We check out the phone that could save Sprint in our review of Palm's first WebOS smartphone. Is there a new king of smartphone hill? Find out in our Palm Pre review.
Review summary of the Palm Pre:
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 The Palm Pre is a very good phone, and an exciting addition to the smartphone world. We enjoyed our time with the phone, and would have no trouble recommending the phone. But to who would we recommend it? iPhone users might be put off by the less intuitive interface, which would be a shame because they would miss the snappy feel of the e-mail and address book apps. BlackBerry fans might gripe about the smaller QWERTY with those grippy keys. That would be too bad, because the Palm Pre does all the great consolidation of e-mail, contacts and messaging that BlackBerry users take for granted, but extends these to social networking and Internet search, as well. So, here's how to know if you should buy the Pre. Do you use Gmail, Exchange and a variety of e-mail and scheduling services? Do you text, twitter, Google Chat and send messages over Facebook? Do you have dozens of duplicate phone book entries that need some organization? If so, the Palm Pre is an impressive way to bring a lot of disparate services together in an organized, intelligent way, and it might be the smartphone for you. Release: June 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: Beautiful, fast interface with innovative, useful new features. Great hardware design. Very good contacts, messaging and multimedia integration.
Cons: Interface has a steep learning curve. Camera and multimedia functions good, but can't compete with the best.
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Full Palm Pre Review:
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Design – Very Good
In every way, the Palm Pre is a gorgeous smartphone. Closed and asleep, it's a polished stone with an almost unbroken, tight-fitting seam between the top and the botton. Open and awake, the screen melts into the black plastic around it and the keyboard is reasonably sized and gently curved to fit the hand. Palm has been talking up the phone's ergonomics, and it truly is quiet comfortable to hold, something we take for granted with our stiff-backed iPhone. The screen is dazzling, packing in the same number of pixels as Apple's device into a smaller diagonal width, with fantastic color depth and rich contrast. The screen blends nicely into the glossy plastic around it because it looks glossy and bright as plastic itself.
The WebOS interface on which Palm has gambled its fortunes is a stunning piece of work, but it won't win over converts right away. It has a steep learning curve. There are plenty of gestures and shortcuts to manipulate the onscreen "card" windows, but these weren't often intuitive, and Palm offers few onscreen menus or buttons for guidance. iPhone users will certainly find WebOS a bit complicated, but there is a benefit to being so difficult. In return, WebOS rewards some practice with a very speedy and convenient interface. Once we knew our way around, opening and closing apps was near instantaneous,
There are a few gems in the WebOS interface. First, start typing from the main screen, and you'll begin a search like you've never seen on a mobile phone. The phone searches contact information and application names. Keep typing, and you can search Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Twitter. Those four alone would make a formidable search force, but Twitter seems to be a recent addition, so we expect more search services down the pike.
The second thing we like about the WebOS interface is that it retains Palm's key charms. Palm OS was always a fast and efficient OS. Press one button to jump directly to e-mail, another for calendar. Keystrokes were kept to a minimal, and we're happy to say that WebOS continues this tradition. Most touchscreen interface designs seem to revel in their layers of menus, but at any time on WebOS, you can drag your finger up from the bottom of the screen to bring up shortcuts for the phone, contacts, e-mail, calendar and the application launcher windows. Jump to any one of those, and the Palm Pre will hide your work in progress without losing anything. You can keep the music player and Sprint Navigator open in the background so you don't lose your progress.
We could ramble endlessly about the nuances of Palm's WebOS, but needless to say it is a nuanced OS. It wasn't easy to pick up and learn without a little help, but there is a good onboard help directory, and some patience and learning will be rewarded with a quick, efficient OS. The iPhone seems fun and jolly compared to WebOS, which seems like fun and jolly's rich uncle. In a way, we think BlackBerry users might find the OS even more appealing, as it presents many of the messaging and integration benefits of a BlackBerry, without any of the long menus that make BlackBerry devices tedious to figure out.
