Palm pre games review

The Palm Pre was the most hotly-anticipated phones of - it is coming to the UK very soon. Our Verdict. Against Cheap plastic case No video recording Fiddly keyboard Interface requires practise Poor app selection.

TechRadar Verdict. Cons - Cheap plastic case - No video recording - Fiddly keyboard - Interface requires practise - Poor app selection. John Brandon. Put the packplate on the phone and place the phone on the base station and it will wirelessly charge your phone. So Palm has added this back plate as standard to the Palm Pre Plus. Palm has improved the feel of the keys slightly, giving them a more pronounced click, but the rubber keys are simply too small requiring you to stab at them with fingernails.

Consequently you have to open the phone up to write even the quickest and simplest text, though you can at least dial number without the keypad. Build quality is the other obvious initial complaint. Unlike most premium touchscreen smartphones, the Pre and Pre Plus use plastic screens rather than glass. This makes them much more prone to scratching. Thankfully Palm does provide a neat slip case to keep the phone protected. Where the Pre Plus does still excel is in its physical features and their layout.

The 3. The only weak points in this regard are the speaker and camera. Despite its oversized grille the speaker is nothing special. It does, however, have an LED flash, which helps out a bit indoors.

Video is available in resolutions up to x and framerate of 30fps. Performance is, much like for stills, hampered by strong contrast situations and colours look a bit muted, but you should still be able to recognise which of your friends it was that just drank a shot of hot sauce or won in a play fight.

We also love its curved corners that mirror those of the body. It's been a long time coming, but the full and usable Internet has finally arrived on a Palm device. Most pages first load up in a zoomed out view as they would appear on a larger monitor. You can then double tap to automatically zoom into a particular area, or do the pinch and zoom motion to set the magnification level.

The best experience is had when the device is held on its side in landscape mode, where is drops the UI and enters fullscreen mode as well. Here text is usually larger and more readable, however you have to tilt the Pre back upright in order to use the keyboard. In my short trial I never had the browser completely crash, however I did experience a few minor issues.

A few times it would stop rendering pages even when refreshed, and other times it seemed to confuse the cache and show images in the wrong spot here and there. These were just minor hiccups on what is otherwise totally excellent web experience. Simply sliding out the keyboard and typing from the home screen invokes the clever universal search feature. With each key press the device will attempt to narrow down and find the contact or application that you are looking for.

If a local match can't be found, the Pre will present a list of online search options such as Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Twitter.

This is a super efficient way to dial or message a contact, and it also works great as an even faster means to execute a quick web search. Messaging The email and messaging experience on the Pre is good, though a little basic. They way it is integrated into the system is most impressive, given that it can stay in sync with your server without having the app open.

The notification system gently alerts you when new messages arrive and the built in client can combine multiple inboxes into one view. SMS and Instant messaging are also integrated as seamlessly as the email program. These apps also combine their respective communications by contact for a great threaded conversation view. Multimedia Another aspect that has fortunately been given a good amount of attention is the Pre's multimedia capabilities.

The Pre's high density screen and multitasking capabilities further add to its attractiveness as a media player. All of the usuals are present as well as some added apps for additional online content. The Pre's music player is straightforward and easy to use. Even its background operation is well thought out, as you can control the player at any time via a set of expandable controls in the notification area.

It even notifies you of the new track names as you progress through your playlist. The inclusion a standard 3. For more video enjoyment a basic YouTube app is included, which lets you search, browse and stream full clips from the 'Tube. SprintTV is also on board, which provides access to a wide range of subscription based mobile video content. It should be noted that all of the above video applications will playback video in landscape mode.

The Pre also comes preloaded with Amazon's MP3 store for on-the-go music purchases. In order to facilitate media importing your media, Palm has created a special media sync mode. This functionality only supports music and video at this time, as you cannot sync other content such as photos and PIM data through iTunes.

Photos One app that seriously disappoints is the Photo viewer. The Pre's Photo browser simply needs some urgent improvements. The basic functionality is present, however the app is just painfully slow at some crucial tasks. Displaying each photo's can often take up to seconds just to fully load.

As a result, the program also frequently stutters when scrolling through a set of pictures. I'm sure its something that could be addressed in a future update, but at present browsing photos is frustratingly slow. Business users will be relieved to find a document viewer built in that is capable of displaying Microsoft Word and Excel spreadsheets. At this time, the app is view only as you cannot edit or create office documents on the Pre.

Its primary purpose seems to allow you to view email attachments. DataViz has announced that they are working on a version of their popular Documents to Go editing software for the Pre. A basic PDF viewer is also present. Google has created a version of its Google Maps application for the Pre. The app makes use of the built in GPS and location services to pinpoint your location.

Just like its desktop counterpart, it can provide basic search, directions and traffic information in addition to the maps and satellite views. For more detailed routes, Pre users can make use of the Sprint Navigation software based on Telenav for a more automobile centric voice guided directions and services.

