Hands-on Review with the Palm Pre, Amazing.

This is a review from Tony Peric of prethinking.com. He had a meeting yesterday with an individual that had access to a fully working Palm Pre. He is some of what he had to say...


Feel in hand:

The phone feels solid, just as they advertised like a smooth river stone. This particular phone had the Matte back cover and I was told that the owner does have a touchstone and loves the charging device. The overall feel is solid. The slider was responsive and not lose, which is good. I had opened and closed it several times to see if I could get a feel for how the Pre could become loosened over time, but I have to say that the slider mechanism is solid as a rock (no pun intended). Time will tell how this hold’s up to the daily grind but to my understanding, this particular phone has been through some heavy use as text messages were popping up like crazy (busy owner of the Pre I guess). The guys keys are small and a little rubbery but in a few minutes, I had no problem with blasting out a couple of text messages. They work fine. Yes, the qwerty works fine. If you know how to type, you know the Pre.

Ease of Use:

Selecting to run any of the programs was very easy to accomplish. The interface was very intuitive and it felt as I had already owned or played with one before. It was very simple to navigate the phone's apps and made transistions between other applications without a problem. The overall look and feel is similar to the iPhone but mix that in with Windows 7 and kick in a good dose of speed of the Linux OS and that is exactly what you get. One badass, easy to use phone that makes you wonder "Why wasn't this built sooner?"

Multi-tasking:

This is where the phone excels like no other. It truly Multi-tasks and does it with amazing flair. Putting it through a real world test, I started to launch app after app. Pandora, Webpages, email, among a few I cannot name), and the phone had NO LAG whatsoever. The ability to switch between apps using the cards interface was great and you could actually see everything running in the background. This has truly made this phone a revolutionary step in the next direction with operating systems for cell phones.

Furthermore, notifications kept popping up with emails, texts, etc. and the phone didn’t miss a beat notifying or allowing me to switch between the applications when new notifications popped up. I fell in love with this right away. All too often on several other phones, you have to stop what you are doing to accept an incomming call, text message or email. Not on this phone and it does it with some horsepower and slicker unlike any other device on the market. Apple is going to have a seriously hard time trying to play catch up to the Pre.

Applications:

I am not able to go into great detail of the ‘types’ of applications that were available on this particular individual's Pre but I will say, they are certainly extensive. And if the apps contained on this phone gives us any indication of ‘what is to come’ in the App Catalog, I will say with certainty, that the Pre will be the Phone to beat, even though it has a lot of catching up to do with the iPhone and others. The applications are rich with color and the speed at with which they move is ferocious. Several other phones aren't able to hold a candle to the Palm Pre in it's speed of the apps loading and overall usability. Not to mention, that you can multi-task with such fervor! This sets the Pre in a class by itself.

Overall assessment:

The Palm Pre is going to one of the best phones for 2009 in its class. It is truly a Smart Phone and not a dumb phone made to look smart by overlaying apps upon apps on a system that was not designed for Multi-Tasking. This phone will be your phone, a communication device with email and phenomenal text messaging, music, movies, camera, calendar and a whole slew of other applications I am not at liberty to mention.

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