Palm Pre 2 deals & review

The Palm Pre 2 is the follow up device to Palm´s earlier Pre and Pre Plus handsets. While the original Pre saw the introduction of Palm´s highly innovative WebOS operating system it didn´t manage to attract the attention that Palm had hoped for. In the meantime Palm has been taken over by computer manufacturing giant Hewlett Packard who have managed to bring their technical expertise into the mix to offer significant improvements for this latest Palm handset.

Aesthetically the Pre 2 is almost identical to the original Pre but this belies the fact that there has been some significant changes made inside. The Pre 2 features the same 3.1" TFT capacitive touchscreen and has a similar 320 x 480 resolution and 16 million colour depth to show off the interface beautifully. The OS has seen an upgrade to the second version of WebOS with a number of tweaks and additions to make this even better than the original version. The Pre 2 also features Gorilla Glass on its screen and supports multi touch input.

Internally this is all powered by a 1GHz processor which offers a dramatic increase in speed from the Pre´s 600MHz. Memory has been doubled from the Pre´s 256MB to the new 512MB found on the Pre 2. Internal storage space has also been doubled from 8GB to 16GB although, like the original Pre, the Palm Pre 2 does not come with support for microSD memory cards so that 16GB is the absolute maximum. Having said this, 16GB is still plenty of room to store a large amount of music, video and other media content such as photographs captured on the 5 megapixel camera (up from 3.15MP on the Pre). This comes with an LED flash, geo-tagging and the addition of video capture support.

For connectivity the Pre 2 comes with GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi and HSDPA as well as Bluetooth (with A2DP) and microUSB. The Pre 2 also features an accelerometer, proximity sensor and A-GPS. Web surfing is a real joy on the Pre 2 thanks in part to the WebOS interface, and the Pre 2 also features Adobe Flash 10.1 support. The Pre 2 supports push email accounts and comes with a document viewer as well as threaded SMS messages and support for MMS.

Like the original Pre the Pre 2 comes with a condensed QWERTY keyboard hidden beneath a sliding design that is perfect for tapping out messages or writing emails. This follows the same layout as the original and offers additional input comforts to the fantastic touch sensitive screen in use. The Palm Pre 2 is very similar in look and feel to the original Pre but has some noticeable upgrades in terms of processing power and the camera. However, for owners of the original Pre there might not be enough to warrant an upgrade just yet.