Palm Pre Smartphone Review

Posted by Brandon on Dec 22nd, 2009 | 1 comment home title

I think I’ve had my Palm Pre long enough to give it a proper review. For those of you that have been living under a rock, I’ll quickly tell you what the Palm Pre is. What is the Palm Pre?

Answer: It is a smartphone that gives the iPhone a run for it’s money. It is currently only available on the Sprint network, but will make its way to others in the near future.

Now that you know what it is, let me go over some of the features!

3.1″ touchscreen
Palm webOS™ platform
3.o megapixel camera with LED flash
Slide-out QWERTY keyboard
8 GB of memory
Wi-Fi
Bluetooth
Email
GPS
All in-one calendar
Universal search
Mp3 player
Combined IM, MMS and SMS text messaging
Palm synergy™
Multi-touch gestures

Included accessories:
Standard Lithium Ion (Li-Ion) Battery
AC Travel Charger
Carry Pouch
USB Cable
3.5mm Stereo Headset

Palm webOS™ & Multi-Tasking

The Palm Pre runs on the webOS platform. webOS is a mobile operating system running on the Linux kernel. The design and features are without a doubt incredible and easy on the eyes. Multi-tasking on this device is a breeze with the “activity cards”. What are activity cards? When you run an application (eg: the camera, text messaging, web browser, mp3 player, etc), you can minimize the programs and see them all in a card view, kind of a like a deck of cards. Navigate through them and touch which ever one you want to maximize. If you want to close an application, simply swipe it off the top of the screen. It is so simple and fast, you won’t believe it until you use it!

Design & Slide-Out QWERTY Keyboard

I am in love with the design of the Palm Pre. The shape, size and weight is what I would describe as the nearly perfect smartphone. It just feels very comfortable in the hand. Comparing it to the iPhone, it has a much “cooler” design and is not blocky like the iPhone is. The keyboard is a little small. However, it’s not so small that it messes me up when I text. I prefer this physical keyboard rather than a virtual one. I never accidentally hit the wrong key. I also like this vertical slide-out keyboard better than the kind that slide out with the phone tilted horizontally. After a little use, you’ll find it to be very comfortable to use.

The touch screen is very touch sensetive. Some might say that it’s not quite as sensetive as the iPhone, but I find it to be just as sensetive to the touch. It’s not like those cheap touchscreens in which you have to literally press down. A light touch on the screen works just fine. The finish is a beautiful glossy black – This does make it a fingerprint magnet! When you slide out the keyboard, the phone takes on a slight “banana” shaped curvature to resist glare.

Universal search

The universal search feature is one of my favorites. From the home screen, simply begin typing something and a screen pops up with results as you’re still typing. It searches your contacts and applications and then offers to search Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia, or Twitter for the search term you typed in.

The 3.0 Megapixel Camera

The 3 megapixel camera has a built in LED flash. The iPhone camera is 2 megapixels and has no flash at all (ha!). I have found the photo quality to be quite amazing. Here’s a photo of my little cousin that I took with my Palm Pre just before his school concert last night:

Palm Synergy™

The Palm synergy feature links things together to be in one place for you to view. For example, if you’re having an AIM conversation with a buddy, you can continue that conversation via text messaging in the very same chat window. To put it simply.. Synergy combines user data from a variety of sources. Sync your phone with Google, Facebook and more. It’s a very powerful feature!

So far, I have talked about some of the main features, but have not mentioned one thing about the sound quality, which is ridiculous because it is a phone. After comparing the call quality to the iPhone, I can say that the quality was better on the Palm Pre. This may have something to do with the different networks (Sprint vs AT&T) and the area I was in. But the Palm Pre was definitely clearer.

One of the main things that the iPhone has over the Palm Pre is the huge number of apps available. The Palm Pre’s app store is in beta and the community is steadily putting out new homebrew apps, but it is still behind the iPhone. With webOS, the Palm Pre’s design and features, it is enough for me to choose it over the iPhone. The Palm Pre is lacking the ability to do video recording but there are hopes for it to soon be another feature as Palm is constantly updating the software. It’s an amazing phone that you must try for yourself!