Palm Comes Up Trumps With The Multitouch Phone Pre

09/01/09

Meet Palm Pre, a phone that’s always thinking ahead to make your life easier. Pre pulls your different online calendars into one view, bringing you the information you want without having to search for it. Pre links your contacts from different sources, giving you one place to find what you need. And Pre delivers incoming messages1 and notifications in an intuitively subtle way, letting you react or respond however you want. People, events, information that matters. With Palm Pre, it’ll come to you.
The new Palm pre will come with EvDO, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS connectivity and a slide out QWERTY keyboard. Storage will be 8GB and it will be powered by a Texas Instruments processor.

Elsewhere there will be a multi-touch 3.1-inch 320 x 480 resolution colour screen. On the back there will be a 3-megapixel camera, a speaker and taking a dig at Apple - a replaceable battery.

Connection options will give you a USB connector and microSD socket. You'll also get a 3.5mm headphone jack and ringer switch to silence the device.

The operating system has been designed to act like a pack of cards that you can shuffle through.

The idea appears to be an attempt to remove the UI from the UI.

"There are no save buttons, no close buttons, it just works", the company said as it demoed the product.

The multitouch is used for "pinching" into web pages or images, whilst messages and notifications will show at the bottom of the screen, this means when you are in other applications you can still stay in touch regardless of what is being shown at the time.

Palm has also announced the first accessory for the Palm pre, which takes the form of the Touchstone.

The charger will offer wireless power so according to palm all you have to do is simply place the smartphone on the charger.

The Palm pre will be available exclusively on Sprint in the US in the first half of 2009. No word on whether the Palm pre will be coming to the UK.