
It's alive! It's alive! Well, Palm that is. After years of waiting Palm has finally showed life and released their most anticipated handset--The Palm Pre. This will be Palm's play against the Apple iPhone and Blackberry Storm.
It's a very sleek phone with a large 3.1-inch touch screen featuring 24-bit color 320x480 resolution HVGA display, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, accelerometer for orienting web pages and photos to your perspective, high-speed connectivity (EVDO Rev. A or UMTS HSDPA), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, GPS, 3-megapixel camera with LED flash and extended depth of field, 8GB of internal user storage, proximity sensor, which automatically disables the touch screen and turns off the display whenever you put the phone up to your ear, light sensor, which dims the display if the ambient light is dark, such as at night or in a movie theater, to reduce power usage, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR with A2DP stereo Bluetooth support, messaging support (IM, SMS and MMS capabilities), MicroUSB connector with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed, gesture area, which enables simple, intuitive gestures for navigation (we'll have to see how that works), and removable, rechargeable battery.
The phone runs on Palm's new webOS platform, with TI's new OMAP CPU inside. Palm's webOS was designed to allow an ecosystem of partners, including developers, hardware suppliers, and accessories manufacturers, to develop core solutions for the platform and product line. Whether Palm could ever rival that of iTunes and the support the iPhone has received for development, is left to be seen.
One of the coolest things about the new phone is the wireless inductive charger. Simply set Pre down on top of the Palm Touchstone charging dock and presto! Pre is active while charging, so you can access the touch screen, watch movies or video, or use the speakerphone.
Palm Pre is scheduled to be available first in the United States exclusively from Sprint in the first half of 2009, and will be followed by a world-ready UMTS version for other regions. Pricing for the phone has not yet been determined.
If you have any other questions on the Palm Pre, PC Mag has a good list of
FAQs and answers.