Palm Pre was one of Cnet’s best phones of 2009:

Palm Pre

Debuting at CES 2009, the Palm Pre breathed new life into a company struggling to defend its relevance in the smartphone space. More than that though, the Pre and Palm WebOS was a game changer in the way that it handled contact management and multitasking. Hopefully, we’ll see.

Consumer Electronics Show · Handhelds · Palm · Palm OS · Palm Pre · PalmPixi · Smartphone · WebOS

Source: Computer Weekly

iPhone 3GS · Palm Pre

PhoneDog’s Adriana Lee had the unique opportunity of messing with the Palm Pre and Palm Pixi in the same video session. She compared both devices in a 10 minute dogfight, that can be checked out in the video below. Slim candybar phone meets the original slider. Who wins?

Source: GSM Dome

Handhelds · Mobile phone form factors · Palm OS · Palm Pre · PalmPixi · Shareware · Unix and Linux · WebOS

he latest publication to rank the Pre high is PC Magazine, billing Palm’s first webOS powered smartphone as the “most innovate new platform” in the phones category for 2009.  As their mobile phone guru Sacha Sagan puts it:

Palm has returned with the coolest handheld device we’ve seen in a long time. The Palm Pre has the same exhilarating sense of possibility as the iPhone—and it’s even worth switching to Sprint for. The Pre is the start of something genuinely new: Palm’s webOS, an innovative operating system that’s benefited a lot by what the company has learned from Apple’s smartphone successes.

Source: Pre Central

Apple · Handhelds · iPhone · Mobile phone · Palm · Palm Pre · Smartphone · WebOS

A Palm Pre user is suing Palm and Sprint Nextel, alleging they caused him to lose most of the data from his phone, and he wants to turn the suit into a class action.

The suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, in San Jose, is the latest black eye for the Palm Profile cloud-based synchronization service, which debuted with the company’s webOS on the Pre earlier this year. Palm and Sprint last month said “a small number of customers” had had trouble transferring their data from Palm Profiles to new Palm devices and that they were working on a solution.

Read the full story on PC Magazine

Handhelds · Palm · Palm OS · Palm Pre · Palm Profile · Sprint Nextel · United States District Court for the Northern District of California · WebOS

Checkout Pre Central round table about the Palm Pre and the webOS; here is a highlight:
What was the most important event for Palm in the last six months, and what will be the most important in the next six months?

Craig: There has been no single big event from Palm since the the Pre was introduced but there are dozens from the user community. In July, WebOS Quick Install and fileCoaster threw open the door to homebrew apps like Solitaire and Checkers but none rocked like Music Player (Remix). Then came Preware and our world exploded. In September themes and patches came to the masess and suddenly our Pre phones could do almost anything. Oh, and somewhere along the way Palm released some updates and the Pixi.

Hopefully the biggest events ahead for Palm will be incorporating user patches and introducing the Pre 2. Imagine if Palm incorporated key user patches in one area each month: Messaging, Email, Phone, App Launcher, Browser, and Top Bar. Add in the Music Player (Remix) and the Pre and Pixi would suddenly have world-class apps, users would be a buzz, and the pundits would be blown away. Users could provide an endless source of patches. But if fragile Palm egos prevail, the Pre 2 will be irrelavent.

Derek: More important than the Pre launch in the long term will be the Pixi. Despite what Palm keeps saying, the Pre is a smartphone for smartphone geeks. The Pixi, however, has much more mass-market appeal, ala the Centro. In the 18 months after Palm launched the Centro they sold more than three million units, which is an awful lot for Palm. The hope, and expectation, is that the Pixi will replicate that success. Like the Centro, it’s the smallest smartphone on the market. Like the Centro, it’s a scaled down version of its big brother, the Pre. Like the Centro, it’s a new smartphone at a very attractive price-point: $100. And like the Centro, it’s an approachable cute phone. Assuming that Sprint’s exclusivity on the Pixi isn’t too long (they don’t seem to be making a big marketing push behind it), the Pixi’s eventual landing on multiple carriers will make it a serious contender in the mass-appeal smartphone market.

While the Pixi’s launch may be the most important of the last six months, the next six months will be all about webOS and the successor to the Pre. While I have absolutely no evidence apart from industry trends to back up this assertion, I believe that summer 2010 will bring both the Pre II and webOS 2.0. Assuming that the Pixi performs as well as we expect, Palm will be well positioned for an iPhone-style global launch of the Pre II. What makes the hypothetical Pre II important is that it will demonstrate whether or not Palm has learned lessons on the hardware front. Software is easy enough to correct, but once the physical phone is out there, there’s nothing that can be done to correct design deficiencies. The Pixi has shown that Palm does indeed know how to design a solid phone, but it remains to be seen whether that will be a fluke or the start of a trend.

Handhelds · iPhone · Palm · Palm OS · Palm Pre · pixi · Smartphone · WebOS

A comparison between three of the biggest hyped smartphone in the mobile arena, the Palm Pre, the Motorola Droid and of course no comparison would be complete without the inclusion of the iPhone 3GS.

The video is a side by side comparison lasting just over seven minutes and basically covers the similarities and differences of these three high profile smartphones, the Palm Pre on Sprint, Motorola Droid on Verizon and the iPhone 3GS on AT&T.

