Palm’s new handheld is Pre-tty cool

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 2 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Today at CES, Palm unveiled its new smartphone: the Pre, running webOS (formerly code-named Nova).

The Pre has a 320×480 high-resolution touchscreen display, built-in 3G/GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth, a 3 mega-pixel camera, 8gb of user storage (the most on any Palm handheld ever), an accelerometer (for screen rotation), and the Treo’s familiar keyboard (it slides down from under the screen, or rather, the screen slides up). Though I hate to say it, it’s basically Palm’s version of the iPhone. The market seemed to like what it saw … shares of PALM jumped 34% today!

webOS looks slick … and finally Palm has a multi-tasking operating system! I just hope it’s faster than Windows Mobile (my Treo might not have 3G or be able to run two applications at once, but the user-interface speed blows away any WM6 device).

So, any bad news? First, the Pre will initially be available only on Sprint (CDMA), in the first half of 2009. Hopefully other carriers (like AT&T) will follow. Next, and I couldn’t confirm this, it doesn’t look like there’s any backward compatibility with PalmOS. There is a huge library of third-party applications out there and none of them will run on the Pre. I’m sure developers will jump on the platform relatively quickly, though, and it’s probably better to leave the legacy of PalmOS behind (how about a PalmOS emulator for webOS? 😉 ). No Flash support either. I’ll bet it has cut-and-paste though!

There’s a lot more good information over on Engadget (except pricing, which hasn’t been announced yet) and some videos of the Pre in action from Gizmodo. For now I’ll have to wait and hope that my next smartphone is going to be a member of the Pre family.

Heh, there’s already a wiki page.

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