There's been a lot of hype surrounding the Palm Pre. Does it live up to it? Yes.

For a start, the operating system has been described as 'revolutionary' - and it actually is. The Synergy syncing software is just amazing and the Pre's multitasking abilities are second to none. We wouldn't describe the Palm Pre as an iPhone killer, but it has set a new smartphone standard, and we want one.

 

Look and feel

The Palm Pre has a capacitive touch-screen (like the iPhone), and it's perfect. Dragging, swiping, multi-touching and tapping even lightly produce an accurate response.

It's 3.1 inches with a 320x480-pixel resolution, just right for making the best of all your multimedia goodies. At the bottom is the 'gesture area', which you swipe to launch, quit and switch apps; it's a good feature and part of what makes this such a usable phone.

The Pre is smaller than the iPhone with a rounded shape that feels good to hold. The glossy finish is unusually prone to smudging, though.

A thumb push is all it takes to slide the screen up, not entirely smoothly, to reveal the QWERTY keyboard underneath and a sharper shape.

Oddly, the keyboard and screen appear to belong on two separate phones. In contrast to that high-spec touch-screen, the keyboard is somewhat small and the keys need to be pushed quite hard to get a response.

The Pre has a nice curvy backside on which sit the 3.15-megapixel camera lens, a teeny LED flash and the onboard speaker.

 

WebOS

Smartphones can make it difficult to simply dial a number into your phone, but the Palm Pre isn’t too bad – just fire up the dialer and input your number. If you type in a name on the home screen, your contact’s phone numbers and email will appear. You don’t have an option for favourite contacts, but you can use every character key as a speed dial, and add the numbers you call a lot to your main menu or contacts bar.

But it’s the WebOS operating system that gives the Palm Pre its power. Palm promised a revolutionary user interface, and it didn’t lie. It’s based on a system of cards on your home screen, each representing an open app, and you simply flick between them with your finger. If you want to close the app, just flick it up and out of the carousel. It’s an intuitive process, which really makes the most of the large touch-screen. In fact, using the Palm Pre does involve a lot of flicking – you just flick right-to-left along to gesture area to go back or to the home screen.

 

Customisation

Below this card structure sits a customisable quick launch bar, which you can launch in a brilliant wave-type motion. If you drag your finger upwards from any screen, the bar appears like a wave you can slide long to select your app. The main program is called Launcher – three screen of programs you can rearrange and change. This and the quick launcher are the only customisable areas on the home screen.

It’s all structured so logically. The menu options for all the apps are in the top right corner, notifications show up in the bottom right. Your missed calls pop onto the screen, giving you the option to call back or dismiss, and a flick across your notifications deletes the lot for you.

There seems to have been a lot of time put into ensuring that everything happens without too many screen clicks, and it makes a real difference.

All those cards and shortcuts use up a lot of screen space, though, meaning there’s no room for widgets, even when you don’t have any cards open. The quick launch bar has just five shortcuts, and the shortcuts in the Launcher menu require two clicks to get to. Phones like the iPod and HTC Hero allow you customize everything and add as many shortcuts as you want, which was one of the things we loved about them.

The Palm Pre features a universal search feature, meaning that when you type anything in any app, it will search your contacts followed by Google Maps, Twitter and Wikipedia. Unfortunately, it doesn’t search your emails, music or calendar, so it’s essentially a contacts finder combined with an online search tool – useful, but hardly universal.

 

Synergy

The Palm Pre is a multitasking genius. You can have up to 12 apps open concurrently, making for intuitive and easy working. You can flick between your email and browser and back again, for example, exactly as you would on a PC. The more apps you have open as one time, the slower they perform, although it never gets annoyingly sluggish. Memory-hungry apps such as your browser and Google Maps are the worst offenders for slowing things down.

Synergy is over-the-sir syncing software, and it's brilliant. What it does is link your Google, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft contacts, emails and calendars and streams them into the Pre. Whenever you update – either your accounts or the phone – it'll appear on both.

If instant messaging's your thing, you can sync to both AIM and Gtalk, and your messages are stored alongside your text messages. If you're chatting to someone on IM and they go offline, you can send your message as a text instead, which is a great little bonus.
The calendar is also integrated well. The Pre lets you see your entries from Outlook, Google and Facebook, plus UK Holidays. If that sounds a little busy, you can choose which you want to view. The syncing happens automatically over the air; we updated our Google Calendar on our desktop, and within minutes, there it was on the Pre.

