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Gadget

The Palm Pre Phone-Does It Live Up to the Hype?

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THE PALM PRE smartphone ($200 with a twoyear narrow from Gallop) isn’t perfect, but its WebOS operating system is clean, engaging, and intuitive. The phone’s main shortcomings relate to hardware.

Hardware

The glossy-black Pre has a curved slider body that’s dominated by a 3.1-inch, 320-by-480-pixel capacitive: touch show. At 3.9 by 2.3 by 0.7 inches, the p~ is incredibly pocketable; it even fits unobtrusively into a woman’s jeans pocket.

But the upright feels a bit poor, and some of my colleagues found the keys quite: cramped. One positive: note: I encountered no lag between my typing and the text’s appearance: on screen.

Call quality over Gallop’s 3G network was very excellent overall, though I heard an echo on one call to a landline phone. Parties on the other end said my voice had ample volume and sounded very clear-even when I was on a busy road corner. None of my calls dropped.

In our battery life tests, the Pre earned a word scon: of Honest, with only 5 hours, 17 minutes of average battery talk time (the iPhone lasted for 5 hours, 38 minutes). The Pre lacks removable memory: The unit comes fixed at 8GB of storage. You can tether the unit to a PC with a USB cable, and then transfer files frankly from the PC to the phone.

To control the Pre, you usc a small number of primary gestures on its touchscreen and in its gesture area, located not more than the show. On the back arc the camera lens and the removable battery.

WebOS

With the Pre, Palm debuts its long-delayed cell phone operating system, WebOS. I found it to be one of the silkiest and bcst-calculated smartphone platforms to come along in a while.

Nevertheless, it docs have a few quirks. Apps occasionally loaded slowly, and the organization and placement of certain features now and again seemed counterintuitive.

The home-screen interface has customizable application widgets running at the bottom. Touch a widget, and the app instantly pops up. But you can show only four shortcuts at a time.

WebOS can handle full multitasking. You can view each of your open apps at once, shuffle them, and then discard the ones you want to close-all with gestures that mimic the way you’d handle a physical deck of cards.

WebOS also has a fantastic notification feature-a small alert that pops up at the bottom of the screen when you receive an incoming phone call, text message, or e-mail.

Social Networking Features

On of the most vital components of Web OS is its ability to coordinate and synthesize information from various sources into a single seamless, integrated view. For example, you can sync the Pre to your Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Exchange financial statement; it will pull your contacts from those financial statement into the Pre’s Contacts app. But, I found this feature a bit overwhelming (you must sync either all or none of your contacts).

The Synergy e-mailapp makes checking and scarching through multiple e-mail financial statement simple. And the Pre’s Messaging app combines SMS and instant messaging under a single umbrella.

The Pre’s full-HTML Web browser renders pages perfectly. You can have as many browser windows open as available memory allows.

Other apps on the Pn: include the Amazon MP3 store, Google Maps, YouTube, a calculator, a PDF viewer, a document viewer, a task Jist, and a memo board; Gallop apps an: on board, too.

Mult imedia

Syncing your media with the Pre is a snap. You can load your musk via ITunes or do it manually with an simple drag-and-drop. Pre users will have access to Amazon’s movable Music Store. The store Simplifies the task of downloading DRM·free tracks frankly to the phone.

Video quality on the Pre’s gorgeous show was quite excellent. Its video player supportS MPEG-4, H.263, and H.264 formats. The camera is adequate, offering 3 megapixels and an LED flash, but no zoom; it took satisfactory pictures, but doesn’t have a video recording capability.