Palm Pre and WebOS wows the CES crowd (finally!)

In what has easily been the most impressive keynote presentation of CES so far, Palm just announced its new smartphone – the Palm Pre.

We’ve got lots to say and show about it, but we’ll cut right to the chase – Palm has really surprised everyone here and the innovative Pre looks set to give the iPhone a run for its money.And if you just bought a T-Mobile G1, you’re going to be kicking yourself…

Lots of photos and videos, including a 30-minute in-depth demonstration of the Palm Pre, after the cut.

Those artists’ impressions were pretty accurate and a 3.1in, 320 x 480 multi-touch screen fits flush with the top of the Pre and the touch-sensitive area extends below the display to provide a virtual centre button.

The bottom half carries a Qwerty keyboard and this slides out on a curved track, not unlike the keyboard on the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. It looks a bit on the chubby side, but the Pre bears more than a passing resemblance to the Touch Dual – hardly surprising given that HTC manufactures them both.

We don’t know a great deal about the Pre’s full specification just yet, but it has a TI OMAP processor, 8Gb of storage, 3-megapixel camera with flash, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, GPS and EVDO (in the US). Palm doesn’t seem to have missed out anything obvious, which is a pleasant change, but what really, really impresses is the operating system. Palm WebOS looks like it’s everything weary Palm users have been waiting for for years – and then some.

WebOS still has plenty of classic user-led touches that once made PalmOS such a joy to use, but Palm has clearly drawn inspiration from the iPhone for its clear, colourful look and feel. A slick application carousel provides a neat way to manage the operating system’s multi-tasking capabilities and the display responds in a snappy, bouncy way that’ll be familiar to iPhone users.

Palm made much of WebOS’s ‘Synergy’ feature, which combines such information as contact details and appointment details from a variety of online sources into one. So, the address book lists telephone and email details alongside FaceBook status updates and instant messaging status.

Neat touches abound, from the concertina effect in the calendar that compresses unused time to make more room for displaying appointments, to the system-wide real-time search that seamlessly leads you to Google and Wikipedia if you don’t find what you want.

We’re still buzzing from the Pre demo – not something we thought possible with Palm any more – and it looks set to make a similar splash to the iPhone in terms of changing the way that people interact with a smartphone.

Palm pulled another first when it comes to power with the optional Touchstone wireless charging dock. This holds the Pre in place with magnets and uses inductive coupling to charge the battery and sync data with a computer.

We’ll stop fawning over the Pre now and leave you with some videos. The first gives a short overview of the Pre and its specification, the second is a 30-minute in-depth walkthrough of WebOS and the third explains Touchstone.

The Pre will launch “in the first half of 2009” in the US with Sprint, but there’s no news yet on pricing. A European launch will follow and we'll have a hands-on video tomorrow. 

[Palm Pre]