The Palm Pre: A First Look

Based on our early tests, the Palm Pre lives up to its promise as a viable competitor to the iPhone—even if Apple moved the goalposts today by announcing a new and faster model of their smartphone, and dropping the price of the older iPhone.

As we cover in our video First Look, the Pre, which costs $199 with rebates and a 2-year-contract from Sprint, uses its touchscreen in several of the same effective ways as the iPhone and some other touch smart phones. It also allows you to open multiple applications and move them around the screen, like playing cards on a table.

Attributes not covered in the video, but significant, include:

• The ability to search within the phone and on the Web without retyping the search terms.
• Bookmarks on the Web browser that go to home pages—for Facebook, Amazon.com, ESPN, MySpace, Sprint, and Palm—that are specially formatted for mobile devices; many look and function just like their iPhone counterparts.
• A 3.0-megapixel camera that lacks a flash but does have an LED light to illuminate subjects in low light.
• Some connection limitations. There's no Bluetooth data capability on the Pre, which makes it impossible to beam contacts and other data from another phone—even from Palms. And if already own a Palm device, you can't transfer data from it with a sync to your Pre, using your computer. However, Palm allows you to do a "one-time transfer" of data from selected desktop organizers like Palm and Outlook, via a Web link.
• All data on your Pre gets backed up daily, and wirelessly, to a remote server.

We're continuing to test the Pre, and we'll add it soon to our Ratings of smart phones, available to subscribers. —Mike Gikas

Comments

[Bob]

Is it true that Search on the Palm Pre does NOT search email? I read that somewhere but have not seen it confirmed.

[Paul Eng]

To Jeff and all:

Thanks for the alerting us to the error.

The link has been fixed and now takes you directly to Consumer Reports Smart phone Ratings:
http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/electronics-computers/phones-mobile-devices/cell-phones-services/smart-phone-ratings/ratings-overview.htm

Paul Eng
Web Sr. Editor, Electronics

[Jeff Fry]

Thanks for the post! FYI there's a typo in the link to 'Ratings of smart phones': It begins:
http://http//www.consumerreports.org/

...and so naturally doesn't resolve.