Palm Pre Update

Monday, 20 April, 2009

There’s been a slow trickle of PR concerning the Palm Pre and it increasingly looks like a May release date on Sprint. In general there seems to have been a lot of positive commentary on both the Pre and WebOS. Developers have been brought on board early and the ease and speed of porting software across seems to have won them over. At least initially. We also have Motion Apps announcing a PalmOS emulator for the Pre with some pretty firmed up details on what it can and can’t do. Of course there are still neigh sayers and not without reason. This is a hugely competitive market place in a downward spiraling world economy; Apple, Nokia, RIM and Google (Android) all have very big slices of this pie. However Palm have a heritage of innovation and currently employ a very talented design team. Time will tell!

Two things remain big problems though; firstly there has been no mention of a GSM version and whilst it surely must be coming out, who knows the release date for it. Secondly, on looking over the specs again I note that there is no option to expand the storage on the device. It’s 8Gb and only 8Gb. That is increasingly looking like not much when you have photos and music involved. My Palm TX uses the excellent Palm Powerups PowerSDHC driver allowing me to carry my entire mp3 collection on a 16Gb SDHC card (although that’s getting a little small now). I struggle to understand the rationale behind Palm’s decision here.