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Pros
- Excellent design.
- Very cool interface.
- Synergy feature consolidates e-mail, contacts, and calendars.
- Syncs with iTunes just like an iPod.
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Cons
- Very few third-party apps at launch.
- So-so reception.
- Short standby battery life.
- Limited IM apps.Watch the Palm Pre video review!
Palm Pre (Sprint) Specs
| 802.11x/Band(s): | Yes |
| Bands: | 1900 |
| Bands: | 850 |
| Battery Life (As Tested): | 4 hours 45 minutes |
| Bluetooth: | Yes |
| Camera Flash: | Yes |
| Camera: | Yes |
| Form Factor: | Slider |
| High-Speed Data: | 1xRTT |
| High-Speed Data: | EVDO Rev 0 |
| High-Speed Data: | EVDO Rev A |
| Megapixels: | 3.2 MP |
| Operating System as Tested: | Other |
| Phone Capability / Network: | CDMA |
| Physical Keyboard: | Yes |
| Screen Details: | 16M-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen |
| Screen Details: | 320-by-480 |
| Screen Size: | 3.1 inches |
| Service Provider: | Sprint |
| Storage Capacity (as Tested): | 8 GB |
Palm is back—and with the coolest handheld device we've seen in a long time. The Palm Pre has the same exhilarating sense of possibility as the
A glossy black oval that fits perfectly into a medium-size hand, the 4.8-ounce Pre measures 3.9 by 2.3 by 0.7 inches (HWD). Its back feels soft and is a little bit curved, like a smooth rock. There's a home button at the bottom of the phone in a black "gesture area" where you swipe your finger to navigate around the interface. But most of the device's face is a crystal-clear, very responsive 3.1-inch, 320-by-480-pixel touch screen. When you touch the screen, a visual ripple on the display shows where you've touched it.
So far, so iPhone. But slide up the Pre's screen to reveal the QWERTY keyboard, cradled in black plastic with a slightly sharp lip at the bottom. The keyboard is more beautiful than comfortable, because Palm uses a clear, gummy rubber for its keys, so they're a bit sticky. But the keys aren't too, too small: The Pre's keyboard is actually wider than the one on the
The Pre works like a lot of smartphones do, it's just a bit more fun. The menu system is simple to grasp, and it should take only 15 minutes, roughly, to learn some of the new interface tricks. Palm's innovation is cards. Hit the Main Menu button in the middle of any application to reduce that app to a "card" and start doing something else. You can toss cards away (that's quitting apps), shuffle them, or close and reopen them. It's a beautiful, well-conceived answer to the "what programs do I have running?" question.
The brilliant card metaphor makes me want an entire deck of them—meaning apps. Now we get to my number-one worry about the Pre. Apple's done an excellent job of making people aware of smartphone apps with the 40,000+ programs available for the iPhone. And as soon as you pick up the Pre, you're going to want to load 20, 30, or 40 from its app store, which is right on the phone. But Palm has been stingy with its software developer's kit, so there are currently only a handful of apps. Once developers get the kit, they may find it very limiting, especially in terms of the deep hardware hooks required to make compelling games. For the Pre to succeed, it needs as many collectible cards as Pokémon.—
The Pre's Phone and E-Mail Prowess
Like the iPhone 3G, the Pre isn't the best voice phone ever, but it's good enough. The touch-screen dialer is easy to use; you can also dial using the keyboard. On my tests, reception was weaker than that of competing smartphones for Sprint, such as the
The handset ships with a wired 3.5mm headset and works very well with both mono and stereo Bluetooth headsets. It automatically paired with the
Seven ringtones come with the Pre, and you can use any MP3 file as a ringtone by dropping it into the right folder using your PC. Ringtone volume is loud enough, and the vibrating alert is also very loud and powerful.
Like other smartphones, the Pre lets you load a bunch of e-mail accounts at once. I successfully added Google, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Live, Mobile Me, and Yahoo accounts to my test handset. You can sync multiple accounts of the same type, and they appear as separate inboxes with subfolders. On my tests, all the accounts supported push e-mail, and HTML messages appeared with clickable links. When I got JPEG attachments, the Pre offered to save them in its image library. MP3, PDF, video, and Microsoft Office attachments are viewable, but not savable. The Pre lets you respond to Microsoft Exchange meeting requests without a problem.
One of the Pre's standout features is Synergy, which syncs the Pre's contacts with Exchange, Facebook, and Google and syncs the calendar on the phone with Exchange and Google. Everything appears together in one view; if you click on a Facebook friend, you can then e-mail that contact from one of your other accounts. It's a step in the right direction, but Synergy needs to do more. For example, you can Synergize Facebook contacts, but Facebook e-mails, IMs, and events don't appear in any of the Pre's built-in apps; you have to go to Facebook's Web site to see them. Facebook built a good-looking mobile site especially for the Pre, but it's still just a Web page and doesn't plug into the built-in apps. For Windows Live and Yahoo, you can get e-mail, but not contacts and calendars. And MySpace and Twitter are totally AWOL as far as Synergy is concerned.
