This afternoon, I was glued to Engadget’s live blogging of Palm’s announcement at CES 2009 in Las Vegas. I heard that Microsoft’s announcement was pretty anemic… and Apple had announced that 2009 would be their last appearance at MacWorld (and Steve Jobs didn’t even show up!). Palm had been building up a lot of intrigue into what would be announced today.
Turns out, all that curiosity was well satiated. I’ve been a fan of Palm products for a while. I never had a Palm Pilot, but the whole concept was pretty neat back in the day. I got a Treo 700p back in 2006, after I killed my flip phone. I flipped it one too many times, and one afternoon, the earpiece/display went flying 10 feet down the sidewalk after a stressful day and a particularly violent wrist flick. Oops. I was sold on the touchscreen and full keyboard. It was a lot heftier than any other phone I’d had previously, but come on — smartphone with a touchscreen? Awesome. And it was cheaper than purchasing Blackberry’s additional data plan. The 700p even had a memory card slot that just happened to be perfectly compatible with my camera’s memory card!
After that phone took a swim in the toliet on Valentine’s Day 2008, I replaced it with my current red Palm Centro. Definitely smaller and significantly lighter than my Treo brick. It had personality — it’s a bright happy RED! And a touchscreen. And everything else I’d been enamored of Palm recently. My only minor complaint was that the QWERTY keypad was more ‘gummy’ than the hard plastic buttons of the Treo. While it was definitely no Windows Mobile, I was pretty happy with the Palm OS…
But it was no iPhone. When Jeff got his with the full touchscreen, I was initally all oooooh and aaaaaah. But there were no BUTTONS. I LOVE my BUTTONS. My wonderful QWERTY BUTTONS. I got fairly used to being able to use my fingernail as a stylus on my Palm phones and being able to stab at buttons with my thumbnail. Meaning, the phone could still function as what it was, even if I wasn’t using my fingertips. I remember it took me nearly 15 min to type out a 5 sentence email one morning. Why? I tried using my fingernails on the touchscreen keyboard. No go. Apple’s nice for other things… but I needed BUTTONS.
And that’s why I was so freakin excited this afternoon when the awesome top people at Palm (I have all the articles open, but I can’t even find the name of the people who talked. Sheesh) announced the 1H 2009 arrival of the Palm Pre.
The specs without my further rambling:
- Curvy ergonomic handset
- 3.1 inch 320×480 touchscreen
- Full QWERTY keyboard that slides out portrait-style (like the orientation of keyboards on Treo and Centro)
- Accelerometer-sensed widescreen browsing enabled
- Runs Palm webOS (not just the old Palm OS)
- TI’s new OMAP CPU (claims to have laptop-like performance)
- ‘Deck of cards’ app-switching
- EV-DO Rev. A, 802.11b/g WiFi
- GPS (squee!)
- Integrated IM, SMS, MMS
- Bluetooth with A2DP
- 8GB of built-in flash storage
- 3mp camera with LED flash
- MicroUSB port with high-speed USB2.0
- 3.5mm headphone jack
- wireless charger (no more blindly trying to stick things in my phone’s bottom!!)
- Sprint exclusive
I’m going to say this will be my birthday/Christmas present for 2009. I got my Centro 6 months ago. I don’t think I’m eligible for an upgrade/replacement for quite a while. Doesn’t matter. I WANT. I’ve been in full-on fangirly geek out mode all day. I’m saving up!
More pictures from Engadget here
Official Palm Pre page