Palm Pre
Photo by O2 UK, used under CC licence
Finally available in the UK, the Palm Pre is touted as the iPhone killer by many. And for good reason. This smartphone looks good, feels good, and works really well.
First, the physical design. The Pre looks very cute, and fits smugly in your hand. This is a phone you’ll want to hold, and it’s a phone you’ll want to use. The menu button is a joy to use, the keyboard nice and smug, and the touchscreen is one of few that actually works properly.
However, I found that the actual usability of the keyboard lets it down, but I’ve never been a fan of physical qwerty keyboards on phones so it’s a very personal taste thing. I did, however, realise very quickly when having to type out ‘.com’ that soft keyboards have their advantage when it comes to being able to quickly enter url shortcuts.
The new webOS is a very nicely made and thought out operating system. It takes ideas from the iPhone OS, but it isn’t afraid to improve and go one step further. The ability to quickly flick between open applications with your finger is lovely, and the quick access to the network options by simply pressing on the top of the screen makes me wish the iPhone had this. Having to quit the running application to mess around with my wifi settings is perhaps the single most infuriating problem when using my iPhone.
The phone does have its faults, of course. It’s noticeably slow and it takes a while to work out how to do things, but it certainly deserves its reputation of being on-par with Apple’s iPhone. If it wasn’t for Apple’s massive App Store, the Palm Pre would certainly be a worthy alternative.
Pros:
Good looking phone that’s pleasant to hold
Well thought out operating system
Very responsive touchscreen
Cons:
Keyboard takes a bit of getting used to
Can be a bit sluggish
You can’t help but wonder where the instructions are