Palm's bid to produce an iPhone killer is gusty, but without significant work, the Pre won't dethrone Apple's smartphone any time soon.

 

We have a confession to make: There are a few Palm fans among us. Back in the day, you would have had to pry the grayscale Palm IIIx out of our cold, dead, extremely well-organized hands. But Palm lost its way--and we went back to our paper calendar for a while. With the Pre, Palm is taking its flagging brand in a new direction. And while it has adopted many of the multitouch gestures popularized by the iPhone, the Pre also adds a fair amount of its own special sauce.

The Pre sports a tactile keyboard, exposed by sliding the screen upward. But we’ve gotten pretty fast with the iPhone’s soft keyboard, some prefer the feel of keys beneath their fingers. The Pre’s keys, however, are downright Lilliputian. Our thumbs are over three keys wide, making typing with any speed at all an exercise in frustration and bad spelling. Even after dedicated practice, our text messages resembled strange consonant-heavy alien languages. Worse, the Pre’s autocorrect feature is decidedly hands-off--it’s perfectly content to let you type garbage in most instances, rather than helping decipher the language of your clumsy thumbs.

Without direct Mac syncing and more sensible controls, the Pre will never be an iPhone killer.

Most of the keys have a secondary symbol printed in superscript. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that to get the orange numbers, you hit the orange key first. What doesn’t make sense, however, is that the orange button--not the white Sym key--also lets you type all the other superscript characters, which are white.

Like the iPhone, the Pre features a 320x480 touchscreen. There’s also an area immediately below the screen that allows for some useful gestures, but forces you to think about which of the two touch-sensitive areas are used for certain commands. And then there’s the app Launcher, which is laid out in a grid that is larger than what will fit on a single screen. You’re forced to scroll vertically and horizontally to see all of the icons and descriptions--a perfect example of our biggest gripe about the Pre. The interface often feels cobbled together and unintuitive. The Pre has plenty of great features: an OS that can multitask and run apps in the background, a cool card-based interface for switching between apps, and an integrated email inbox that allows you to see messages from all your accounts at the same time. But the UI is challenging. The Pre also features the App Catalog, an online store that, at press time, was sparsely populated with a handful of apps--Twitter, sudoku, and Match.com, for example. More developers will need to jump onboard before App Catalog becomes a compelling draw.

When we first started testing the Pre, iTunes syncing worked--but only because the Pre impersonated an iPod. Then Apple closed that loophole with an iTunes update. Then Palm made it work again. The cat-and-mouse game with Apple is unsustainable, and Palm would be better served creating its own syncing solution. There’s also no direct sync between Address Book, iCal, or other Mac apps out of the box, although there are third-party solutions to keep your Mac-based data in step with a Pre. But you’ll pay for those, in time, frustration, and/or cash.

Background apps are awesome, and (apparently) some users are still married to a physical keyboard. But for most Mac users, the Palm Pre doesn't stack up, leaving the smartphone score at Apple: 3, iPhone killers: 0.

Pre
COMPANY: Palm
CONTACT: www.palm.com
PRICE: $199.99 (after $100 mail-in rebate, with 2-year service contract)
REQUIREMENTS: USB port to charge via computer
Slide-out keyboard. Apps can run in the background. Sleek design.
No direct Mac syncing. iTunes sync is a cat-and-mouse game with Apple. Unintuitive UI. Keyboard layout can be confusing. Keys are teeny-tiny. Pre's App Catalog is sparse.