Palm back in the game with Pre

Can Palm save itself with the Pre? Maybe, they do seem to be on the right track.

Gizmodo on Pre

It has a 3.1 inch 480x320 screen that slides vertically to reveal a keyboard. The slider action is curved, sort of like the SE Xperia X1. It also has 3MP Camera, LED Flash, EVDO rev.A, WiFi, bluetooth, a gesture area on the screen for navigation and use, a removable battery, micro USB, USB mass storage support, a 3.5mm Headphone Jack., plus a very cool wireless charger.

It weighs 4.8 ounces and can be used easily with one hand. The phone runs on a new platform named Web OS, which is designed to seamlessly integrate all your web content into one interface. It's going to release the first half of 2009 on the Sprint network, but pricing details were not discussed.

The phone itself reminds me of the Treo 680 in shape, except all there is on the front is a screen and a button.

One of the big new features is something called Synergy, which can pull contacts from all your sites (Facebook, Gmail, AIM, etc...), gather and organize them into one coherent list on the Palm Pre. It has dupe checking so you don't have the same contacts listed multiple times. It does the same thing for calendar events.

Boing Boing's opinion of killer features

There was a glow on the face of every Palm employee we saw today, and deservedly so: the new Palm Pre is a hail mary product. It's probably going to save the company.

And it is, in many ways, better than the iPhone.

Brownlee and I got a little guided tour of a Pre by a beaming executive this evening. (We filmed it; Xeni, Derek, and Wes from the Boing Boing video team are working on it as I write.) But I'm so excited about the product that I wanted to share my enthusiasm before I forgot all the details about why I am so into it in the first place.

Scoble on Pre

When I sat down at the beginning of the Palm Pre announcement press conference I was expecting to watch the death of a company. Palm? Give me a break. It would NEVER do anything interesting and Nokia, Microsoft, RIM, and expecially Apple were about to kick it into the deathbin of history.

I was wrong. WAY WAY WAY wrong.

Palm just did what Nokia and Microsoft and RIM couldn’t do: deliver a better experience than Steve Jobs did.

“Give me a break Scoble, you are drinking the shiny new object Koolaid,” I can hear you saying.

This is why I didn’t post a blog about it all day, even though everyone else did. I wanted to let the Koolaid wear off. I went back to the Palm booth again tonight just to make sure what I saw this morning was real.

I learned even more stuff that just blew me away.

From Palm? Give me a break!

Nokia’s devices that I saw last month just suddenly seem so lame.

Why? Well, when you look at the Nokia N97, which will be out at about the same time as the Palm Pre, you see that they also have a nice UI, but it falls apart when you click down into apps and try to do things. Palm doesn’t fall apart. Click down and you keep getting shocked.

They seem to be learning lessons from Apple. The retail package looks iPodian.

While wandering Palm's lounge of poor lighting and heavy shadow, we bumped into the retail packaging for the Pre. While not likely the final design, it certainly follows Palm's recent packaging aesthetic.

I hope Palm does well with this. Competition is good for consumers and a viable alternative to the iPhone is needed.