Review: Palm Pre

"Pre" is an odd name for a device that drops late into a corporate drama already loaded with twists, turns and setbacks. But if Palm is indicating that its new phone kicks off a new phase, maybe the Pre is aptly named after all.

Shaped like a small bar of shower soap, the dense, ebony Pre matches many (if not all) of the features of its chief competitor, the iPhone. But in one key aspect, the Pre does the iPhone one better. While a lot of the Pre's features — a bright 3.1-inch touchscreen manipulated by taps, swipes and pinches; apps sold by third parties in an open online bazaar; integration of e-mail, contacts and calendar — are now standard in 3G smartphones, Palm also lets users keep multiple applications running simultaneously.

It's a huge win. The Palm gets around the inherent difficulty of multitasking with a concept dubbed "cards" which work like windows on a regular computer. When browsing open apps or web pages, you swipe through the cards as if viewing photos. Tap on a card to use the app. The other apps are still active; your inbox still collects mail, web pages still update. Just as with your computer, you can stay constantly connected to Facebook, Twitter, IM and other online activities. Best of all, when you're using an app and need something from another app, you don't have to go through a tortuous process of closing, launching and reloading. When you're navigating with Google Maps you can slide over to check a contact's address, choose a podcast or answer an e-mail, and then return to Maps without losing a beat.

The Pre also offers an extremely useful notification bar at the lower end of the screen that informs you of what's happening in various apps, like new e-mails received. The most appreciated example is the music player tab, which tells you what's playing and even lets you pause or skip to the next song while you're doing something else.

The Pre pays a price for all that labor. A morning's worth of heavy use may leave the Pre powerless by afternoon. I've been testing the Pre for less than a week, and typically, the battery meter hits the red zone before sunset. (Since the Pre uses removable batteries, though, you can always pop in a spare.) Palm acknowledges that battery use is a challenge and gives tips on power preservation.

Also, the temptation to keep many apps running can outstretch the device's ability to handle them. I quickly learned to dread the dialog box informing me that I could not open a new app without removing some of my open cards. It's like blackjack: one too many cards and you're busted. So you have you be brutal and keep closing cards. You do this by flipping the card towards the top of the screen, whereupon it disappears. Did Ricky Jay have a hand in this interface?

The Pre's other big claim to innovation is its attempt to combine iPhone elegance with Blackberry efficiency at e-mail and other typing-oriented tasks. So the Pre's gorgeous compact form — lustrous and small enough not to bulge your pocket — also hides a tiny slide-out physical keyboard. It's a compromise: The keyboard's too small for thumb typing (welcome to fingernail typing) and makes handling non-alphabetic characters a bit difficult. While I generated text more slowly than I did with the iPhone, my tweets and e-mails were more accurate. I didn't have enough time with the phone to see if a moderate user could eventually produce text with machine-gun speed to compliment the sniperlike accuracy.

Setting up on the Pre is easy. Palm offers a variety of options, including sucking contacts from Facebook and Gmail, but the most useful way to do it is Media Sync, which employs software from iTunes. When you plug the Pre (via mini-USB cable) into a computer equipped with iTunes, the software thinks the new device is an iPod, and lets you load songs, photos, videos and contacts into the Pre. (But not movies and TV shows that you bought from the iTunes store, which are copy-protected.) Not surprisingly, this process occurs with Apple-like ease.

The Pre's 3-megapixel camera has an LED flash and takes decent pictures. (It can't capture streaming video ... for now.) The device also has "universal search" that finds matches for keywords in the contents of the phone, or on the web, Wikipedia or Twitter. And a killer "synergy" feature lets you aggregate IM, SMS and e-mail messages with someone into a single threaded conversation.

Generally, the Pre's software, called webOS, is intuitive and effective. Still, some flourishes are missing on the Pre. On the iPhone, phone numbers embedded in e-mails are highlighted so you can call with a single click. Not so here. The external speakers sound anemic. The software that auto-completes words and spell checks during typing isn't as helpful as the iPhone's. As with the iPhone, the Pre's browser doesn't run Flash. (No Hulu!) The first version comes with only 8 gigs of storage, pretty much the minimum acceptable. And maybe it's because I've been conditioned by the iPhone, but the Pre seems to under-use its single button on the front panel, employing it mainly for shifting between cards and apps.

And then there's the network. Depending on where you live, Sprint, the Pre's exclusive provider, may be a boon or a deal-breaker. In the Palo Alto, California, the location where I used the Pre most, calls were dropped so often that I finally threw my hands up and returned to the iPhone to make a call. But in San Francisco the signal came in clear, and on a road trip through Central California, Sprint worked fine in some remote areas.

Of course, compared to the iPhone, the real missing pieces are those thousands of applications available on the App Store — one for just about anything, as the commercials constantly remind us. Right now, before the June 6 launch, there are only about a dozen or so "preview apps" in Palm's App Catalog (including an impressive version of Fandango that skillfully integrates the Pre's GPS and web abilities). Palm claims developers will find it easy to create new apps for the Pre, and is banking on a thriving marketplace. The company has not yet announced details on how you'll get apps from the marketplace onto your Pre, and the feature wasn't available for me to test.

The Pre is priced competitively at $200, once you get back a $100 rebate. (The rebate trick is a low-rent consumer electronics sales stunt that Palm should have passed on.) You will also need to commit to a two-year Sprint contract, which will cost you a minimum of $70 per month. Since the sticker price is reasonable and the device justifies a lot of its, uh, pre-release buzz, it will probably be a hot item in the near future.

Its long-term prospects, though, hinge on whether or not all those third-party apps will show up, whether Sprint can satisfy users, and whether Apple has something up its sleeve that counters the Palm's gambits. Also, of course, the Pre has to prove stable and reliable. (My test unit occasionally suffered opening-day jitters, including a crash that was fixed only by taking out the removable battery.)

Palm originally found glory in the PDA era, then fared well in corporate smart phones, but as of late has been pummeled by better, smarter, touchscreen-

enabled handsets. Now led by an Executive Chairman with a pedigree from the company it hopes to challenge (Jon Rubinstein, who headed the division that created Apple's iPod), Palm once again is making claims to be a contender — even against the Ali of high-tech.

The Pre emphatically shows that Palm has not reached the stage of suffixes. And multitasking rules!