I’d been desperate to get my hands on a Palm Pre since I saw the first demo videos that came out of CES in January. I’m an organisational failure, and the promise of being able to view my girlfriend’s hectic social calendar overlaid with my own, rather mundane, work calendar had me literally gnawing at my knuckles in anxious expectation.  I’ve never owned a smart phone unless you count the VTech ‘Tiny Touch’, because I think they’re universally terrible, but I have owned several Palm PDAs and I’ve always been impressed. 10 months on, and the wait is finally over: I’ve been the smugly-proud owner of a Pre for THREE WHOLE DAYS now – does it live up to the hype?

The Short Answer

Maybe. I’m very happy with it. If you’re the kind of person who wants the latest and greatest for the sake of owning it, go and buy one right now. Why are you even reading this? You know you’re going to no matter what I say. If you’re my girlfriend, you’ll complain that it’s weighty and the keyboard isn’t as nice as a Blackberry, if you’re my boss you’ll complain that the app store is empty and it’s a touch slow. In either case, screw you – I like it.

The Longer Answer

Setup, Power, and Assorted Tinkering

Out of the box, the pre comes with a micro-USB charger cable. At the time of US launch, Sprint claimed that the device required a Palm-specific charger and that other cables would not work but I’ve since heard from several people who’re happily using Blackberry chargers to power a Pre without causing fires or attracting the wrath of Satan – your mileage may vary.

I ponied up the extra £30 for a touchstone charger, but it hasn’t been worth it in all honesty. The touchstone uses inductive charging to power a battery so that your pre sits comfortably on your desk with no cables attached. It looks cool; the Pre fits into place with a satisfyingly magnetic clunk, and you can carry it off without detaching any wires; but it offers no real benefit unless you desperately need to answer your mobile in under 3 seconds.

Once the device is charged and turned on, there’s a well-considered tutorial complete with choirs of angels and videos of your productivity (represented as a shiny golden orb) swooping majestically over green fields. Having gone through the tutorial you’re well equipped to deal with the gesture system, and the phone leads you through a simple setup process for creating your Palm profile and importing your contacts from GMail, Exchange, and Facebook. It’s so simple I’m struggling to think of anything interesting to say about it, and that’s a GOOD THING.

Having used the phone for a few days, I’m disappointed with the battery life. I’ve seen other sites claim 2 days of use from a single charge, but they’re either lying or have neglected to turn it on. I’ve not gotten through a day without charging, and have managed to drain the battery completely with an evening’s tinkering. I’m told that the power consumption is on a par with the iPhone and the G1 but, frankly, that just means that *they’re* shit as well. My advice is to save your money on the touchstone, and invest in a second battery or – better yet – buy a third party battery and let me know if you get better results.

Overall fit & finish

I love the shape of the Pre. It fits neatly in the hand and feels about the same size as a Blackberry, if slightly thicker. It’s heavier too – you could deal someone a fatal blow with the thing if it came to it – but that adds to the quality feel rather than being unwieldy. It’s definitely more plasticky than either an iPhone or a Blackberry, but it’s solid and doesn’t feel cheap. The slide-action on the keyboard has a slight curve to it, like the G1, and this threw me initially but now feels very natural. I’d heard that the lip around the edge of the keyboard was sharp, and it is – you’re not going to lose any fingers on it,  but it feels a little unfinished, and it’s not a flaw that Apple would have shipped.

The keyboard itself is nothing to write home about. It’s better than I expected, given the coverage it’s received, but it’s definitely not in the Blackberry class. The keys feel slightly tacky and there’s not enough action on them to satisfy a QWERTY freak like myself. The biggest problem is the lip around the edge which makes hitting keys in the corners a cramped and unpleasant experience, but overall it’s perfectly adequate. The @ symbol and the period are given their own keys, which is handy, but the alt-key is awkwardly placed, especially for typing a slash which seems a little short-sighted given that it’s hard to type a URI without them.

The real star of the show, however, is the screen which is easily on a par with the iPhone. It’s bright and clear, and the multi-touch is beautifully responsive. I’ve turned the brightness down to the minimum setting to conserve power, and it’s still more than bright enough even in direct sunlight. It’s a genuine joy to behold, and I’m not a joyful person.

WebOS

The Pre’s hardware might make it a respectable also-ran, with neither the polish of an iPhone or the simple *rightness* of a Blackberry, but it’s the software that makes this phone interesting. WebOS is Palm’s last-ditch attempt to become relevant again, and they’ve pulled out all the stops.

