![]() ![]() You’re not going to cut yourself on them, to be sure, but should you end up with the edges pressed against your skin, it’s often uncomfortable. Slice any cheese with it, I did agree with the assessment that the edges around the keyboard feel particularly sharp. That aspect of the Pre’s construction is worth commenting on. Unfortunately, this is also where the volume controls reside while the unit’s open, which makes using those controls annoying-and the edges of the opened unit are sharp, too. Since the Pre is slightly tapered at both ends, the point at which the display slider and the rear assembly intersect when the unit is in its opened form are not quite even. The headphone jack is also stuck in back of the opened slider, so beware if you have an L-shaped plug-you’ll have to orient it correctly before sliding the unit open, else the slide action might knock the headphone plug loose. In fact, it’s often easier to slide the unit closed, hit the power button, and then slide it open again. At that point it’s also flush with the back of the display slider, which makes it somewhat awkward to press. As a result, when you slide the screen upwards, the power button is now obscured by the front half of the phone, so you have to reach around the unit to press it. For one thing, the power button, which you need to use to wake the device from sleep (pressing the Center button won’t do it) is on the back half of the unit. Not that there aren’t other signs of that. ![]() Unfortunately, the door is attached with a thin plastic tether that just begs to be torn off by accident. The left-hand side of the Pre has the volume up and down buttons the right-hand side sports a small door behind which hides the Pre’s microUSB port, used for both data and power. In the center of the Pre’s top side is a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack. On the top right corner of the Pre, you’ll find the power button and, next to it, a switch that toggles between ring and silent mode. Both screens are touch-capable and, more to the point, both are capable of multitouch, a feature previously unique to the iPhone. The screens have different feels, too: the iPhone’s is made of glass while the Palm’s feels more like hard plastic-in addition, if you catch the Pre’s screen in the right light, you can see a grid of “dots” which I presume is related to the touch sensors. The Pre’s screen is a 3.1-inch diagonal, smaller than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display, but the two share the same resolution: 320 by 480 pixels. I attributed that mainly to its construction materials, which rely more heavily on plastic than the iPhone. Despite that commonality, though, there’s something about the Pre that just feels light. The two are identical in weight however, each weighing about 4.8 ounces (or, if you prefer to roll metric-style, 135 grams). In its retracted form, the Pre is a little narrower and shorter than the iPhone, measuring in at 3.9 inches tall, 2.3 inches wide it is, however, noticeably thicker: 0.67 inches compared to the iPhone’s 0.48 inches. With its keyboard retracted, the Pre is shorter and slightly narrower than the iPhone, though it is thicker. The device launched shortly beforeĪpple’s own introduction of the iPhone 3GS, and so it seemed clear that the two were destined to be pitted in mortal battle against each other. Dubbed the latest in a long line of “iPhone killers,” the Palm Pre and its webOS took some inspiration from the iPhone, but also attempted to make its own mark in the world with features like multitasking and unified contacts. Rolled out a brand new smart phone with a brand new operating system. Then, this past January at the Consumer Electronics Show, the company But at a certain point, the smartphone market kept moving on and Palm’s innovation went stagnant. Into the late part of that decade, Palm even managed to leverage its PalmOS into the early smartphone market with the Treo line, even while the company was repeatedly bought and sold, changing hands more time than the Queen of Spades in a game of Old Maid. ![]() In the early to mid ’90s, when Palm was at the top of its game, the name “PalmPilot” was effectively synonymous with an entire class of devices: the Personal Digital Assistant. ![]()
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