Palm Pre (US version) review

Finally, for people coming from a Treo or any other Palm phone, Palm offers something called the Data Transfer Assistant, which performs a one-time transfer of data from your desktop, including Palm Desktop, iCal or Exchange, to your phone. Data Transfer Assistant is available as a free download from Palm.

Phone features and contacts
The Pre offers a speakerphone, speed dial, conference calling, aeroplane mode and silent ringer switch. Unfortunately, the initial version of webOS doesn't support voice dialling, and there's no support for visual voicemail at this time.

Pressing the launcher icon will bring you to all your applications and settings. There are three panels that you can swipe from left to right (and vice versa). This is the first panel, which is where you'll find the phone's core functions, such as the Web browser and multimedia

The contacts list is only limited by the amount of available memory (about 7GB) and includes fields for multiple numbers, email and IM addresses, street addresses, birthdays and more. With Palm's Synergy feature, the Pre can pull a contact's information from various sources -- Facebook, Outlook, Gmail and so forth -- and automatically fill all the fields in a single contact sheet, so you don't have to go through the hassle of manually entering all the data.

In addition to numbers and email addresses, Synergy will also attach any photos that are associated with that person's Facebook or email account. If you don't want all your information merged together, there's a way to unlink contact profiles so you can keep social and business contacts separate. Be aware that, if you have a large contact list, it can take a while for the Pre to sync all the information, but you can still work in other applications during this process.

Messaging and calendar
The Pre supports multiple email accounts, including POP/IMAP and Microsoft Exchange. We synced several email accounts to the Pre, including Gmail, Yahoo and Exchange. The set-up for all three was a breeze. With Gmail and Yahoo, we simply entered our login ID and password, and the Pre retrieved all our account information and messages, including any folders. Outlook synchronisation was also seamless. We simply selected the Exchange option, entered our email address, mail server, user name and password, and we were set up in seconds.

On the second panel, you'll find more service-orientated offerings, such as the Palm App Catalog

All accounts are housed under the email card, from where you can access your various inboxes. Synergy also allows you to view messages from all accounts under one view, although we think most people would prefer to keep personal and work email separate. Email delivery was almost instant -- you can also set different retrieval intervals -- and actions such as deleting a message or moving an email to a folder are reflected on both sides, whether you do it from the Pre or your computer. We were able to download and view attachments as well as send them.