The Palm Pre may have rocked up in the UK a few months after its US release, but it's definitely been worth the wait. With a round, caressable case and a gorgeous, smooth user interface, the Pre is a pleasure to use, as long as you can handle its teeny, tiny, slide-out keyboard. Its ability to multi-task gives it a leg up on the iPhone, but it does have one enormous flaw: the Palm App Catalog app store is taking longer to be born than a baby elephant.
The Pre is available exclusively on O2, from free on a £34.26-per-month, 24-month contract.
Pick a card, any card
The Pre shows that Palm understands what a touchscreen should be: a touchable, smooth user interface that you can really get your fingers into. WebOS and its flickable 'deck of cards' UI is a pleasure to use, with each tap of your finger triggering a tiny ripple animation on the screen.
The deck-of-cards feature sounds fancy, but it's simply a way of showing what applications you have open at one time, by displaying each as a rounded window that takes up the home screen. To open a running app, you tap a card, and you flick it away to the top of the screen to close it. It's an elegant way of helping you manage the Pre's ability to multi-task, but it didn't quite live up to our hopes. Each card just shows the app in suspended animation, so you can't use the cards as home-screen widgets, like you might see on the HTC Hero, displaying a live ticker of tweets or status updates, for example.
There are a couple of exceptions to this frozen state. For example, the messaging app shows your latest texts, the music player shows the current song, and the clock always stays accurate. But you won't be able to load Web pages in the background or see your latest tweets -- you'll have to open the app to see your latest tweets and post your own.
The deck-of-cards feature means that you can't add shortcuts or icons to your home screen, and you don't see alerts there. Instead, notifications pop up at the bottom of the screen. It's a good, unobtrusive way of letting you know that you have a new email or text, and you can also control the music player down there. When you're sick of an alert, you can flick it away and the notification area slides discreetly out of view, in another example of the Pre's finger-friendly design.
The Pre also has multi-touch support, which means you can zoom into a map, photo or Web page with a pinch of your fingers. We've seen multi-touch capability on other phones, but it's jerky and annoying on LG phones and it's not available in some places on the Hero. The Pre's multi-touch functionality is wonderfully smooth. It's in the same league as that of the multi-touch pioneer, the iPhone.
Smooth like a pebble
All this swiping and wiping takes place on a beautiful, responsive touchscreen, and there's also a touch-sensitive area underneath the screen. Aside from a home button, which looks oddly like a trackball but isn't, the Pre does away with the mess of buttons that we've seen on recent Android phones. This gives the phone a smooth, rounded appearance when the slider is closed, although it's impossible to keep the shiny finish fingerprint-free.
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davros123 3 March 2010
Good: WebOS its just awesome!
Bad: Oreo effect on the slider
Comment: I will preface this review by saying I go through phones faster than most people change there underpants. I think its a bit of an adiction. I have had all 3 models of the iPhone, a HTC HD2, a Google G1 and T-Mobile Pulse in the past year so i feel i can make a pretty good judgment bassed on the competition.
I got the Palm Pre about 6 weeks ago after pretty much ignoring it at launch due to its luke warm response. I think it got this response purely because the mobile phone websites and press seem to only like phones that have an i at the front of the name.
I have no intention of parting with this phone and I love the intuative OS, speed and the physical keyboard is great after you adjust to using it.
There are plenty of apps out there to use on both the marketplace and on Preware through the thriving homebrew comunity. It syncs perfectly with iTunes if you download iTunes version 9 and dont update it. Its also intigrates seamlessly with Facebook and my Exchange mail servers.
Now 1.4 has come it has added a video camera and lots of other tweaks here and there which make this phone a pleasure to use. Multitasking is fantastic as you can pause a game for example and quickly respond to a text for example.
I cant recomend this phone enough! If you are looking for a new smartphone check this phone out.
James Webb 3 March 2010
Good: Multi-tasking, size, keyboard & user interface, synergy
Bad: lack of apps but this will change
Comment: Fantastic little device, does what I need from a device in a new way. Multi-tasking on this phone is excellent and really easy to use. After using the Pre and going back to similar smartphones, I find it difficult, frustrating and slow to get stuff done.
The Pre is the new kid on the block and deserves a look. 10 out of 10 from me
kategorgeous 1 March 2010
Good: keyboard, looks, Google "synchronicity"
Bad: limited apps, can't use as modem, sometimes crashes, terrible battery life, only 8GB memory
Comment: I've had this phone for a couple of months now. I think it's a nice small size and fits in the hand comfortably. As a phone it seems to do the job OK. But as a music player i-tunes no longer recognises it so you cannot set up playlists any more and there doesn't seem to be software to do so. The Palm OS software sometimes seems to hang and also occasionally get a weird message about "too many cards open" when I have none open. The user experience is OK, flipping between pages and the flippy open keyboard is great for people like me who cannot get on with the i-phone keyboard. My biggest gripe is that I used to be able to use my previous phone, a Nokia E51 (fantastic phone, wish I'd just got a newer version rather than this Palm Pre) as a modem with my laptop so that I could connect to the internet while out and about when there was not Wi-Fi available. However, O2 have barred this from the Palm Pre. I believe that it has the capability but O2 have stopped it. Arse! HOWEVER, I do like the synchronicity with Google Calendars an Google Contacts so you can have your MAC or PC permanently sync'd with Google and your phone. It would be nice if the "Tasks" sync'd too though.
I have a 18 month contract with this new phone and will definately be going back to Nokia when it is over. I think Palm had a good potential to whoop the arses of I-Phone with their "proper keyboard" and could have given it the option of upgrading the memory (via mini SD) and upgrading the battery (the supplied battery lasts about half a day with regular use.)
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