I heard from Fresh Gear shop that Palm was launching a new mobile phone called the Palm Pre using a new platform called Web OS. It still hasn’t reached the shores of Malaysia so I’m still waiting for the shop to have stock before having a good look at it. Perhaps as a long time fan of Palm devices like my current Palm Tungsten T3 and Palm Centro which I am using, I wonder if the new Palm Pre with its new Palm Web OS would be nice to use.

AFAIK Palm always give some thought to their design in terms of usability without too much software bloat unlike the clunky Microsoft Windows Mobile OS. So far I have like their Palm OS5.x version for both my Palm Tungsten T3 and Palm Centro, and have no complaints so far. I really like the Chat function in the Palm Centro text messaging system where I can see the history of text messaging with a particular person and thus know what the text conversation was all about easily.

Their introduction about the Palm Pre shows that it has 8GB of memory, build in 802.11b/g WIFI, GPS, Bluetooth 3.1 stereo, EvDO (Rev A) (what is this? Hmmm.) and a fast processor TI OMAP. It has a 3.1 inch display with 320×480 resolution with touch screen.

The Palm Pre was really slim, and it was a slide phone. At first I thought underneath the slide was just a plain numeric keypad, but looking at their demo later, a full qwerty keyboard slid out to my surprise. It must have been quite a a cram to provide a full qwerty keyboard (which is real handy for typing sms text messages and blogging, couldn’t live without it, now I can’t switch back to normal numeric keypad phones!). But that’s Palm, all their mobile PDA phones comes with a full qwerty keyboard.

For taking pictures, it has a 3.0 megapixel digital camera which was a big improvement over my Palm Centro’s 1.3 megapixel digital camera. For connecting to PC, the Palm Pre USB connection uses a mass storage mode so that your PC would recognize it as a drive. So no more pulling out the memory card and plugging it into the card reader or using the hotsync to transfer files.

Their Web OS though as the namesake goes, is more about getting your data from anywhere that you might have store it, not just in your Palm Pre but also your information stored online like in your Outlook Server, Facebook, etc

Here’s something that might get the ooos and the ahhhs… it has a touch screen just like the Apple iPhone! You can flick your fingers across and get the screen to move about just like in the iPhone. Plus it has a new touch gesture where you place your finger on the screen and pull out your good ol’ software launcher.

There are a lot more to this Palm Pre, but I guess to know how it feels like I would have to get my hands dirty on one. The only problem about getting it would probably be the price. Heard that it might be in the ballpark of around RM3000 (US$800) so that might kind of put me off in owning one. The way handheld devices get abused, I find I rather not plunked so much for one unless I absolutely need one.

Anyway for those who has too much cash to spare, and can’t stop their drooling, then the only way to stop the craving would be to head down to the nearest mobile PDA shop and get it when it is finally launched!