Palm Pre Smartphone Reviews

Palm Pre Smartphone Average Rating: 7.67 / 10

Brand: Palm
Date Added: Jun 18 2009
Number of Reviews So Far: 9 View Reviews



Palm's latest smartphone, the Palm Pre, carries all the features necessary to compete in this market. The phone has a capable 3.1 inch colour touchscreen, slide-out keyboard (unusual in that it is vertically orientated), E-mail, Wi-Fi and GPS turn by turn navigation. As the phone is a slider, it is a bit thicker than it's principal rival, Apple's iPhone.

The phone runs the Palm webOS, which proves responsive and user friendly. Running multiple applications at the same time is easy, with each application held in an "Activity Card", and the user being able to flick between them just like a deck of cards. Managing your calendars and contacts is also easy, with the Palm Synergy feature bringing together your Outlook, Google and Facebook calendars. For convenience, Synergy also combines your communications with a particular person into one view, whether they are IM or texts, and makes it easy to see who's online from your contacts. Messages and appointments appear as notifications at the bottom of the screen, so you're kept informed without being too distracted.

There's a Gesture Bar to allow particular finger movements to control phone operation, making it easy to use the phone on the go. Applications can be launched easily from their icons held in the dock area at the bottom of the screen. There's a trackball and full slide-out keyboard, which unlike rival smartphones slides out in the vertical position, which is convenient for texting and marks the Pre out from the crowd. An accelerometer automatically aligns the screen whether the phone is in landscape or portrait orientation.

The Pre's browser renders pages quickly, and the internet is tightly integrated with many of the phones features. Search has been executed well, as when you type a search and Pre starts with local data on the phone and then offers internet searches on properties such as Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Twitter.

The screen is excellent, and there's a good camera, but video recording is lacking, which was severely missed on the existing version of the iPhone. Other features missed on the existing iPhone were copy and paste and MMS messaging, but the Pre does have these, giving it an advantage over its rival.

You'll be able to download new apps over the air from an App Store. Buying music from Amazon will be easy thanks to an Amazon Music Store App. There are also over-the-air Palm Services to provide data backup and recovery, or even remotely erase all of your data should the phone be lost or stolen.

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