Palm Pre (mostly) praised in early reviews
The $200 Palm Pre won’t be available until Saturday, but several high-profile publications that received review units of the much-anticipated smart phone have weighed in—mostly positively.
The reviews echoes many of the positive points we made after having used the Pre a few months back at CES 2009. We liked the Pre’s unique webOS operating system, which provides a highly intuitive interface that elegantly aggregates all the relevant elements pertaining to contacts, calendars, and messaging, and stays connected to their Web-based sources to keep the most up-to-date info at your fingertips.
The interface, too, is a pleasant departure for the old icon-driven menu system started by the iPhone—which can handle only one application at a time. As I observed, the Pre shuffles open applications like a deck of cards, holding your place when you return to them.
The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg liked that interface, and also praised the Pre’s built-in keyboard—since some people don’t like virtual keyboards like those found on the iPhone. He, like me, also liked Synergy, which keeps track of all of your communications – if, say, you are both texting and e-mailing—in one “chat-style” view. He also liked the Pre’s turn-by-turn navigation and automatic wireless backup.
The New York Time’s David Pogue liked the Pre as well, but he dinged the keyboard as too small and the ringer as too quiet.
Both reviewers criticized the Pre’s battery life as too short—Pogue even calling it a “heartbreaker”—and the dearth of applications in the Pre’s App Store, in contrast to the tens of thousands of apps now available for iPhones.
Of course, comparisons to the current iPhone may become moot on Monday, when Apple is widely expected to announce a new iPhone, which WSJ’s Mossberg says “will have lots of added features that could alter [the] calculations” when comparing iPhone to Pre.
We plan to buy the Pre on Saturday, and have more to say and show about the phone on Monday. —Mike Gikas.