In a nutshell:

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The Palm Pre is a newcomer to the world of mobile phones. The Pre is the first smartphone to run the Palm webOS operating system. The first of anything often turns out to be lacking in a few ways (remember the first iPhone, the first Android phone, etc.) So we’ll be sniffing around to see if there are any “beta-testing areas” of the Pre.

The first thing to say is that the Pre is exclusive to O2 and it’s expensive. This definitely isn’t going to be a mainstream phone. It’s intended as a snazzy business phone with knobs on. The webOS was designed from the bottom up as a multitasking interface, and the Pre just positively oozes with the desire for you to multi-task. Go on, it dares you, open up yet another application. I can handle it. And what’s more I can make all those apps talk to each other too. So its various calendars talk to each other, the calendars talk to your contacts database, and the whole lot (Palm calls them “activity cards”, which sounds a bit pre-school) constantly interact, update and send you notifications. There’s a whole social whirl out there on your Palm even when you’re not using it! The Pre is a phone designed for the social network age. It integrates Facebook, Twitter, email, texts and all your Google stuff, and lets you keep track of everything in an easy to use and responsive fashion. It works best if you have plenty of contacts and an active online social life; otherwise you’re missing out on what the Pre has to offer. The user interface is very responsive, and you’ve no doubt seen the pretty TV ads with stuff zooming all over the Pre’s screen at breakneck speed. It’s fast, it’s intuitive and it gets the job done. And with a choice of a virtual touchscreen keypad or a slide-out real QWERTY keyboard, you can talk to your Pre just as rapidly as it talks back to you.

The Palm comes with a media player that supports most common formats, including MP3 and AAC audio, and MPEG4 video. The camera is rather poor though. It’s just a basic 3 megapixel camera that would be fine on an entry-level phone, but not on a device that costs this sort of money. The Pre has good connectivity, including USB, Bluetooth and WiFi, and comes with a GPS receiver too. It’s quite chunky in size and fairly heavy, but not too big for a smartphone. The disappointing factor is the smallness of the screen. At just 3.1 inches across, it could really do with being larger.

We can’t really find any areas where the new webOS platform falls over. It seems to be as well designed and capable as say, Android or OS X. The range of apps is limited at present, but that’s to be expected for a new OS. Where the Pre does fall down is in the hardware that supports the OS. It doesn’t offer the best value for money, in our opinion. The QWERTY keyboard, though welcome, is a bit small and plasticky, and in fact the whole phone construction is a little on the flimsy side. We don’t like the camera one bit, and the battery life isn’t impressive either. The pre certainly isn’t an iPhone killer, or anything like it. It’s the first of a kind and is best suited to technologically-minded early adopters who like the touchscreen gizmos, the multitasking and the social networking features, or who just fancy a change. mainstream users should approach the Palm Pre with caution. It will be interesting to see whether Palm can do what Apple managed, and release a mature product with a wealth of third-party apps. At the moment, this is not it.

Features of the Palm Pre include:

• 3 megapixel camera with LED flash
• Display: Touchscreen with 320 x 480 pixels (3.1 inches)
• Music player (MP3, AAC, AAC+, AMR, QCELP, WAV formats supported)
• Stereo FM radio RDS with Visual Radio support
• Built-in GPS
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, IM, Email (support for Microsoft Exchange)
• Memory: 8GB
• Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB, WiFi
• Web browser, EDGE/WCDMA/HSDPA
• Quadband plus 3G
• Size: 60 x 100 x 17 mm
• Weight: 135g