Palm hands on video

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Palm Pre promises to bring ailing Palm back from the depths of financial ruin. With its innovative design, high-end feature-set, and intuitive UI (courtesy of Palm’s other new product, the Web OS), the Palm Pre has the potential to rock the smartphone world, redefining what it means to be connected to the web and how you manage all the information sources in your daily life.

No longer will your business and personal lives need to be separated, the Palm Pre integrates all aspects of your life in an easy-to-use platform that’s still powerful and flexible enough to take your virtual office with you.

Palm Synergy is possibly the coolest feature of the Web OS.

Enter your Facebook credentials and Synergy will search out all your contacts and automatically add them to your contacts list - complete with profile information (like phone numbers and email addresses) as well as pictures.

Synergy can also draw contact information from multiple sources, like other social networks.


Another interesting feature is the universal search tool. Simply bring up the search box and start typing for whatever you need - food, a contact, and email, a song, or a movie theater - and Universal Search will automatically scour your device for appropriate content. If the Web OS can’t find anything on your Palm Pre that matches your search, it’ll search Google, Wikipedia, or even offer to map the location for you.

Oh, and then there’s the 3.1-inch capacitance touchscreen that’s just a joy to use. Combined with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and the gesture-control area directly below the display, the Palm Pre offers intuitive navigation and sleek design.

But, it doesn’t stop there. Oh no, not in the least.


The Palm Pre sports a 3 megapixel camera, GPS, WiFi, EVDO Rev. A data connection (3G), 8GB of on-board storage, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a super-fast CPU based on the OMAP3 architecture (the Palm Pre is the first mobile phone to use the processor, in fact).

We’re looking for the Palm Pre to hit market in the first half of 2009 (1H 2009). And there are rumblings about the Sprint subsidized pricing coming in around $400 on contract, but we’re not going to hold our breath. Palm would do well to get this little baby out as quickly as possible.

Needless to say, we’re enamored with the Palm Pre. We’ve already offered a sacrificial intern to the Palm reps in exchange for a early review unit - it would be totally worth it.