouped together in a chat-style view, meaning you can reply to an instant message with a text message, or vice versa and it’s made easier with the vertical slide QWERTY keyboard.

There’s no word on price as yet, but the Palm Pre is said to be available in the first half of 2009 on the Sprint network.

For more piccies, check out Palm’s Website.

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