Build them and I will buy one.

Seems like Palm are on the comeback. And inovating to boot too.

Better than any Windows Mobile hacked shit to look like an iPhone.

Apple and Palm leading the way!

If the Plam can sync with the Mac that'll be a bonus for them too.

I know the phrase 'iphone beater' is overused, but that UI does look very clean, smooth and fast. If you Youtube search there is a five-part video from the CES as well which is about 30mins long in total going through the kit in detail.

Finally, a smartphone rival to the iPhone that, while perhaps not knocking it's socks off, might give it one motherfucker of a kick in the teeth?

Steven R

Could learn a lot from this... combine it with the touch screen on the ASUS eee keyboard and data entry / windows / mac will be come MUCH cleaner... allowing more space for all that DRM rubbish.

All that begs the question though: why cant the gui / OS on a PC behave in the same way? Ok many more processes / threads running... doing erm... what? Network access... well its also on the phone (ipod or this). Disk access... well it should be fast with todays data rates... oh right its indexing, defragging and other stuff.

Perhaps its that Virtual memory space? or those bloat ware device drivers...

Competition time: Who is the first person to port an iphone / Palm OS to PC as the main OS.

a better iphone then the iphone and a proper qwerty to boot! People still like keyboards.

I've been using Macs for over 24 years, waited for version 2 of the iPhone. However it's great that there's someone who has come up with a phone that can teach Apple a few lessons.

The only thing Apple fanbois can't stand about people promoting the competition is when it is no way as good as what Apple does. That's why the Pre is good news for making Apple products better (as Windows XP was to a lesser extent).

The battle between Pre and iPhone is more reminiscent of that between DTP apps. It's as if Adobe InDesign 1 arrived six months after Quark XPress 3. Imagine how much better XPress 4 would have been, and how much better Quark would have treated its customers if Adobe had launched 7 years earlier than it did.

@alex4d

.. in a good while that I am actually tempted by a new phone. Slick, slick, slick, and you can replace the battery whenever you feel like it.

Oh, and Palm, be sure to make it play nice with OS X. I want to see it sync Apple's native apps, including the iCal and Addressbook categories. I am sick of "smartphones" that cannot handle those.

Aaargh, the logo for the product is horrible. With that silly line over the final e it looks like it should be an é - just like Clié. But if you look at the Palm website, there is no accent on the e in any of the plain text, and if you hear them refer to it in their webcast, they clearly call it the " Palm PREE", no the "Palm PRAY".

I watched the product launch video this afternoon. There are aspects of the interface that seem interesting, but at each point I went, "Oh, nice" there would be a followup "Oh, how annoying that might be". I guess the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

I don't see Apple getting too worried by this - but RIM may need to watch out for keyboard lovers who've read the dreadful reviews if the Blackberry Storm.

The overly-representational corkboard, and whatever that desktop is you can glimpse in the last few seconds are a little too reminiscent of Microsoft's Bob for my taste.

Why can't people understand that some things--like a corkboard covered in post-its and tacked-on notes--is really not the best way to keep a collection of notes. Use the stupid computer to make improvements, not just re-implement physical things in a GUI.

But overall it looks interesting.

Looks like an iPhone but with desperately needed Back and Task buttons (gestures).

Also I like that it looks physically smaller than the iPhone.

Another thing I noticed from various youtube videos is that it's MUCH faster at rendering complex web pages. Hopefully this is not a result of using stacked clock speeds for demo-only units!! It is a pain to wait 40 seconds for the iPhone to render the front page of the NYT, over wifi. (!!)

One very visceral complaint I have is the back gesture though. I understand that you're moving your finger in the "back" direction, i.e., right to left, but in the world of swipe gestures, you'd want to "swipe" the invisible content on the left hand side from left to right. Seems like they got it backwards. I notice that when you're swiping at their lists, swiping from up to down reveals the content above and not below of course. So why the inconsistency.

I don't have time to sit through these. Can we have go back to a text based register please?

... WebOS applications seem to be explicitly limited to HTML+CSS+Javascript offerings, as per the original iPhone firmware. Apart from this, and without really being able to be too certain on just the video evidence, this really does look like someone beating Apple at their own game. Good work, Palm!

... like a lot of people here I've a huge soft spot for Palm (well three to be precise) and that device is reminding me why I loved my old monochrome Palms. In 12 months time I will be able to escape the pile of dog turd that is *r*nge and hopefully a decent carrier will have picked this up in the UK (hell, even Voda would be OK by me). That device punches so many 'right' buttons with me I cant wait.

As a matter of fact, I especially like it because it doesn't have Apple and Steve Jobs attached to it - I can't stand the guy, his company, his overpriced and overhyped products and quite a few of his customers. However, I do acknowledge that his team's GUI, industrial design and marketing skills are top notch.

What I've seen and read about the phone and the OS seem really good, so far. By the way, rumor has it that Palm will release a GSM version of the phone sometime in February.

I'd love to see Palm do a more multimedia oriented version of the phone though: Better camera with a Xenon *and* multi LED video light, MicroSDHC expansion, FM stereo radio, top notch multimedia player, etc.. However, it's still early days and I'm sure we'll see other offers from them based on this new platform.

"Competition time: Who is the first person to port an iphone / Palm OS to PC as the main OS."

iPhone OS is pretty much the same as OS X.

I like the look of this Pre. I was waiting for iPhone v3 but I might get one of those instead.

That was the worst review El Reg has done in a long time, show features, how does it function as a phone? What did you tell us there?

ring ring ring ring ring ring ring ring bananaphone!

was it just me or did the guy's voice seem to drop in and out randomly?

I had to watch a second time to see the gestures.

This phone has potential!

Has Palm stopped trying to go out of business, then? great news!!

It is still a bit weird, though, as the tiles do not always follow the orientation of the phone, and the ui seems to remain static when you turn the phone on its side ... a few glitches here and there, but what a nice phone, indeed .... they need to iron out the glitches and then we have a windows mobile killer!