Palm today announced their new phone and their new direction today. It’s this, the “Pre”. It’s got a curvy slide-out QWERTY keyboard, 3 megapixel camera with flash, EVDO Rev A (this isn’t for Europe then), WiFi, GPS, gesture area (allowing simple finger movements for navigation), stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) and 8GB of user storage. The screen is a 320×480 pixel 3.1″ display and there’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack along with a microUSB connector giving you mass storage capabilities.
Inside is webOS which, according to Palm Executive Chairman Ron Rubinstein, will be attractive to anyone coding in HTML, Javascript or CSS. Hmm.. That’s a lot of people. Palm’s Matias Duarte was keen to promote the physical keyboard (instead of an on-screen one) and showed off the Palm Touchstone charging dock. With this there’s no worrying about connection, orientation or fit – just set the phone onto the Touchstone and it’ll charge without a connector.
Inside you’ll also find a “desktop class browser”, POP3 and Exchange server support, instant messaging and an “advanced multimedia experience”. The Pre also packs a light sensor (for adjusting screen brightness dynamically), acceleromer and a proximity sensor. Palm need this phone to do well and there’s every possibility that it will. Let’s hope Microsoft are ready for yet another challenger in the Smartphone arena.
It will be appearing on Sprint in the first half of this year and engadget have managed to get info of a GSM version too.
Links – Palm Press Release – Sprint.com
Credit – DailyTech – Electronista – Gizmodo (thanks Dan!)
Palm announce the Pre and new webOS
January 8, 2009