A First Look at Palm's New Pre Smartphone

Earlier this month, I finally got a chance to check out the most buzzed-about gadget of the year — the upcoming Palm Pre smartphone.

I'm happy to report that all the hype from the gadget shows is true. Palm's got a winner on its hands and Apple's got a challenger for first place among smartphones.

I'll have a full review once Palm lets me borrow one for longer than 10 minutes. But based on what I saw, I may have found my next smartphone.

The Pre takes everything that's great about the iPhone — multitouch commands, the App Store — and adds most of what the iPhone's missing, such as a real keyboard, MMS messaging and a multitasking OS that can do more than one thing at once.

And I also got a pleasant surprise. Contrary to previous reports, the Pre will be able to run Palm OS legacy applications. Millions of Palm PDA, Treo and Centro owners can simply port their favorite apps over to the new platform.

Like its competitors, which also include the BlackBerry Bold and Storm, the T-Mobile G1 "Google phone" and half a dozen Samsung, Nokia and HTC also-rans, the Pre is very pretty and rather heavy. It looks like one of those heated sauna rocks that get put on beautiful women's backs in ads for upscale hotels.

Palm won't narrow down the Pre's release date beyond "first half of 2009," but the Palm reps I met with said it'd be "soon." Rumors have Sprint store personnel already being trained in demonstrating it to customers, indicating a "street date" of late April or early May.

The Palm people also said the purchase price would be "very competitve," which to me indicates about $200.

As for the service plans by Sprint (the exclusive U.S. carrier for the moment), I was told they wouldn't be any different from Sprint's current smartphone planes, which start at $70/month for unlimited data and messaging and 450 minutes of talk time, and also includes the $100 all-you-can-eat plan.