LAS VEGAS — Palm just gave us a demo of the Pre. You know the gadget unveiled at CES everyone is talking nonstop about. And although they didn't let us handle the device (no touching!), we did get a very detailed preview from the Palm's Director of Product Marketing, Paul Cousineau.
Our first impressions? The hardware itself is...succulent. When the slider is closed, it's a little smaller than an iPhone, when opened it's a little larger than a BlackBerry Bold. The touchscreen itself is prettier than an Icelandic supermodel with colors that pop like an M-80. The screen is also multi-touch, allowing you to pinch and expand photos and web pages...kind of like another touch screen device we know of. During the demo we didn't see any sort of lag or jagged scrolling — the phone's operating system looked like it was fully baked and functioning flawlessly.
The accelerometer had no problem orienting itself. Flipping the phone on its side and the web browser followed suit. One cool, novice feature: when the phone is titled on it's Y axis 45 degrees or so (like you're showing the person in front of you a picture) the screen orients itself 180 degrees allowing whoever is on the other end to view the screen right side up. It's a clever touch that allows you to share images and web pages with friends a little more easily than other devices.
The browser is constructed on top of Webkit — the same platform as
Android and the iPhone — and it works. The slide out QWERTY keyboard handles text input (there's no virtual keyboard) with web pages that took only a few seconds to load. When text or pictures were too small to read, the multi-touch pinching expanded things out perfectly. Palm claims they selected Sprint as the Pre's lone carrier primarily because of the very large, ultra-fast data networks. While I'm sure this will benefit the Palm on the data side, Sprint's voice network skews toward the subpar end of the spectrum.
Okay remember when we said that we didn't touch the phone before? That was a little bit of a fib. When no one was looking we did scroll through the contacts screen. It was creamy smooth but took a very delicate touch. When I first mashed my index against the screen the contact list flipped out a little and wouldn't scroll. When I lightened up and just barely brushed the screen, it responded with fluid scrolling. I also managed to pinch a web page, opening up some difficult to read text and a small picture.
The pinching action felt exactly like the iPhone; natural and effortless.
The brief time I played with the Pre felt promising. Palm has been vague on when we'll see actual review units, but it should be sometime in the next month or so. Hopefully, the finalized version of the Pre lives up to the promise we've seen in this demo.
(Photo by Jon Snyder/ Wired.com)
See also:
Palm Unveils Its Long Awaited Smartphone, The Pre
