The new iPhone rival - Pre

6/6/09

Thats the date when Apple got a headache. The reason - the biggest competition for its iPhone got released. The name of the competition - Palm Pre.
After a long long time Palm comes up with a huge gadget(and huge in terms of its importance), The Palm pre, often called by analysts as the 'iPhone Killer' is one of their top favirotes. Some even got to the extent of saying that Palm just might become bankrupt if this product fails to deliver. But that doesn't seem so, with the smarties of this industry for its WebOS based device.



The curved pebble-like looking is glossy but not shiny - just the way i like it. The 3.1inch touchscreen claims to render 16million colours at 320x480 pixels, and auto rotates with the help of the accelerometer built in.
The gadget uses a single button on the screen just like the iPhone, using it to be the one touch input. This gives you some positive and negetive uses(though the functionality is made complicated, the interface comes clean).

It edges over the iPhone where the latter lags the most - the lack of a physical keyboard. It has a Querty keyboard similar to that of Centro's. The company claims that the angle of the screen lessens the glare for better viewing. Clad in black, and the alphabet in white with a red tinge to it, the colour combination looks simply amazing.

The Pre sports a 3.15 MP camera with LED flash and enhanced fixed focus. The 2048x1536 pixel pictures are great, but the lack of video recording does take its ups a bit low. However, as the WebOS is open-source, it is expected that some developer soon comes up with a solution for it.

On the storage front, Palm does offer 8GB inbuilt memory, though is not possible to expand it using microSD. But the 3.5mm audio jack does make the inbuilt 8Gig extremely useful for music playback purposes.

This 3G handset has GPS, Bluetooth , Wi-Fi, Micro USB, etc. But surprisingly, radio is not supported. It does seem amusing , looking to the fact that a radio transmitter uses so little of resources.

But still, given the wonderful WebOS, and the solid hardware, the phone seems superb, giving Apple marketing guys more and more lines on their foreheads. Its already launched in the US.

Lets see how the phone fares. A couple of weeks is a lot of time to rate it thoroughly.