June, 6 – the official date of the Palm Pre sales start. This is one of the biggest long-comers of the last years and one of the most anticipated smartphones as well. A very unique situation of Palm composed from the tough financial times, a very brave step to create a mobile phone with first of a kind operating system aimed to maximum integration with day-to-day life and desktop experience, I can go on and on about why Palm Pre has developed so many rumors, opinions and discussions. They all are going to be solved soon.There are several things equally important about the Pre. So I will just randomly start with financial background. Many talks were going round the Web about a year ago and earlier that Palm just isn't going to make to the New Year. And, of course, one had to be overly optimistic to predict the Pre as it is now. However, they managed to pull needed people and funds together and set to work. This is where Pre's magic starts – those who are in charge in Palm had to apply this crash through or crash approach as their last chance. It worked.
Still Pre is a smartphone, so it has its own measures apart from events preceding. From the first look it is not very impressive. I mean very few people till today were lucky to try its webOS and looking at the hardware nothing really makes heart go faster. Sliding physical QWERTY keyboard, middle-sized display, 3 MP camera and 8 GB of storage – 199 USD on the tag. That's OK, but what to get exited about? About the first ever multi-touch screen. In tandem with webOS it works just so. Opened apps or "cards" management made easy. Rapid browsing over 3G and Wi-Fi. Synergy feature which imports contacts from mail and social network services truly replaces most of what a computer can offer for communication. And the main point, simple also, why Palm Pre is ready to meat Apple iPhone for a contest - it’s a hole year younger so it does everything little better. A year gap between mobile phones is going to be tangible. Perhaps we should wait for the next gen iPhone before we can make a more factual comparison.
