Smart Phones of today

Palm webOS is a unique software which made Pre get a place in the top 5 Smartphones of 2009. The Smartphone company is all set to release their latest version of the software the “Palm WebOS 1.3.5” at the CES 2010. The WebOS 1.3.5 is released for Palm Pre and Palm Pixi.

As expected the WebOS will have few improvements like better battery life, increased speed and stronger WiFi.

Palm famous for its Smartphones in the US has confirmed it is looking up to their recently launched Ares Application development kit. The company also said that it has really no interest in making their market bulge with thousands of useless apps. Instead they plan to have a small store with quality applications.

The rest of the updates are all left for the big day but will let you know if something new pops up!

Comments(0)

ince Droid is days away from getting launched, we might as well go out and compare it to the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre, as far as the total cost in concerned. The duel between handsets and their prices easily turns into a duel of carriers, a three way competition between Verizon, AT&T and Sprint.

The folks of BillShrink have provided the excellent comparison table below:

Turns out that the Droid and iPhone 3GS cost the exact same price in the long run, while the Pre is cheaper, although it has its drawbacks (fewer apps, less internal memory, no voice commands). Meanwhile, getting the Moto Verizon Droid with an unlimited plan will mean paying $3,799 over a 2 year period, but this handset has some strong points, to be honest.

For example, Droid outperforms the iPhone 3GS and Pre when it comes to talk time, camera quality and multitasking.

Comments(0)

The Pre arrived in a nice looking package. I love usable, attractive, purposeful design. From the shape of the box and the colors of the carboard throwaways inside the box, Palm put time and effort into the details.

The device itself looks and feels great. Palm was not kidding when it said this over and over again. When closed, it is small enough to easily carry around everywhere, and when opened, it simply makes much more sense than other phones. This may be the first time a smartphone doesn’t feel like a brick to me. And the combination of a 480 x 320 touchscreen and a QWERTY physical keyboard begs the question “why didn’t anybody else do this earlier?” Or maybe… “Why didn’t anyone do this SO WELL in the past?”

The black, glossy, and nicely shaped phone should be appealing to almost anyone. My wife likes the Pre almost as much as I do. But she absolutely hated carrying any of my old smartphones around. “Too manly,” she’d say. The Pre looks stylish, no matter who you are. And that’s even before you turn it on.

With the user interface, Palm again goes all out with the details. With readable and stylish fonts, great use of spacing, nice transparencies and images, the old ugly Palm UI is gone and gone forever. While the screen does not look as good on a sunny day (especially not if you’re at the beach), it is bright and colorful.

WebOS goes beyond looking cool to rethinking the way we use mobile phones. Cards, gestures, syncing with Gmail/Facebook, combined messaging, and the launcher make for an awesome experience that makes sense and is actually fun to use. Multitasking is taken to a new level; you can open an app like Pandora to listen to music while tweeting, sending txt messages, browsing sites, getting notifications, and more. Opening cards/apps is easy, switching from one to another is even easier, and closing them is, well.. extremely fun. This may sound weird, but I just love swiping my finger to send an app into oblivion. No more pressing a bunch of button to close a window/app. With the Pre, I just swipe away upwards. Fun times.

What else? The touch sensitivity responds well, and I like that it doesn’t try to constantly correct me all of the time. I may miss an apostrophe here and there, but I know how to spell, thank you very much. I guess my only huge problem with the Pre is that the battery cannot keep up with the multitasking and it will take a while before you can use it again once it is charging. I have no choice but to charge the phone at various times during the day to really be able to use it as I want to. There are a few other things I’d like to have (like video), but overall the Pre is an awesome experience and I cannot recommend it enough.

The hype around the Pre created a little skepticism in me before it launched on June 6th, but now that I have one, I wonder why the hype wasn’t even greater.  Sure, the tech community made a big deal out of it, but the average consumer might still not be fully aware of its existence nor its power. It will take some time to make Palm what it once was, but it sure looks like the future is bright. The Pre really is as good it seems and you’d be surprised about how quickly you get used to it. Without an expensive cost of ownership (as other phones in the market), and with an OS that is truly innovative and usable, the Pre changes everything. Palm is back because it has created a functional and unique product that people can be excited about.

In future posts, I will write about the Pre’s awesome 3.2 megapixel camera, the sound quality, the “wave”, marketing and advertisements, available apps, features like copy/paste and universal search new things I like or don’t like, news and more.

Comments(0)

The newly released Palm Pre can sync with a Gmail account. If you can make a little alteration, then your Pre can start working like a real Gmail client.

How to do?

• Open the Mail application and go into Preferences and Accounts.
• Under accounts, tap your Gmail account
• Under Default Folders, change the trash folder to [Gmail]/All Mail

So for some of the folks new to Palm Pre, a brief description:

Palm Pre is a multimedia smartphone designed and marketed by Palm, Inc with a multi-touch screen and a sliding keyboard.

The phone came out on June 6, 2009 and uses Palm’s new Linux based operating system, webOS.

Comments(0)

It’s no mystery that Palm hasn’t been on the top of most mobile phone shoppers even though they have consistently produced some decent handsets in recent years. The fact that their phones were a bit boring in appearance was reason enough that there was never much buzz about their newest phones, until now. At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, Palm introduced their entry into the touchscreen handset market with quite some fanfare. But will it be enough to change this company’s future as a player in mobile phones?

To look at the Pre’s specs you’ll see that it comes with some pretty impressive features. It doesn’t have the largest screen when it comes to mobile phones, but at 3.1 inches it’s adequately large as well as bright and clear. For those that are heavily into texting, you’ll like the fact that it does have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, so you can be all thumbs without being ‘all-thumbs’. Yes, this is a 3G phone that also has Wi-Fi capabilities as well as TeleNav GPS, and to make this phone a contender in this ever-expanding phone category, it was needed.

Currently the Pre is reported to only come in a one size model, 8GB which is not bad, but other phones on the market already offer more storage. As well, it can not accommodate expandable memory either, which seems to be a bit of a non-starter for some people. On the upside the Pre does have a 3MP camera as well as stereo Bluetooth connectivity. We can pretty much expect that it does have a music player, but there’s no word on an FM tuner or satellite radio support. If it’s entertainment features are as good as we hope, then this will be a popular phone to have.

Overall the Palm Pre is a really sleek-looking phone with plenty of features to like, but we’ll have to see what the customers will have to say about when it comes to market sometime in the first half of this year. The Palm Pre will be available through Sprint with a contract of course, but with Sprint’s flat-rate monthly fee you won’t get any unsuspectingly large bills. So, for now Palm is grooving on the buzz that this phone is producing, and we hope that this is just the beginning.

Comments(0)