Palm Pre Review: Hyped To Challenge iPhone
Palm Pre is already in news with good reviews and many of those reviews have said the phone is the first serious challenger to the iPhone in terms of design and usability. The Palm Pre smartphone, along with the company’s webOS operating system, has had quite the buzz building up since its launch in January.
Comparisons with the iPhone are inevitable, and in some ways people are more impressed with the Pre, which costs $200 after a mail-in rebate with a two-year Sprint plan. Despite some missing features and performance issues that make it less than ideal for on-the-go professionals, the Palm Pre offers gadget lovers and consumers well-integrated features and unparalleled multitasking capabilities.
Interface: A smart approach the Palm (PALM) team took is how the Pre circles around contacts rather than applications. A person is associated with their Facebook page, their email and phone number, and you can have a continuing conversation with them using whatever mode is most convenient at the moment. So you might use email when you are in a WiFi zone (the phone has WiFi and Bluetooth built in), switching to SMS or voice if you choose. The home-screen interface has customizable application widgets running at the bottom. Touch a widget, and the app instantly pops up. Unfortunately, you can display only four shortcuts of your choosing (plus the Launcher shortcut, which you can’t switch out) at a time.
Hardware: The multitouch display supports a richer range of flicks and swipes of the finger than does the iPhone screen. The battery should get you through a day of hard use, and you can pop in a spare if you run short on power—something the iPhone design doesn’t allow. In addition, the screen module slides to reveal a full qwerty keyboard. The glossy-black Pre has a uniquely curved slider body that’s dominated by its 3.1-inch, 320-by-480-pixel capacitive touch display. While I appreciated having a physical keyboard, I disliked the design. The vertical slide-out QWERTY keyboard looks and feels much like that on the Palm Centro; here, the keys are glossy black with orange-hued lettering and different colors to designate the embedded keypad. The keys are slightly recessed, however, and I found that the bezel lip on the sides and bottom often interfered with my typing.
Camera: The 3.2 megapixel camera takes pictures very quickly, especially if you use the spacebar as a shutter button instead of the on-screen button. Photo options are basically nil you can set the flash to Auto, On, or Off, and that’s about it. Coming from a Treo Pro, however, it’s night and day. This is the best camera Palm has ever put in a phone. Unfortunately the camera cannot record video and this is a serious drawback. But since the OS is open source, a video-recording app could be forthcoming. In my snaps, the LED flash did a good job; dimly lit indoor environments had sharp details and fairly accurate color. My outdoor shots looked ever better, with excellent color saturation and little image noise or distortion.
Web Browsing: Like the iPhone, the T-Mobile G1, and various Nokia smartphones, the Pre’s browser is based on the Webkit rendering engine. What this means to you is that it renders full web pages quickly and accurately. The Palm Pre beats out both the iPhone and the G1 in download and rendering time. Part of its speed seems to come from really great javascript — often on smartphones pages will load and then hang when it comes time to process all the scripts on a given page.
Social Networking: One of the most important components of webOS is its ability to synchronize, and synthesize, information from various sources into one seamless, integrated view. Palm calls this concept “Synergy,” and it is incorporated into the contacts, e-mail, and messaging applications. Users can sync the Pre to your Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Exchange accounts; it will grab your contacts from those accounts, and all of them will appear in the Pre’s Contacts app. The Pre comes loaded with a few other apps: YouTube, Google Maps, the Amazon MP3 store, a PDF viewer, a document viewer, a calculator, a task list, and a memo board (which looks like a corkboard). You can also access the Palm App Catalog to buy more. Sprint apps, such as Sprint TV and Sprint’s NASCAR program, are preinstalled on the phone as well.
Multimedia: The Palm Pre supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, WAV, and AMR files. Music through the included earbuds sounded clear with no noise or static, but it lacked bass. Pre users will have access to Amazon’s Mobile Music Store, also seen on the Google Android-based T-Mobile G1. The store makes downloading DRM-free tracks directly to the phone simple. You can load your music via iTunes or do it manually with an easy drag-and-drop. The media player is pretty standard: You can view your music library by artist, album, songs, or genre, see album art, and create playlists. And, of course, you can run the music app in the background. Video quality was also quite good on the Pre’s gorgeous display. The Pre has a dedicated video player that supports MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264. The YouTube app, which comes preloaded on the device, delivers video in high-quality H.264 format regardless of whether you’re on Wi-Fi or on Sprint’s EvDO network.
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