Palm Pre: Three times as lucky?

As expected, Palm showcased its new, eagerly anticipated smartphone at CES 2009 late last week. And judging from the generally positive reaction, perhaps Palm is three times as lucky after all.

The new smartphone in question is called the Palm Pre, and features a 480 x 320 capacitive touchscreen with multitouch capabilities. A "gesture area" fronts the bottom of the display, which is used by the user for switching between applications, among other things. For users who prefer hardware buttons, a QWERTY keyboard reminiscent of the Treo keyboard slides downwards as needed.

Under the hood is the new Palm webOS--one of the key factors that will either make or break Palm. What is unique about the webOS is its concept of using "cards" to describe the interaction with content. The user can quickly switch between multiple application screens by "sliding" the card to the side; to close a running program for good, the user flicks the card off the top of the screen.

One interesting aspect of the webOS is its concept of seamlessly accessing PIM data from multiple sources. The heart of this ability resides in a Palm-developed technology called Synergy. Synergy enables the webOS to connect to disparate sources of data such as an enterprise Exchange Server, web-based email such as Google, as well as locally stored data. For more information about the software side of things, you can read more about the Palm webOS here.

Some bad news though: WebOS will not support legacy Palm OS software. The Palm Pre is expected to be released before the second half of the year by Sprint, though Palm refuses to divulge any pricing information at this point.

To read more on the article:
- check out this article from Brighthand
- check out this article from Network World

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Will Palm be three times as lucky?
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