by Michelle Lentz
The tech/gadget world has been all a-twitter (literally) about the new Palm Pre. Like everyone else, I had pretty much written off Palm as far as Smartphones go. I even routinely make fun of my husband’s clunky Treo (regardless of the fact he has better reception than my iPhone). This was silly of me. After all, Palm was one of the early companies out there. Apple’s Newton failed rather spectacularly, but along came the Palm Pilot and things changed. I had two or three different Palms over the years, as recently as five years ago.
I gave up the Palm for a Blackberry when I realized that a Palm, a phone, and an iPod in my purse was one gadget too many. That was followed by the iPhone, which miraculously reduced me to one gadget. Yet I often pine for the keyboard on my Blackberry. I’m one of the few, it seems, to have never quite taken to the virtual keyboard on the iPhone. My contract is up this year and I was seriously considering investigating other services and other phones. The Android was tops on my list, followed by the Storm, but now I think the Pre may be pushing all those others aside.
Palm debuted the Pre (prounounced “pree” – there’s a line over the e that WordPress doesn’t like) at CES this week. Since then, several different gadget bloggers have had the opportunity to get up close and personal with the phone. Interestingly, Palm won’t let any of the bloggers actually touch the phone, but they’ve tried. No price has been set on this innovative new smartphone and the release date is sometime in the first half of this year. So they’ve got some time to work out bugs and settle on competitive pricing.
The new phone runs Linux, has an accelerometer like the iPhone, touch screen capability and a pull out keyboard. Apparently the toolbar is a really cool feature, and the speaker is fairly loud. The applications are all fairly solid, from what I’ve read, and your contacts have information pulled in from their social network profiles. That’s small, but impressive. My favorite? System wide cut and paste.
I’m curious to know how well it will sync with a Mac and just as important, and often forgotten, is it a decent phone?
My favorite video so far is the one from our friends at Boing Boing Gadgets, so I’ve embedded it here.
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Contact Michelle with news, stories, events, and more.
Email: michelle[at]writetech[dot]net
Twitter: @writetechnology
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Blogs: Write Technology, Wine-Girl.net
