Palm Pre Cell Phone Review

The Hardware

Every detail of the Pre’s design is well thought out. The front of the phone, shown in Figure 5, is simplistic in design. You see only the earpiece at the top, the screen itself, and the Center button which is used for basic functionality.  The black area under the screen where the Center button is placed is called the gesture area. (More on that later.) Although this Center button looks like a metal ball, it is actually translucent. An LED inside lights the ball up when you perform certain gestures.

Figure 5: The front of the Pre.

The top of the phone, shown in Figure 6, has a standard sized headset jack in the middle. Next to that is the ringer switch the slides to turn the ringer and notification sounds on and off. At the corner of the top of the Pre is the power switch which you can press to wake up or turn off the screen. You can also press it and hold for a few seconds to turn the device on and off. You can also wake the phone up by opening the sliding keyboard.

Figure 6: The top of the Pre.

The sliding keyboard is shown in Figure 7. Those who don’t like typing on a touch screen will love this feature. The keypad itself is a QWERTY keyboard is similar to those found on BlackBerrys.  The keys are a bit crowded, but workable. The good news is that they are backlit. The bad news is that they have a plasticy feel. The number keys are marked with red letters, which is problematic for those who are color blind, but okay for the rest of us.

In Figure 7 you can also see a key on the left with an orange square and a Sym key on the right. These are used as shortcut keys for added functionality. The only problem is that some shortcuts require holding down both keys and touching something on the screen. For instance, when browsing the Web you can press Orange + Sym and tap on link to open a new window. You feel a bit like a contortionist when you try this.

Figure 7: The sliding keyboard.

The back of the Pre is shown in Figure 8. This is where the camera opening, flash and speaker are located.

Figure 8: The back of the Pre.