Hardware:
The Palm Pre is the latest of Palm’s cell phone creation, bringing with it the demise of the legendary Palm OS and birthing the Web OS, a highly advanced OS based off the idea of always being in-sync with the web wherever you go.
The basics of the phone follow the new standard set by the iPhone with an innovative interface controlled by a 3.1” capacitive high resolution (480×320) touch screen which allows users to utilize their fingers with ease and accuracy. It also sports 8Gbs of internal storage which is unfortunately not expandable, and is powered by a 600Mhz ARM CPU with 256Mbs of RAM. This gives the Pre a significantly powerful platform from which to drive their new WebOS which we’ll touch upon a bit later.
The rest of the Pre’s specs are fairly industry standard with CDMA and GSM support, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, a MicroUSB port, b/g WiFi with support for WPA, WPA2, and 802.1X authentication, it also has an aGPS module, and runs off a 1150mAh Li-ion battery which is removable. It sports a 3.5mm headphone jack, has a proximity and light sensor, an accelerometer, and a physical slide-out QWERTY keypad.
Hardware-wise, the Pre gives a great amount of flexibility to its users, carrying all of the latest industry standards, as well as providing both a keyboard and touch screen method of navigation and entering text. However, apart from being the highest-end phone in terms of circuitry, the Pre doesn’t introduce anything new to the table over-all; it just introduces them all in a new neat package that hasn’t yet been released. Where the Pre should really shine and set itself out from the all the other touch screen (capacitive and resistive) phones, is how the OS interacts with the phone.
Software:
The new OS is being monikered as the WebOS by Palm and like its name suggests, is heavily based off the mobile web. The OS is built off Linux source code, and is meant to be used with touch screen phones, operated by fingers, and takes it roots off current web-based languages such as HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS. This makes it potentially incredibly easy to create applications for the OS as it doesn’t introduce a new language and merely builds off existing technology.
The way the web-based programming languages will tie into the OS and the hardware is by way of JavaScript APIs which will be readily made available once the Mojo SDK for the OS is released publically, currently it is obtainable only after being approved by signing up on Palm’s website. The easy syntax of the languages Palm selected for the OS should make it relatively simple for developers to create new applications.
In terms of the GUI, the web OS is a very simplistic, sleek, and attractive interface with smooth and rapid navigation between applications. A demo of the OS was presented at CES 2009 and showed off the Pre’s capability to run applications in the background and switch to them with a swipe of a finger without any lag time and without losing any work or text entry.
Palm also demonstrated the OS’s unique feature of being constantly connected to the internet, keeping emails, contacts, IMs, notes, documents, etc in constant sync with your main account which will most likely reside with Palm. It will also sync effortlessly with other software available on the web such as Google’s Gmail, calendar, contacts, etc. Palm is effectively creating the OS is be cloud-based as it’s called.
The downside with the OS however is, the languages that it is built off of cannot allow for intensive tasks such as games, hardware interactions, nor allow deeper interaction with the OS. This is because the languages (CSS, HTML, JavaScript) are really only used to create website designs, they are never used for anything more in-depth than a website’s layout and basic functions such as form validation or animations. Whether or not there will be a different way of truly tapping into the Pre’s hardware and into making native applications is unknown at this time. However, it is known that there will be a Legacy emulator which will allow users to run older applications which were built for the Palm OS Classic.
In all, the Palm Pre is a very promising phone, mainly because of its OS, though it’s hardware capabilities are certainly ahead of the current cell phone curve. The Pre is scheduled to hit US store shelves the 6th of June for 199$ after 100$ mail-in rebate, on the Sprint network with a 2 year contract. There will be one major accessory that will be available which is the Palm Touchstone, a wireless charger that can charge the Pre without plugging any cables into the phone, all it requires is for the phone to be placed on the surface and it will instantly start to charge.
Learn more about the Pre here:
http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/index.html
This was posted over at PCHelpForum.com and was written by me and published with my permission over there.
Tags: cellphones