With Apple’s unveiling of the new iPhone 3GS yesterday, which comes without multi-tasking, the Palm Pre remains the sole smartphone with the feature on board. Does the sound of yesterday’s iPhone announcement leave you waiting for its release or did it make you turn your attention back to the Pre? Perhaps this short review can help sway your mind.
The Pre, as far as I’m concerned, is the only phone in the market that can really stand up in terms of actual features against the iPhone. While future Android handsets may change that stance, it’s the only truth that stands today. Instead of slapping high-end phone hardware into a box and looking for an OS to take charge of it, Palm went about it the other way, crafting a brilliant platform and putting together a handset that will take advantage of it.
Physically, the Pre is an attractive phone. While not as slick as some of today’s devices, it bears a look that it can call its own. Featuring more pocketable dimensions than many high-end smartphones, along with a surprisingly sturdy build, it won’t lose any design points anytime soon.
The 3.1-inch display is both bright and crisp, apart from facilitating an extremely responsive touch experience. Multi-touch is a bundle of joy those not privy to its charms (i.e. don’t own an iPhone) will discover makes a huge difference in the way a touchscreen is able to facilitate controls. That’s not to say you’ll be enjoying it as soon as you pick up your handset. On the contrary, the Pre’s multi-touch commands are hardly intuitive and will require some amount of learning before you get used to it. After that initial slowdown, though, I doubt you’ll ever want to go back to non-multi-touch phones again.
UI, as you’ve probably seen from the online screenshots, is gorgeous, with plenty of nice touches that make working on the phone easier. Features such as the Universal Search (one search interface to go through all apps and files), easy access to the connection settings (a must for any web-connecting smartphone) and the message notification system (which appears as a non-intrusive bar regardless of what you’re working on) simply put a crowning touch to the immensely easy navigation system.
As we said earlier, multi-tasking sets the Pre apart from competitors, enabling users to run all sorts of applications (including third-party ones) in parallel with no detrimental effect on performance. Suffice to say, this feature will see plenty of use from me, along with probably everyone else who picks up on of Palm’s webOS handsets in the future.
With regards to phone features, the Pre capably manages, offering pretty much every feature in the book save for a couple of overlooked items I don’t personally use (though they may be important to you): voice dialing and visual voicemail. Messaging, from SMS to email, is well-executed with plenty of thought going behind their implementation.
Like most pieces of technology, I do have some problems with it. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard is the most apparent, with its cramped frame making typing a tad more difficult to get used to. It’s not a deal-breaker, as we all eventually learn to get used to working with smaller keys, but it really takes a lot away from the early experience. Similarly, the memory (at 7GB) is a tad too limited for a phone that’s intended to be used as a platform for apps. With no card expansion available, it’s quite a disappointing specification. Other things that may dissuade you include the lack of Flash support and video capture, along with a general feeling of sluggishness (just slight) on the handset.
Regardless of the caveats, the Pre ($199 with contract, after a $100 rebate) is an amazing piece of work that marries a great OS with a hardware that’s good enough to exploit it. Whether this saves both Palm and Sprint from certain demise, however, is still up in the air.
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[...] a Palm Pre yet? It’s a great experience, to say the least. Their new webOS platform is a definite [...]