Phonescoop: Palm Pre

[0]After months of waiting, here it is, the Palm Pre, the brand new smartphone from Palm that will be available on the Sprint network in the next day or so. Phonescoop is going to do something a little bit different this time around with the video. We are going to do one master video here which just gives you a general overview of the phone but we are going to dive deeper into all other features separately and you can watch those videos, you know, if you care to see a little bit more about how each of the functions works. This video is just going to concentrate on the hardware and the main WebOS operating system. on the hardware and the main WebOS operating system. So you can see the Palm is very round and smooth of course. Palm said it was fashioned after a riverstone or a rock that you would find at the bottom of a river. Comfortable to hold in the hand, feels nice to grip like this. And given the shape and size it fits easily into any [1]pocket that you care to put it in. We have a got lone one single button here on the front. On the left side, we have just the volume toggle here, nothing along the bottom, nothing along the right except for the hatch covering the microUSB port. And on the back you have got camera flash and the speaker. And on the very top we have a full 3.5mm headset jack as well as the silence key and power and unlock key. Pressing the power unlock key you can see will just unlock the screen. You can check the time and see some messages and things like that. The slider mechanism works pretty well, it was a little stiff when I first got the phone but now that I have been using it for a few weeks, excuse me for one week it is feels a little bit better. What I dont like is this ridge here. Its very sharp and [2]you know digs into your thumb or fingers its not very comfortable. As for the keyboard itself you can see the buttons are minimum here. Very small and have you know just a very small shape and contour to them. You know the keys dont offer that much travel and feedback, its again minimal, not a whole lot going on here, but most people would probably be able to get used to this keyboard in just a matter of several days use. When open it still has a pretty slim profile. We have got a banana shape going on and the back you can see there is actually a mirror and we will get the, so you can see mirror there, and could be used to check your makeup if you are you know, a makeup wearing person, or you know, signal overhead aircraft for rescue if you are trapped in a desert island. [3]Thats the mirror. Now that we have seen the hardware, lets take a look at the software a little bit more. The Pre uses the new WebOS mobile operating system from Palm. Its a brand new Smartphone platform, its developed from the ground up, and incorporates a lot of web technologies into making it all work. You can see along the bottom, we have got, pretty much constant access to the phone contacts, email, calendar, and then the launcher button. Each of these applications does exactly what you expect it to. The launcher button is really, really the main menu of the phone you can see here, basic grid pattern and we have got little arrows here indicating there are two more pages of these applications. We can scroll, now you got one page to the left, one page to the right here on the screen. Any new applications you download from the apps catalog go here. They get piled into the first page. You know, it appears to be [4]unlimited number of applications that you can load. Want to get rid of this, hit the key at the bottom of the phone or hit the launcher button again And that will take you back to the home screen. Lets fire up an application real quick so you can see a little bit about how navigation works. You will see a demo application. Which will launch here in just a second. So we want to type a new memo. We will hit memo, type in some text and there is a menu key up here whcih is present on a lot of the phone systems. And this lets us cut, copy and paste and we will save that. So looks like we can set a color that looks good to me and we want to go back, we swipe back here which takes us back to the main memo screen here. This area of the front face of the Pre is sensitive to touch and lets you [5]scroll back and you can see here we have deactivated this card and if we want to we can just fling it and get rid of it and not deal with it anymore. Thats basically how you close an application on the Palm Pre. You can of course have a lot of applications open at one time. We will look load up the messaging application and then we will load up pictures, which will take a second to load here. And we will load our videos and we will load tasks. So you can see now we have a number of different applications running at once and each of them is stored on the what Palm calls cards, you can scroll through them easily, and [6]jump to any of these applications. This essentially just sends the application to the background If you want to clear up some user memory so that you can do other tasks, you can just get rid of it. You can toss things off at will and of course open things up whenever we want to. So thats the basics of how WebOS works, there is a lot of features included in the Pre, you know, messaging, web browser, camera photogallery, music player, video player and Google maps of course. Also has Sprint services integrated, you know we have got Sprint TV, navigation, the Sprint page and its NASCAR application. There is the App Catalog, YouTube client and Amazon MP3 client and on the last page here you will see all the different tools you can see you can use to configure and the phone. So this is our main overview of the phone and if you want to see some more in depth looks at other features please check out phonescoop's other videos on [7]Palm Pre.



Channel: phonescoop