Palm Pre Review

Everything modern phones do with multitasking and notifications, the Pre did first. webOS 1.0 showed running apps as cards you flicked up to close, stacked notifications along the bottom edge where a thumb could reach them, merged Gmail, Facebook and Exchange contacts through Synergy, and let you swipe back on a gesture strip below the screen. Palm also shipped the Touchstone, a magnetic charging puck, years before anyone else took wireless charging seriously.

The hardware betrayed all of it. The curved slider twisted in the hand until the two halves no longer met, which owners called the Oreo effect; screens cracked near the hinge on launch batches; the keyboard was tiny and rubbery; the 1150 mAh battery gave up before dinner. The TI OMAP 3430 at 600 MHz and 256 MB of RAM out-specced the iPhone 3G, but webOS drew its interface in web code and apps took two or three seconds to open, and the 3 megapixel fixed-focus camera could not record video until the 1.3.5 update at the end of the year.

Sprint sold it from June 6, 2009 at 199.99 dollars after a rebate on a two-year contract, 13 days before the iPhone 3GS. Palm's stunt of making the Pre pose as an iPod so iTunes would sync it lasted until Apple's next update. HP bought Palm in April 2010, promised webOS 2.0 for the Pre, withdrew the promise in February 2011, and killed the hardware that August. The software as shipped would be an A on its own; the support that followed pulls the OS grade to a B, and the phone around it was a C.