The Palm Pre

The Palm Pre is the latest smartphone announced by Palm at CES 2009. It has a touchscreen as well as a slide out keyboard for input. It runs the latest operating system from Palm, dubbed Web OS. It does pretty much everything that your standard iPhone style smartphone is known for doing these days. It does web, email, music, videos, etc.

There is no word yet on pricing, but we will keep updating this hub as more information becomes available.

Not a whole lot is known about the Palm Pre yet. It was just announced at this year's Consumer Electronics Show (2009), so not a lot of details are available.Here is what I've dug up so far:

It will be available on Sprint. I'm guessing it's a timed exclusive and Palm will eventually push similar phones on Verizon and AT&T. It uses Sprint's advanced broadband quality wireless network to deliver WiFi like speeds similar to the iPhone 3G.

It has a touchscreen that seems to work well. It supports gestures for zooming in on webpages and photos. However, it does not have an onscreen keyboard. It uses a physical keyboard for all text input. I find this to be a bit strange if you are holding the Palm Pre sideways or if you don't want to slide out the keyboard.

For typing in emails or text messages, a physical keyboard is going to be a big boon for some people. I personally don't mind the iPhone's virtual keyboard, but then again I don't write a lot of emails on the go.

One area where the Palm Pre might really shine is in taking photos. It has a 3 megapixel camera, which is far superior to the camera on the iPhone. As much as people use their phones for taking candid shots, this could be a big step up for all those quality facebook/myspace galleries.

Like most modern phones the Palm Pre has a modern web browser, which means it will surf the web the same way the iPhone does. The accelerometer built into the device lets you do landscape or vertical browsing, which is cool, but only having text input from the physical keyboard kind of lesses the coolness of the landscape mode.