WebOS is based on a card model, where each card houses an application. The touchscreen allows you to scroll through cards, expand them, minimise them, flick them off the screen to close an app, and generally faff around, dizzy with the power of it all. It’s a hoot, and I still open applications so I can flick them away again, just for the sheer, naked thrill of it. Really.

The Launcher bar gives quick access to applications

Zooming out to play with cards

Cards provide a windowed view for multitasking

Notifications for emails, tasks and so forth are represented by icons below the main screen where they’re neatly out of the way but visible. Tapping them causes them to expand, and you can dismiss them with the same flick-gesture that you use for closing an app. It’s an intuitive and engaging UI, and represents a serious challenge to that other phone by that other company.

The WebOS name comes from the idea that you can treat web pages as though they were apps: load up RememberTheMilk or Google Reader in a card, and it will stay open, running in the background so that the web is integrated with your “desktop” in a very fluid way. The browser is fast and makes a decent fist of rendering all the sites I’ve visited so far, but has a couple of glaring omissions.

Firstly, you can’t download images from a page – a fact so unbelievably retarded that it took me a good three hours of exploration to accept – but still less retarded than shipping without copy/paste.

Secondly, when I tried to open a PDF file from the web, I was told that there was no application that could open such a thing. Hey, Palm – how about you try the PDFView program that ships with the phone? Hopefully these niggles will be worked out with an update because they mar what is otherwise an excellent browsing experience.

Palm have borrowed the pinch and stretch gestures from the iPhone, and the Pre does an excellent job of scaling content. The browser renders content nippily, and adapts sites to fit in the screen. Flash support is expected some time this year, but Flash is an abomination unto the web in any case, so I don’t care.

Software updates happen in the background and over the air. I updated my phone the day after I got it, and noticed a drastic improvement in reception and call quality, so it’s definitely worth keeping up to date.

Synergy

Synergy is the lynchpin of WebOS and the reason that I bought a Pre instead of a Blackberry. The idea is simple – the Pre imports your data from your SIM card, your email accounts, and your social networks and aggregates them all as a single contact book, calendar, and IM client. You can “link” profiles, so that my boss’s phone number is associated with his Facebook page, his Google Talk account, and all his email addresses and the data is synced regularly keeping it up to date.

The phone will import *all* of your contacts, though – so if you’re a Facebook whore, you can expect to get a lot of useless entries on your Pre. The heuristic for automatically linking profiles is less than perfect, so expect to spend some quality time manually associating your contacts and cleaning out duff data. Once it’s all set up, though, it’s got some intriguing possibilities for bringing together the different data that rule your life.

The calendar does a great job here – I can finally view my girlfriend’s Google calendar alongside my Exchange calendar for work and my Facebook events, as a single, searchable view.  The device syncs happily with Exchange or Google calendar and it all just works. If I try to schedule a work event when I’m supposed to be at a romantic dinner for two, I’ll be notified immediately, even though the events are in different calendars on different systems.

Synergy allows you to switch from SMS to IM in the same conversation view

Multiple calendar sources show as a single merged view

Email inboxes are synced via Synergy. GMail and Exchange ship as standard with Yahoo support to come

Flick to messaging and within a single conversation view, you can switch between Google Talk, AIM, and SMS depending on the online status of a contact. MSN support is in beta stage and I imagine that Twitter isn’t too far behind.  Likewise emails are aggregated into a single view for all your accounts, and your Exchange folders and GMail labels are mirrored on the phone so that things stay categorised neatly on the move. All these apps use the same notifications system, so everything flows together in a very neat way.

Synergy is open to the development community, and LinkedIn have recently added synchronisation. It’s an absolute triumph, and one of the most interesting pieces of software I’ve seen in a long time.

The App Store

OK, it sucks. If you’re in the UK, then there’s a truly depressing dearth of apps, and most of what exists is in early beta. There is a flourishing dev community, though, and there’s a growing number of home-brew apps. If you take the plunge and get a Pre, your first stop should be PreCentral.Net where you can find all manner of patches and tweaks to pimp your phone. If you’re a wannabe hacker, there’s an SDK available for public download, which I’ll be playing with over the next few weeks. I’m hoping that the app community takes off in a big way because Synergy and WebOS deserve some development love.

The Moment You’ve all been waiting for

So is it all worth it? I’m ecstatic with my Pre and it’s barely left my hand since I got it. Having all my contacts, email, and IM in a single aggregated device is a revelation, and the phone itself is perfectly decent even if the keyboard disappoints hardcore Blackberry fans. This is clearly a first-generation device, but I’m crossing my fingers on Palm’s behalf, because this phone really does deserve to succeed.