Really, Palm has got it just right with this user interface. It's streamlined and intuitive – all your information is just where you would expect it to be. It makes everything so accessible, and you get to take advantage of all this smartphone can do. Here's an example: we went to email a friend on their work account, and the Pre showed us their Facebook profile picture and online Gtalk status. Just great.

 

Web browsing

Finally, a phone other than the iPod has managed to perfect multi-touch zoom. That, plus the excellent touch-screen, make web browsing on the Palm Pre a desktop-like experience. You view the web in landscape mode and your websites are automatically fitted to the screen, even the ones not optimised for mobile; the WebKit engine loads the pages quickly and prettily.

The 3.1-inch screen is smaller than the iPhone's, but that doesn't affect quality. It's incredibly accurate, even for the fat fingered – we didn't miss one link. The harder you flick a window, the faster the page scrolls; you just tap to stop it, and double-tap to see the whole page again. The copy-and-paste function is particularly good: press the shift key on the keyboard and drag across the text you want to highlight.

There's no option for opening a new tab in your browser but if you want to view another page, just open a new card from the menu on the top left of the screen. Usefully, you can share page links with any of your contacts via email.

 

Email

Emailing is a smooth experience with the Palm Pre. You can get push-email from Microsoft Exchange and Gmail, and sync your other webmail accounts too. Keep those accounts separate if you wish, or have all your messages streamed into one inbox.

Fonts and icons are good and large to view, and when you're writing your emails you can change your text colour and use bold, italic and underline. Autocorrect is underwhelming compared to the HTC Hero or iPhone. Instead of this kind of intelligent word suggestion system, the Pre simply adds in missing punctuation or capital letters.

The keyboard, too, could be better – it's not as easy to type on as that of the BlackBerry Bold, for example, and we'd like a better system in a software upgrade.
 
Multimedia

The Palm Pre comes with a MicroUSB cable, but you only really need to use it for transferring media files. All you need to do is drag and drop your files, or you can run MediaSync, which finds all the music and video files on your PC. The 8GB of onboard memory is enough for a decent amount of media but if you want your multimedia world in your pocket you'll be disappointed. Unbelievably, there's no expandable memory slot for boosting your storage space.

When we reviewed the Pre, it didn't sync to iTunes. Apple and Palm have been tussling for a while now; Palm releases regular updates so the Pre can pose convincingly as an iPhone, then Apple prevents them with updates of its own.

The video player on the Palm Pre is fairly basic. It plays the traditional files such as MPEG4, but most high-quality web video files are compressed using Xvid or DivX, and those are not supported. But viewing streamed video from YouTube, for example, is good quality and streams evenly. Aspect ratios are fixed automatically, and the Pre's black finish makes a nice, understated frame for the screen.

The onboard speakers are tinny and echo, but the listen through headphones with full bass and the sound is excellent, even on YouTube clips.

 

Applications

At the time of writing, there aren't a lot of apps to choose from, and too many of them are two or three-star. There are only 31 games to choose from and not even a Facebook app. Odd, considering the Facebook syncing ability on the Pre.

One of the Palm Pre's best points is its GPS capabilities. Positioning is quick and accurate: it had our exact location as soon as we fired up Google Maps. Using it to navigate on foot, it kept up with us perfectly, although an on-screen direction arrow would have been useful to show the direction we were going in.

Google Maps is the usual, with satellite view, directions for walking, driving and public transport, and traffic, but no street view.

 

Camera

The Palm Pre has a fairly basic 3.15-megapixel camera. There's no auto-focus, no settings modes like night or action – you can only adjust your flash. It is, however, good at capturing moving objects. We took a picture of a passing motorbike, going around 30mph, and it was beautifully clear, except for the number plate.

Colours can be a little dull, but the pictures have good clarity in daylight. The flash does help get better quality shots inside, and isn't too in-your-face bright. In lowlight, the Pre really starts to stumble. Taking pics without flash is no use at all – the resulting snaps are noisy, blurred and very dark - but the flash causes distortion when you zoom in and makes pictures too red.

You can't record video clips, but we don't think it matters. This phone has so much going for it as it is.

 

The verdict

The Palm Pre stands for comparison against the iPhone and the HTC Hero, both five-star smartphones with awesome multimedia capabilities. It doesn't beat them on everything, sure – all excel in different ways – but it's invented some new smartphone standards. The WebOS operating system is powerful and effective; your contacts, messages and events are immediate, and exactly where you expect them to be. It's so good that the as-yet-understocked apps catalogue and slightly flimsy hardware are easy to ignore.