Palm Pre: Thinking ahead is a beautiful thing

At the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES) held in Las Vegas,mobile phone developer Palm wowed the crowds with the announcement of the Palm Pre, a brand new touchscreen mobile phone with stunning looks and a brand new operating system to boot. Palm, previously responsible for bringing us the popular Treo range of smartphones, have raised excitement levels through the roof with their brand new operating system WebOS. WebOS promises to deliver smartphone features in a consumer friendly package. Capable of performing tasks that we expect from a smart phone such as running multiple applications, installing new ones and customising shortcuts and program locations, it’s the new additions that look to set WebOS apart in an already crowded market.

Want an example of how WebOS will make your life easier? Let’s say you’ve added an important meeting to your calendar. The Palm Pre will detect if you are going to be late to the meeting using GPS to track your location and traffic updates to determine how long your journey will take and then send an email to your assistant/ colleagues to inform them that you will be late for the meeting. Impressive…if a little bit creepy. It’s features like this that could see the Palm Pre becoming the phone of choice for businesses in 2009. Away from the operating system, the Palm Pre looks to be a promising piece of kit. The 3.1 inch touchscreen display with an accelerometer for auto screen rotation certainly looks reminiscent of the iPhone 3G but Palm have got a trick up their sleeve; a slide out QWERTY keyboard that is bound to keep all those email and text fanatics happy.

3G Connectivity and Wi-Fi add high speed internet to the mix and the aforementioned GPS will sound good to SatNav fans. And for those interested in something a bit more fun, the Pre packs in a 3.2 Megapixel camera which should provide ample fire power in the photography stakes and a comprehensive multimedia player that will support a host of audio and video file formats to help boost the Pre’s credentials as a multimedai phone. Whether the Palm Pre will match the hype that is currently surrounding it depends on the user experience. If Palm can nail down those futuristic features that the WebOS is capable of, in a user friendly easy to use experience, then they’ll be on to a winner.