Palm Pre details and what it means for Asia

John Chan | Jan 09, 2009

Would you buy the Pre if there was no slide-out QWERTY keypad?
(Credit: Palm)

On Thursday, Palm presented its new operating system, WebOS, and the Palm Pre smart phone to the world at CES 2009. The company's executives did a good job demonstrating both elements but also left out quite a bit of information, some of which have been slowly trickling out from different sources. Let's do a quick roundup of the not-so-obvious tidbits:

The Touchstone wireless charging dock is an optional accessory and will require a special Palm Pre back cover (another added cost) to work.

8GB of storage is built-in, but it's still unclear if there will be a card slot for augmenting that. The best bet is to assume that there's none till Palm mentions otherwise.

It will be more expensive than the iPhone. All Things Digital's Peter Kafka asked Palm's CEO Ed Colligan if it will be significantly cheaper than the iPhone's US$200 price point and the reply was: "Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product?" Ouch.

Developers will code in HTML, CSS and Javascript but this is not the same as what Apple initially planned for the iPhone. Apple's implementation (this idea was eventually scrapped) would have required the applications to sit on a server on the Internet and accessed through the browser, but Palm's idea is for the apps to reside on the phone. A big difference, though the programming languages are similar.

One burning question for us in this part of the world is surely this: Will it be sold in Asia? No, not in its current form. Because it's meant for Sprint in the US, the Pre will initially be a CDMA device. This also means that US customers won't be able to roam with it as it is not compatible with GSM networks. The good news is the company has already said it is working on a UMTS version, which means GSM and 3G compatibility for Europe and Asia.

If Palm's past launch timings are anything to go by, that will take a few months. So if the company fulfills its first half release for Sprint, we are looking at a Q3 (for the optimists) or Q4 Asia launch.

For those totally enthralled by the Pre's design, take note that Gearlog, a PCMag blog, suggested that the HSDPA version may not be the same and may even come without a QWERTY keyboard. I personally find that very unlikely, but it's something to chew on.

Filed under: Handhelds, Mobile Phones
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