One place Twitter does appear is in the Pre's Universal Search feature. Simply start typing a name or phrase and the phone will search your contacts, applications, and then Google, Google Maps, Twitter, and Wikipedia. That's pretty slick, but it would be even better if it searched e-mail, too.
For folks who are tied to their computers, Palm offers a simple bit of software that transfers contacts and calendars from Outlook or Palm Desktop to the Pre. But the software works only one way—it's for migration, not syncing—though it ran easily on both my Windows machine and my Mac.
The Pre supports text, picture, and video messaging, along with a very limited set of IM protocols—just AIM and Google Talk. Messages appear threaded in conversations, which is helpful. —
What About the Web and Multimedia?
To connect to the Internet, the Pre uses 802.11b/g Wi-Fi or Sprint 3G. I hooked into a WPA2-protected Wi-Fi network without a problem. The Web browser is quick, easy, and iPhone-esque; it displays Web pages in desktop quality with plenty of JavaScript bells and whistles, but no Flash or embedded Java. (According to Adobe and Palm, Flash is coming later this year.) Desktop Web pages like Expedia.com, the New York Times, and PCmag.com look great. One nice touch is an integrated address and search bar, which starts searching Google or Wikipedia when you enter text that isn't a URL. You can spawn multiple Web cards to browse multiple sites at the same time, and the browser rotates into landscape mode when you turn the phone. To zoom in and out, you use the same pinching and stretching gestures as on the iPhone. As for speed: I was able to achieve about 500 Kbps on EV-DO and around 1,100 Kbps on Wi-Fi, which are typical results for a mobile browser.
There are a few false notes in the interface. The Pre works mostly in portrait mode. Except when you're viewing videos, photos, and Web pages, the screen doesn't rotate. Sometimes on Web pages and in HTML e-mails, buttons are initially too small to press, but I found that as long as I pressed near a button, it worked.
The Pre is the best multimedia phone since the iPhone, and it plays well with iTunes. Syncing the Pre is exactly like syncing an iPod. The only differences are: You can't use iPhone apps, as you can on an
Not an iTunes fan? The Pre has a Mass Storage mode that syncs with Windows Media Player, or you can drag and drop files onto the device by using it as a flash drive for a Mac or PC. Files transfer extremely quickly; a 5MB file copied almost instantaneously. If you want to buy music on the phone, there's an Amazon MP3 store client, but songs can be downloaded only over Wi-Fi. I was able to buy an album from Amazon easily, using my existing Amazon log-in.
In addition to listening to your own music and watching your own videos in full-screen, landscape mode, you can stream videos from YouTube or
The 3MP camera is incredibly fast—there's virtually no shutter lag. But except for being able to turn the flash on or off, you have no options. The camera's color balance is excellent—whites look white, and photos are well balanced in low light—but you can see some fringing around the edges of objects when you blow up the image size and view the photos. There's no video-recording capability.
Other onboard apps include a relatively basic GPS-enabled Google Maps, which offers traffic info and directions, but there's no Street View. You also get Sprint's Telenav-powered GPS driving directions app, Sprint Navigation. In addition, there's a NASCAR app that helps you track NASCAR driver statistics, read news and view NASCAR-related videos, a calculator, a photo viewer, a memo pad, a to-do list, and a nifty alarm clock that lets you set as many alarms as you like. You can't use the Pre as a modem for a PC.
A situation that will seem familiar to any iPhone owner: The Pre's battery life isn't very long. Continuous-usage tests turned out well: 4 hours 45 minutes of talk time and 4:15 of video-playback time, which is on a par with other CDMA smartphones. But even when it's not heavily used, the Pre runs its battery down in a little more than a day. Turning off AIM improved standby time by several hours, as did tweaking the e-mail settings. If you need a lot of extra time, you can get another battery and swap it in when the first one runs out.
The Pre is full of the sort of mind-expanding innovations that make you greedy. Take Synergy, for example: Every device should work like this. Why don't I have one address book and one calendar comprising everything I've scattered around? But now I want complete synergy. Merging my Facebook, Google, and Outlook address books is great, but why can't I synergize my Mobile Me and Yahoo e-mail accounts' contacts and calendars too? Palm says over-the-air updates may add more features in the future.
Still, the Palm Pre has the magic that the iPhone has, that Android doesn't have, and that the
Benchmark Test Results
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