Palm had to do something big, bold and revolutionary to get itself back in the game, and it might just have done it: it’s just revealed its new smartphone, the Palm pre – all the specs after the jump.
Cross the iPhone with the T-Mobile G1 and you wouldn’t be far off the pre. At a glance, it’s a 3.1inch touchscreen smartphone, but there’s a slideout QWERTY keypad tucked in there so snug that no one noticed it until halfway through Palm’s CES presentation.
3G, GPS and 8GB of flash memory are squished inside, but far more interesting is the interface, with multitouch extending to the small black bar below to prevent screen smudging.
Palm’s new open source operating system, webOS, looks fantastic on it. Like the INQ1, it merges all of your different social networks and communication forms (Facebook, Google Talk, Outlook etc) into one address book, and the “Deck of card” scrolling bar puts the iPhone’s single task capabilities to shame.
Palm says it’ll be out in the US “as soon as possible”, and definitely by July, but no European details just yet, other than that a UMTS version is coming. We’ll keep you posted of course, and bring you hands on pics later in the day.
Out TBC | £TBC | Palm
