While many cellphone makers wait to announce new products at the annual Barcelona show, Palm chose to unveil the Pre at CES in order to avoid information leaks before then. Crowley said international availability announcements, possibly including Canada, are coming soon - possibly at the GSM mobile phone conference in Barcelona in February. Sprint uses the same CDMA cellphone network technology that Bell and Telus use, but Palm has announced a GSM version, the standard used by the Rogers cellphone network. The Pre is being rolled out in the United States through Sprint-Nextel during the first half of 2009. users to download music over the air from 's MP3 store, which means tracks can be had cheaply and without going through a cellphone carrier. One other small innovation is the capability for U.S. The Pre interacts with the charger as well, so if a call comes in while the phone is being charged, it can be answered by just lifting it off the pad without pushing any buttons. The Pre can also be charged wirelessly when placed on a small puck-shaped magnetic induction device, which then plugs into the wall. It's a useful feature, given that phones are becoming more complex, Crowley said. Users can type in the first few letters of the phrase they're looking for and the phone will display matching contacts, websites and files. The phone also packs a universal search function like that found on many computers. "We're going to be a lot more open," he said. The openness will spur innovation, Crowley said, but users will also have to be wary because there will certainly be some malicious applications distributed. While the company will offer free and certified applications, anyone who wants to design software for the Pre will be free to do so and won't be required to seek Palm's approval, as seen with others such as Apple. From there, however, the phone goes into relatively new territory.Ĭhief among Palm's innovations is the decision to throw the doors wide open on its application store - a depot of downloadable software that allows users to customize their phones. The Pre has all the bells and whistles that have become standard in smartphones, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, carrier-assisted and stand-alone GPS and a three-megapixel camera. Each application that is running, whether it's the MP3 player or web browser, is displayed as a Card on the screen, and it can be rearranged just like windows on a computer. The gesture pad comes in handy for the phone's "Card" display system, which is similar to how windows are shown on a computer desktop. The area just below the touch screen, which would normally be considered dead space on most phones, is actually a gesture pad that allows the user to navigate menus and programs on the phone without touching the screen. The Pre goes a step further with its touch capability, however. Like the iPhone, the Pre features multi-touch and an accelerometer, so photos and videos switch between horizontal and vertical view when the phone is turned. The Pre thus adds one of the best things about most BlackBerrys - the ease of typing - to an iPhone-inspired touch screen. Its biggest physical difference is the full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which addresses the main complaint about Apple's device - the difficulty of typing on a touchscreen. The phone looks similar to the iPhone, with a full touch-screen, but is a little more rounded. Palm's smartphone product line manager, Matt Crowley, gave CBCNews.ca a hands-on look at the Pre at CES. Written off for dead by many, Palm came roaring back at CES with the Pre - a smartphone that combines the best features of BlackBerry and the iPhone, and which adds a dose of its own innovations. But as PDAs morphed into smartphones, Palm lost its way and ceded the market to Waterloo, Ont.-based BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd., which is now being fiercely challenged by Apple Inc.'s iPhone. Once upon a time, the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company ruled the personal digital assistant market with its ubiquitous Palm Pilot. Las Vegas - There's little doubt that the big story from this year's Consumer Electronics Show was the rebirth of Palm Inc., which introduced a new smartphone (the strangely named Pre) to rave reviews.
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