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Hailed as the 'bet the company' move, the introduction of the Palm Pre via an exclusive 6-month run on the Sprint network completes the introduction of completely new family of Palm devices. The Centro introduced in 2007 is the last device supporting the legacy Palm OS 5.4.9, and Treo Pro which is the fourth Palm device to run Windows Mobile introduced in mid-2008.

The newest Palm device sports a new OS, the Palm webOS and is associated with the requisite app store. Like other smartphones from Apple, Nokia and RIM, the Pre has computing power, onboard storage and a 3rd party developer SDK (although it is in very tight controlled release at the moment) to get the app store fully stocked with useful applications. According to Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, there were only a dozen apps at launch, something that Palm plans to address quickly.

Probably most significantly for business applications, the Palm Pre's new OS enables multi-threading, so multiple applications can be run on the device at a time and even in the background. Single threading is most often cited as the reason for a smartphone's inappropriateness for enterprise applications. The Palm Pre is a dual mode device in that it supports WiFi connectivity as well as the CDMA network from Sprint.

Here are the specs of the Palm Pre:

• Height 3.9"
• Width 2.3"
• Thickness 0.67"
• Weight 4.76 oz.
• Storage 8 Gb
• Physical keyboard
• Screen size 3.1" (diagonal)

User interface

The user interface uses a card metaphor to manage applications and utilities. You can flip through the cards, zoom in on one to use it or quickly dismiss the application by flicking it up and off the screen. Some jestures work in the black area below the screen which has a button to zoom in and out of card view.

The organizer app lets users consolidate contact details from disparate contact sources - called Synergy - including Google, Facebook and email.

Auto-syncing is enabled to Exchange and it supports push email like Blackberry service. Probably more important to many busy business people is the automatic backup service over wireless. You can store data - contacts, schedules, application data - on remote servers so that they are accessible if you loose, destroy or replace your Pre. And, for syncing big files, Pre uses Apple iTunes!

Pre also supports MMS (instead of just texting to other mobile users, the Pre lets users send photos) and an extra battery!

Thoughts

The Palm Pre is a classy new powerful handheld computing platform that is squarely in the business-qualified mobile device category. With support for multi-threading, OTA backup and push email, Palm has managed to combine a slick consumer-oriented UI to push itself into range of enterprise users. Although it may be too early to tell what the market thinks about this device, I definitely feel it is appropriate to say, welcome back Palm!