Calling and Contacts – Very Good
The Palm Pre did a fine job making phone calls, though this wasn't one of the strong points of the WebOS interface. That isn't to say the call screen wasn't useful and good looking. It just wasn't as easy and intuitive to manage as other touchscreen phones we've used, notably Samsung's TouchWiz phones, like the Samsung Omnia. Calls made on the Palm Pre sounded very good in our tests. Sprint reception in our area lags behind the larger carriers, but we never had a problem connecting our calls, and callers reported a pleasant, clean sound, especially when reception was solid. For battery life, we were a bit disappointed. We got a little more than 4 hours of talking out of our Palm Pre review unit, which isn't horrible, but we would have liked to see more talk time. We imagine the constant, always-on networking played no small part in the short battery life.
In terms of contacts, the Palm Pre and Palm's WebOS try something new and extraordinary. We entered all our information for our Microsoft Exchange, Google Gmail and Facebook accounts and the Palm Pre gathered all of our address book info, aggregated our contacts into one list and piled duplicated on top of each other. You get contact pictures from any of the 3 accounts, even Facebook. It's a bit overwhelming, especially if you have loads of Facebook friends, but we still found it to be incredibly convenient. It would only be better if the Palm Pre would sync the other way, to clean up our work contact lists and remove duplicates on the server.
Otherwise, the Palm Pre has a nice set of calling features, but not all of our favorites. Conference calling was available, but the Palm Pre didn't let us pick and choose who to hang up on first. There's no voice dialing app, which shouldn't be much of a surprise, because Palm always lagged behind the competition in voice dialing on their older smartphones. The speakerphone was very loud, however, and pairing the phone with our Bluetooth equipment was very easy and reliable.
Messaging and Keyboard – Very Good
For messaging options, the Palm Pre uses a unified mailbox, with the ability to create smart folders to help monitor only the incoming mail you care about. Our Palm Pre managed to synchronize with our Exchange account, including our buried subfolders, with no trouble, and combined this inbox with our Gmail. We wish that Facebook integration would show up here like it did in the contacts list, but beyond Exchange and the standard POP and IMAP capabilities, there were no real surprises. In e-mails, HTML would sometimes render properly, but sometimes the phone seemed hesitant, and all we could see was a page full of hyperlinks. For text messaging, we were pleased to see threaded messaging in the SMS app, since Palm did originate the idea on their Treo phones.
The keyboard on our Palm Pre wasn't bad. Its keys were a bit small, since the QWERTY takes up the narrow side of the phone instead of sliding our lengthwise. Still, we found the Pre as easy to type on as a Treo, and easier than a Centro. BlackBerry fans used to the hard, clicking, curved keys on their favorite phones will certainly get used to the Pre. iPhone users might not miss the onscreen keyboard, since the Pre doesn't make that an option.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
We've been longing for some time for a better calendar, and Palm has come up with a stylish, modern and useful look for their scheduling tools. The calendar was clean and new looking with splashes of color. Appointments were clearly blocked in the month view. We especially like how time off is condensed, accordion style, to keep daily appointments closer together. The calendar was able to draw our schedule and holidays from our Exchange calendar, our Google Gmail calendar, our Facebook calendar (which we hardly knew existed) as well as from apps we downloaded from the Palm App Catalog. It used Flixtser for movie calendars, for instance. This was an innovative and practical way to unify a lot of different scheduling tools, another unique idea on the Palm Pre.
For productivity tools, the Palm Pre gets a competent suite, but we'll probably see the power tools appear when third parties jump headfirst into the App Catalog pool. There's a simple viewer app for Office documents, and another for PDF files, but we miss real editing capabilities. We imagine this will be a paid app later in the game.
Like the iPhone, the Palm Pre also loses out in laptop tethering, one of our favorite productivity tools. Though the Palm Pre browses Sprint's impressively fast EV-DO Rev. A network, you can't use the phone as a modem for your portable PC. Sure, for the additional cost of a data plan you could simply pay for a separate USB modem (or a MiFi device), but we always liked the convenience of charging our phone and connecting the same device as a modem in one fell swoop.
Multimedia – Very Good
The music player on the Palm Pre was strongly reminiscent of Apple's iPod player on the iPhone, but without some of the fancy Genius playlist footwork. The Pre has good playback controls, but lacks advanced EQ options. Still, the player looked good, with our album artwork accounted for. We also found it easy to control and monitor playback while other apps were running.
