Palm Pre Plus deals & review

In a word or two

Small, smooth and smart – if you liked the original Palm Pre, you’ll enjoy the Palm Pre Plus.

The Design

As far as your eyes are concerned, there is not much between the Palm Pre and the Palm Pre Plus. Both benefit from a compact design, 3.1 inch touchscreen and slide-down QWERTY keyboard – not to mention the clean look and soft-to-the-touch rubberised back.

However, there are a few subtle design changes. Most noticeably, the Palm Pre Plus is even sleeker as it has a touch-sensitive key beneath the screen instead of the original menu button. This makes the device even more “pebble”-like in its appearance, rounded and smooth.

The Palm Pre Plus may have a few additions – we’ll cover those in due course – but it retains its size. Comfortable to hold in the palm of your hand, the screen on the Pre Plus supports over 16 million colours so you can view websites, images or videos in clarity and vibrancy. And this is enhanced further by the look of the home screen which has icons along its bottom for accessing calls, email, contacts and calendar.

Specifications

Those “additions” in the Palm Pre Plus that we mentioned are pretty much the updated WebOS platform, doubled RAM and doubled memory. The interface is swifter and more interactive on this Palm device and the exterior isn’t the only smooth thing about the Pre Plus.

With more RAM powering the Palm Pre Plus, you can chop and change between apps and functions with greater ease, and multi-tasking is effortless. So you could play some tracks on the inbuilt music player while you launch Twitter, leave it running in the background as you write an email – and all without slowing the phone down.

The memory can now be increased up to 16GB on the Pre Plus, giving you greater freedom to maximise the media player on the phone. Add lots of tracks to listen to on the move, or take lots of photos on the phone’s 3.2-megapixel camera with LED flash and autofocus. A new feature is the ability to record videos and edit them, which you can then easily share with friends online through sites like YouTube and Facebook.

Considerations

The keyboard has been enhanced although it’s a slight shame Palm has removed the orange markings on the number keys as this made them easier to distinguish when typing.

Verdict

The Palm Pre Plus is a good looking smartphone with some nice extras on the original Pre but whether it can compete with the likes of the Nexus One or iPhone in terms of capability is questionable. If you want a compact, friendly device, the Pre Plus would be a good choice – especially if you’re a fan of the first Palm Pre.