The reviewer states that out of all three smartphones the Palm Pre is by far the most compact and the webOS runs really smooth. Next up is the iconic iPhone 3GS and the reviewer states that out of all the phones the iPhone 3GS is definitely the best constructed handset and the one everyone wants to beat.

As for the Motorola Droid, the reviewer says it takes a lot from both the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS with a high level construction and industrial design, and one of the thinnest handsets with a side out QWERTY.

[Source: Phones Review]

Handhelds · iPhone · iPhone 3GS · Mobile phone · motorola · Palm Pre · Smartphone · WebOS

Palm’s latest update to its mobile operating system now allows owners of the Pre and Pixi to use Yahoo’s instant messaging client and watch YouTube videos in wide screen view, among other things.

But one feature not included in the update is the seamless synchronization with iTunes, Apple’s popular software for managing music and other media on a computer.

Palm has long clashed with Apple over whether or not owners of its devices can sync them up with their iTunes libraries without any intermediate software.

Palm confirmed that the newest release of WebOS, the mobile operating system for Palm devices, does not include a fix to the media syncing capability, although declined to specify the reasons behind the decision.

Read the full story on NY Times.

Apple · handheld · Instant messaging · iTunes · Operating system · Palm Pre · yahoo · YouTube

Pre Central has a great review of the Palm Pixi, we can’t wait for the Pixi to come to Verizon:

The $99 Palm Pixi will be unleashed upon the world this Sunday and after using one full-time for two days, I can say it’s a great smartphone for anybody who hasn’t made the jump past feature phones. The Pixi comes in a tiny, almost bite-able form-factor that’s immediately appealing — all the more so because inside that little frame is the elegance and power of webOS.

For current smartphone owners, however, there are a few compromises that, all combined, lead me to suggest that most those interested in webOS should still opt for the more powerful Pre.

The Pixi is Palm’s best attempt yet to broaden their base of smartphone users by picking up former feature-phone users. Its competition isn’t meant to be so much the iPhone 3GS, the Droid, or even the Pre – though in reality, of course, they are a healthy part of the competition. Palm wants to position it more as a killer of the ‘near-smartphones’ out there, your Samsung Instincts and LG Rumors and whatnot. By that metric, the Pixi absolutely wins.

The Pixi is a good phone for anybody looking to step up to a their first smartphone without breaking the bank. As a phone for SMS, IM, some Facebook, and web browsing, it’s great and stands well above any non-smartphone or ‘near-smartphone.’ Centro owners: You are going to love this phone.

Should Pre owners switch to the Pixi?
No.

Conclusion

Now that I’ve worked all of the gripes out of my system, it’s time to come back to the main thing. The Pixi is a marvel of a little smartphone. It’s tiny, fun, and does more than a lot of phones at its price. That price is just very close to the ever-lowering cost of high-end smartphones.

If the Pre didn’t woo Palm Centro owners, the Pixi has a much better shot. The only question is whether or not it will achieve its real goal: winning new users who have never used a smartphone. I think it has a shot.

Pros:
Small
No, seriously, it’s small!
Only $99
webOS 1.3.1
Cons:
No WiFi
Slightly slower than the Pre
Slightly smaller screen than the Pre

Facebook · Handhelds · iPhone · Palm Centro · Palm Pre · PalmPixi · Smartphone · WebOS

Gadgetell is trying to decide if the Palm Pre has saved Palm:

The successful launch of the Palm Pre, Palm’s darling of a phone running the “revolutionary” webOS was supposed to save Palm. Launched on June 6 in the US, the Pre was off to a fast start, depending on who you asked. The Pre continues to be sold on one network, Sprint, while it’s application catalog fills out. The question now becomes, did the Pre save Palm?

That was the question poised to me by our Robert Nelson who was standing next to me when the phone was announced at CES last year. Both of us left with a sense of hope and excitement about the new phone and about the webOS. Where are we now?

Robert says, “To me, I think it has gone stale. It almost seems that Palm is back on life support. But at the same time, I like the Pre (of course, that could just be the fan boy in me).”

My take is two parts: I agree with Robert the gloss has faded a bit on the Pre. I attribute that to an unappealing design, at least for me. I am edging closer to despising key’d phones, the split second it takes to slide out the keypad or worse, reorient the device is far too long for me. The Pre doesn’t live on the now network, it lives on the, wait for it, slide out, network.

So it’s clear I am not a big fan of the hardware on the Pre. That’s a personal call and one that I may be on my own with it; I can deal with that. I have the same problems with the Moto Droid and the slew of Android phones with slide out full-size keyboards. A phone store clerk explained it to me like this: the teens and 20 year olds love the slide out, the 30 and up crowd digs the slider phones. Test that one out, I’ve found it to be a decent predictor.

Part two is this, while the Pre hasn’t saved Palm, the webOS will. The OS is fun, simple, brilliant in some ways. I think the Pixi will do well, assuming it gets off Sprint in record time. I think the phone after Pixi will do even better. There is much competing operating systems could learn from webOS. While it still could use some polishing around the edges, it works and works well.

There is no question in my mind that the webOS can compete with Android for most people. Competing with the iPhone OS isn’t the problem, it’s the Santa’s sack of apps that is getting harder to get around.

Palm · Palm Pre · Sprint