UK Palm Pre

Luckily my phone took a bit of damage out in Madagascar, so I had the perfect opportunity to upgrade to a Palm Pre in January. O2 immediately gave me some bad vibes when their promise of a “free gift” turned out to be a charging dock instead of a goldfish or an embroidered bandana, but when I realised that it was a magical magnetic charging dock the anger disappated into restrained geeky joy. It charges through the back of the phone by a process technically known as sorcery, and it is a constant source of wonder and happiness for me.

When I turned on the phone I was treated to a beautiful introduction video on a shining bright screen, followed by a request for my Google and Facebook passwords. Give a little, take a little- the Pre is evidently a device of both Yin and Yang. It helpfully told me that if I entered these passwords, it would “link” my accounts. What? Did I want that? I was intrigued- perhaps this meant that I could now actually physically jab people in the ribs with my phone instead of just poking them. Spurred on by this possibility, I signed my life away. Then the creepy little thing downloaded all your phone numbers, birthdays and profile pictures onto itself. So now when you phone me, remember that I’m rubbing my face against your face. Or your crotch, if you have a dirty profile picture.

The phone itself has a QWERTY keyboard and a well-designed sliding mechanism… which feels slightly flimsy. The screen is a thing of joy. It’s bright, it’s shiny, it has multi-touch, gestures. It has an accelerometer and all that jazz, so you can play tilt games and the display will automatically change from portrait to landscape when you turn it. The camera’s nice. It reads MS documents. It integrates really nicely with Gmail and Google calendar. Etc, etc.

WebOS (the operating system) is great, but it’s still being developed. It’s still slightly less responsive than the iPhone and doesn’t have as many options or features as I’d expect. But it’s very stable, you can run several applications at once, and the gestures are fast and intuitive.

The applications that are there are polished enough… but there aren’t many there yet. I rooted the device and installed some homebrew Quake and Monkey Island while I waited a month for some games to be released in the UK, but I’m not sure that everyone would have been bothered to go through that ordeal.

Luckily, Palm seem to be aware of this, and throughout March they are letting us download Need For Speed, The Sims 3 and Monopoly for free while they sort out the sorry state of affairs. I’ve played all of these through now, and I’m quite impressed by them. Unlocking all the cars in Need for Speed didn’t take very long, but racing around and crashing in gloss-mapped 3D multi-touch is great fun. The Sims 3 doesn’t have much furniture to buy and lacks any community addons, but it turns the Pre into an advanced tamagotchi… which is actually pretty fun. And Monopoly has enough options for me to play it the way my mummy taught me, just without all the cheating and the Dire Straits playing in the background.

Maybe that’ll come in an update.

In conclusion I’m pretty happy and impressed so far, but not totally blown away. Which is probably a good thing. There’s little worse than talking to someone who just fishes out their fancy phone at every available opportunity and talks about how amazing they think it is. I think I only did that for a couple of weeks until the novelty wore off. Or until all my friends stopped talking to me.