Figure A shows the Palm Pre. Designed with a "pebble in the stream" shape, the phone has a slide-out keyboard, which actually extends in a curve to make the unit fit more comfortably in your hand. If you're making calls or listening to music, the keyboard can be left closed. For emails and text messages, having a physical keyboard makes typing easy.

FIGURE A


Here's a preliminary photo of the Palm Pre. (Photo credit: Palm) Roll over picture for a larger image.

The Pre weighs about 4.75 ounces, and it's approximately 2.5 inches wide, 4 inches long, and less than 1 inch thick. It is a 3G phone, and has built-in GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Like the iPhone, the Pre has an accelerometer motion sensor, so the screen will change automatically from portrait to landscape mode when you turn the phone.

Other than the slide-out keyboard, the Pre doesn't immediately appear that different from my Palm Treo. But another look at the picture above shows the "deck of cards" metaphor that Palm has used in developing the Pre and its underlying operating system.

Interface
Multiple applications can be running at the same time (Palm says most users will have fifteen to twenty open at once--seriously?), and the user can flip between them using a gesture-based navigation system. Push your Web browser off to one side when you want to make a phone call, then pull the browser back to the forefront without losing the page you were reading before the call. The Pre's ability truly have multiple applications open at once will be a huge advantage over the iPhone.

Rather than sounding alarms and interrupting what you're doing, the Pre has a Dashboard area at the bottom of the screen where such information will be displayed. It will show you the first line of an incoming text message or instant message, or give you the details of a calendar event and let you dismiss or snooze the alarm. You can continue what you were doing without being forced to respond to the alert at once.

Synergy
The Pre is different beyond the interface, of course. With webOS, Palm has introduced a concept called Palm Synergy, which will allow the Pre to access the Internet to keep its information up to date. For example, if you have the same contact in your Facebook and email accounts, the Pre will link up the information and show it as a single listing. Updating the Pre's information will automatically update the various accounts as well.

During the announcement, the presenter began a search for "Blue Man Group". The Pre, recognizing that it didn't have any such information in the device, automatically initiated an Internet search. It's this behavior that earned the phone the name "Pre": it's always a step ahead of you.