Though the Palm Pre gets some of Sprint's 3G services like Sprint Navigator and Sprint TV streaming video content, the Palm Pre eschews Sprint's own Music Store for the Amazon MP3 store, the same as we found on the T-Mobile G1. It's a real coup for buyers, as the Amazon store offers far superior prices, DRM-free MP3 tracks that can play on any digital device, and superior software that allows buyers to queue up an entire album for download automatically. We'd like to see Amazon's MP3 store on more devices in the future.
Video playback can be a little picky on the Palm Pre, but if your videos are formatted perfectly for the 480 by 320 pixel screen resolution, the results can be impressive. Again, the video player lacked a wealth of options, but in terms of simply playing a movie from end to end, it did a fine job, and our movies looked superb on the high pixel density screen.
In terms of hardware, the Palm Pre packs just enough storage, but purists might scoff. The Pre comes with 8GB of internal storage, less after formatting and system space, of course. There's no memory card slot, a huge misstep, and there's no 16GB or larger option, a second stumble. This will be the first, and perhaps easiest improvement we'll predict for the Palm Pre, and we hope Palm doesn't leave early adopters feeling cheated. Beyond the storage, Palm wisely includes a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, perfect for using your favorite earbuds. The Palm Pre also supports stereo Bluetooth for wireless music listening.
Web browsing – Very Good
The Web browser on our Palm Pre was very good. It used a simple interface without any fancy mini map or zooming tricks, but it was also very quick and responsive. Whether we were browsing Sprint's EV-DO network or our local Wi-Fi network, the browser on the Palm Pre loaded pages quickly. The browser gets a nice set of tricks thanks to its multitouch controls. iPhone users will recognize the pinch zooming techniques, though it didn't seem as responsive as it does on the iPhone.
Camera - Mediocre
The camera on the Palm Pre was a real disappointment. We were expecting the 3-megapixel shooter to produce impressive results. Instead, we got a standard cameraphone, or even less, since the Palm Pre can't perform some of the basic functions of your average carrier feature phone. There's no video recording, like on the first two iPhones. Also like Apple's devices, the Palm Pre has no camera settings. You can't adjust white balance, focal depth, or opt for any scene modes to help with shooting. And the Palm Pre definitely needs help. Focal depths were way off, as the camera usually aimed at the background instead of the foreground. We also had trouble with the automatic white balance. As you can see in our trio of self portrait shots below, the three pictures, taken back to back, produced dramatically different results. Even our best picture lacked fine detail at full crop. Colors looked okay when the Palm Pre got the lighting correct, but the phone really can't compete against the great cameraphones on the market, like the Nokia N85 and the HTC Touch Diamond 2.
Best Pic of flowers and wood
Off focus puffball
Large File: 3 Self Portraits taken back to back
GPS – Very Good
GPS performance on our Palm Pre was very good. The phone also comes with a nice mix of GPS apps, hopefully with the promise of plenty more to come. The phone come loaded with Google Maps, though it wasn't the best version of this app we'd seen. Most of the features were there, but there was no street view option, and none of the cool features we're seeing pop up in Android and elsewhere. For turn-by-turn navigation, the Palm Pre gets a nice build of Sprint Navigator. The app looked good while we were driving and navigating around. We had a little trouble finding the satellites a couple times, and ended up restarting the phone, which solved our trouble. Meanwhile, the Sprint Navigator app did a fine job while we were getting a good signal from space. The app could use a visual overhaul. The 3D map looked good, but the local search map looked pretty dated.
The best part about GPS on the Palm Pre is that this seems to be one area where developers have complete access, Most apps we downloaded, from Flixster for movie times to Tweed for Twitter feeds, all asked to use our location data. Hopefully we'll see GPS services explode on this phone as they did on Apple's device.
Price and availability
The Palm Pre is available now from Sprint for $200 with a $100 mail-in rebate. Other outlets, like Best Buy and Radio Shack, are offering the Palm Pre for $200 with an instant rebate.
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