Palm Pre (Sprint Nextel)

The Palm Pre is the closest thing to an iPhone the market has seen. It out does the iPhone in several ways and falls a bit short in others. Overall, it is extremely promising. Palm apparently partnered up with a company that employeed former Apple employees.

The touch screen is excellent and .4 of an inch smaller than the iPhone's screen. My feeling on screens is that bigger is better, though the screen on the Pre is very crisp and bright.

The Pre uses a system called 'cards' which allows the user to switch between open applications elegantly and easily. The iPhone will only allow one application to be open at a time. (read on)

When the device is off or the screen is shutdown (for battery conservation) the screen sort of disappears in the all black device. The Pre is probably slightly thicker than the Apple product. This product mimicks the Apple phone with 8GB of flash storage. (Iphone has either 8GB or 16GB) Sprint's network shows it's strength through this device. It does require the 'data' plan just like AT&T's iPhone does.

I fell in love with Pandora all over again, Saturday when I bought my Pre. The Pre fades in from black at the beginnning of each song to show you breifly the title and artist. It fades back to black a few seconds later.

The stereo headphones that come with the device has a very small button in the wire that will pause and play your tunes! Most reviews ignore the sound quality and usability of the MP3 player portion of the device.

An accelerometer lets the user decide the orientation of their 3 megapixel photos by simply tilting the screen whichever way the like. The camera also uses an LED flash which is rare feature for a camera phone.

Then there is the smallish keyboard that slides out of the pre. It may take a bit to get used to, but in my opinion it is superior to the on screen keyboard that comes the iPhone. Input from the keyboard when no app is selected with either dial a phone number or search google. (brilliantly simple)

The device is light, small and powerful. Palm created the WebOS 'from the ground up' using GPLed technology along the way. The power of the 'cloud' can truely be discoverd by using the Pre.

Oh, it makes calls too.