For creating notes, an attractive yet basic memo pad application is on board. There is also a dedicated To-Do list application called Tasks.

A very basic Clock app that does not even support world times , Calculator and a Nascar specific app from Sprint finish off the list of built-ins. App Catalog In the post iPhone world, it now seems like every major handset manufacturer is rushing to create its own on device application store, and the Palm Pre is no exception.

Palms take is called the App Catalog and on my review unit it was clearly marked as a "beta" application. At launch there will be about a dozen or so applications available to try. The App Catalog presents a number of features and popular applications available for download and also has a number of organized lists such as most recent, Top Rated and various categories.

It even throws in a tag cloud view for good measure and of course you can also easily search the catalog. It was very simple to download apps, though it was not possible to purchase anything of yet. Not all of the details of how this software marketplace will function have been made public yet, however during my trial it worked pretty well and shows a lot of promise for prospective developers.

As time goes on and once Palm releases a public software development kit, you can expect the App Catalog to grow significantly but at present it is somewhat spartan. Another thing that caught me off guard about the Pre is the online Backup capability. By default the device will automatically backup the contents of its internal memory space to a Palm server somewhere 'in the cloud.

This feature can also be disabled if you desire. If your Pre is lost or stolen, you can even attempt to send a 'kill-pill' from the same interface to wipe out the device's remotely. Not everything about webOS is all sparkly and shiny. As I've pointed out there are some flaws and rough edges here and there, but of course this is not unexpected with such a new platform. There are also a lot of opportunity for software developers as there is plenty of room to fill in holes and build out and improve on functionality that is already present.

The few things that I can take issue with are not by any means serious show stoppers. Granted this is a 1. For instance many of the more higher end apps such as Photos, Music and even the Calendar can take anywhere from a couple to 7 seconds to fully load, while most of the others are nearly instantaneous.

Flash support is not present in the browser of yet, but for most folks this is not a big deal. Adobe and Palm have announced that they are working on some sort of support for WebOS and may release something in the future.

I also ran into a few issues with memory allocation. I was initially shocked to get a "out of memory" type alerts when trying to open a new app during my first experience with the device.

Sometimes when you have a number of cards open and you try to launch a new application, the system will refuse to proceed and will tell you to close some of your open cards before it can continue.

Now this could be understandable with a multitude of active cards, but this message would sometimes manifest with as little as 3 active cards, while other times the device hummed along with more that 12 open at one time. It didn't get in the way too often, but it was certainly worth noting. Usually I would notice this when trying to use the Photos app, so that particular application may have an unresolved memory leak issue or something.

As with the hardware, I'm disappointed with the center button as I mentioned earlier. It's nice that you can just slide the keyboard down to unlock but I'd like to be able to have an option available to use this button to wake up the device.

It's especially hard to reach the power button when the keyboard is already open. Another personal gripe is that you cannot use the Pre for "tethering" with your computer as a wireless modem. As a long time Treo user, I've been accustomed to this handy functionality and it's disappointing to see this feature suppressed. The Palm Pre delivers on Palm's promise of a bringing a next generation differentiated product to market. WebOS is a powerful and compelling new mobile platform.

Despite being a 1. Coupled with the attractive hardware design and charming display, this adds up to a distinctively agreeable experience for mobile phone users. Palm has a lot riding on the Pre and it now appears to be fully back in the game with a superb combination of software and hardware. Palm Touchstone Kit review. The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. Like the Palm Pre Plus , the best we can say about the Pre 2 is that this is a slightly better version of a very good phone.

The problem is, does anyone care anymore? Prices for the Pre 2 haven't been released yet, but we'll update this review as soon as they're available.

We expect it to be one of the pricier smart phones. We'll focus on the differences in this review, although none of them are world-shatteringly huge. The new version of webOS is 2. The software now takes advantage of the hardware graphic processor to be even more whizzy, and the Pre 2 also doubles the processor speed to 1GHz. It shows when opening apps, which pop up promptly, although there was the occasional pause when we woke up an app that was paused.

Palm's 'deck of cards' feature is still present and correct, which means that if you have several apps open, each is displayed as a large thumbnail on the home screen. You can easily swipe between cards to move between open apps, or swipe a card up towards the top of the screen to close the app. You can now group cards together so that you don't have to swipe quite so much, and have a pile of cards related to a particular task. The groups also get created automagically.

For example, when we opened a link from the Spaz Twitter app apologies for that name -- we don't condone it, but the app is free and works , it opened in a browser window. Press the touch-sensitive home button to minimise the app to the deck of cards view, and the browser window is shown stacked on top of the Twitter window. You can still interact with them both, and you can manually split up the cards or stack them in a different way.

That said, we think the deck of cards could be more useful on a day-to-day basis if the cards worked more like widgets. It's great to have the option to multitask -- to pause a game while you respond to a text message, for example.

But the cards don't work well as widgets that let you keep up to date with Facebook , for instance, without opening the full app.