A Shining Star: Palm Pre Review

The iPhone competitor is here. Palm, once a giant handheld devices maker, has struck again with Palm Pre, their new smartphone. It is  ground-up designed to work with Web, while offering exciting multimedia features. With the all new WebOS, impressive multitasking abilities, an innovative menu design, full sized keyboard and impressive built quality makes it stand in the handheld market. Let’s discover the juice this device’s got.

The new Palm Pre is based on Linux based visual interface, which gives strong looks. The body is designed to support the fingers, and seems easy even after prolonged use. It uses the new Cards system interface, which looks really neat and enables multi-tasking features.

Another strong point of the device is its full QWERTY keyboard. Unlike iPhone, its designed to type long mails and easy messaging. The verticle slider opens the keyboard when needed. The keys feel a little rubbery, rather than being hard.

The main idea around which the phone is designed is its Web experience. The new browser uses Webkit just like iPhone and Android, and displays the whole HTML pages instantly. The browser is quite responsive with regular zoom and navigation features.

The screen and the camera quality are both superb as compared to other smartphones. It has a 3.0 MP Camera with flash, which is able to take some quite good pictures. The screen is sized 3.1 inches with 320×480 screen resolution and the display is bright, crisp and richly colored, a real pleasure to look at, with the multitouch proving just as responsive as on the iPhone.

The included media players for audio and video are also adequate. The interface are much inspired by iPhone, but they do manage to give nice visuals and sound. It’s easy to manage playlists, and categorize the sounds.

Although the included browser doesn’t play streaming videos, but the phone comes with an application which can play streaming media from the Internet.

The included WebOS is a true multi-tasking platform. The Apps can be opened as cards which can be flipped to switch between them. To close them, you simply have to flip them away. There is no limit of the cards opened at once, but upto 10 apps run smoothly at the same time.

The Maps and Navigation are also made easier with this device. The on board Google Maps and Sprint Navigation Apps making it very easy to navigate the Maps. The applications runs super fast with no lagging even while zooming in and out.

Synergy is also a new feature in Pre. It’s main purpose is to integrate data from multiple accouts. Facebook, Google and Microsoft Exchange can be combined into one record. The combination is automatic, and lets you easily manage all your contacts.

Another nice feature is the Universal Search Engine. It can be directly used to search the phone or web services such as Google, Wikipedia etc.

Pre supports nearly all the popular video and image formats. It also has a good collection of Apps such as Google Maps, which is accelerated by Pre’s GPS system. Sprint TV is also included which enables live streaming over a EVDO or WiFi connection. It also has a Pre’s App Store with some collection of downloadable Apps, much like iPhone’s.

The detailed specifications of the Palm Pre and listed below.

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