Palm Pre is a genuine iPhone-Ripper

The long awaited Palm Pre lives up to its well hyped yet closely guarded build-up with a responsive touch screen and an engaging interface. But a few hardware design flaws keep it from being a perfect smart phone —still it is a device clearly designed to give a certain young Apple upstart a serious run for it money.

The glossy –black Palm Pre has a uniquely curved slider body that’s dominated by its 3.1 inch, 320×480 pixel capacitive touch display. The screen slides up and curves slightly toward you, a design, intended to resist glare and make the phone feel comfortable in your hand and against your face. Measuring 99x58x18mm, the Pre is incredibly pocket-able, more so than a device like Apple’s iPhone 3G; it even fits into a women’s jeans pocket; a rare feat for a full QWERTY smart phone.

Controlling the Palm Pre relies on a handful of primary gestures on its capacitive touch-screen and in its gesture area, which sits below the display on the phone’s black surface. The do or die of all smart-phones, the Palm Pre screen excels, its touch-screen allows you to glide smoothly through the neatly built menu system, with the pinch and zoom as effective as it is with its Apple competitor.

The Palm Pre smart phone, along with the company’s much anticipated web OS operating system, has had quite a buzz building up since its splashy launch in January. While the Pre isn’t perfect, it definitely does not disappoint: the web OS interface is clean, engaging and intuitive. Web OS is one of the silkiest and best-designed smart-phone platforms to come along in a while-it’s right up there with the Apple’s iPhone OS and Google’s Android.

Like Google’s Android, Palm’s web OS can handle full multi tasking—something that Apple iPhone can’t do. The Palm Pre with a deck-of-cards visualisation: you can view each of your open applications at once, shuffle them any way you choose, and then discard the ones that you want to close. All of this is done with intuitive gestures that mimic handling a physical deck of cards. Apps remains live, even when minimised into the card view, so changes can continue to happen in real-time, even if you’ve moved on to another activity.

One of the most important components of web OS is its ability to synchronize, and synthesis, information from various sources into one seamless, integrated view. Palm calls this concept “Synergy”, and it is incorporated into your contacts, email, and messaging applications, that is it will grab your contacts from Facebook, Google and Microsoft Exchange accounts, and all of them will appear in the Pre’s Contacts app. It also facilitates web searchers with a single search button that will first check the phone for appropriate applications or files, and then give you the option to check various web searches.  Synching your media with Palm Pre is easy. You can load your music via Apple iTunes or do it manually with an easy drag-and-drop. The media player is pretty standard.

Previously smart-phones tend to be littered with quite feeble attempts at throwing a camera into a mix, but the Pre’s snapper is clearly a much more impressive effort. Supporting the 3 Megapixel camera with LED flash and variable depth perception, it surpasses the efforts of iPhone.

Boasting the usual connectivity suspects such as HSDPA, and Wi-Fi (G), the Palm Pre also includes Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR with A2DP. What this means for the user is that you can use the handset as a wireless modem for your laptop plus use wireless Bluetooth headphones, and stream music wirelessly to hi-fi setups.

Perhaps the most exiting feature is the wireless charger. Seemingly an insignificant characteristic is that of removable battery. But for those iPhone owners who have met with a set of industrial screws between them and their phone battery, the palm should offer a less frustrating phone life when you need for some power related maintenance.

Specifications:

• Palm web Os
• 3.1 inch touch screen with a vibrant 24-bit colour 320×480 resolution HVGA display
• QWERTY keyboard
• Microsoft Outlook email with Microsoft Direct Push Technology POP3/IMAP (yahoo, Gmail, AOL, etc)
• Integrated IM, SMS, MMS
• Built-in GPS
• 3 megapixel camera with Led flash
• Ambient light, accelerometer, and proximity sensors
• Audio Formats; MP3, AAC, AAC+, AMR, QCELP, WAV
• WI-Fi 802.11b/g with WPA; WPA2, 801.1x authentication
• Bluetooth2.1+EDR with A2DP stereo Bluetooth support
• 8GB of user storage (~7.4 GB user available)
• USB mass storage support, Micro USB connector with USB 2.0
• 3.5mm stereo jack
• Dimensions: 59.9×100.5×16.95mm
• Weight: 135 gm.

Final Word:

Hardware flaws aside, the Palm Pre has made a solid impression. Its eye-catching design and smooth operation make this smart-phone the most exiting device.

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Tags: Apple, apple’s iPhone 3g, facebook, google’s android, palm’s web os, smart phone, web os