Palm Inc said the Palm Pre, its highly anticipated smartphone, is on track and only needs some ”polishing” before it can be launched. Palm has high hopes of high profits when it comes to the Palm Pre especially after the company’s latest financial update.
Palm said its 2008 revenue was 70 percent lower than the year before. The company’ shares fell 4.7 percent after the latest financial update was made public, so not only the company’s management hopes the Palm Pre will score a homerun, investors do to.
Palm hopes it would be able to come back after a serious error: underestimating the threat posed by Apple’s iPhone. However, the Pre phone is regarded as the smartphone with the best chance of dethroning the Apple iPhone or at least give it a serious run for its money.
The Palm Pre will be sold exclusively in partnership with U.S. carrier partner Sprint Nextel. A world-ready UMTS version will also become available in other countries as well, but after the North American launch.
“There's no showstoppers," said Chief Executive Ed Colligan according to Reuters.
"We plan on delivering on the time frame we said we would."
The Palm Pre, which will compete with the best in the smartphone industry, Apple iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry, will feature a new software operating system called webOS and will also have touch screen controls.
The new OS is designed especially to respond to the users’ need to have their contacts, calendars and information with them at all times. The software was designed so it can track information in relevant ways for the user, and connect it for better productivity.
The Pre has a user friendly design, a physical keyboard, which doesn’t take any of the phone’s 3.1-inch 24-bit color, 320 x 480 HVGA display, because it slides out only the user needs it.
Users of the Palm Pre will be able to make full use of a Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 8GB of internal user storage, proximity sensor, a 3-megapixel camera, but also a MicroUSB connector with USB 2.0 Hi-Speed. Probably the strong point of the Palm Pre, which turned out to be the star of the CES Las Vegas 2009, is the fact that it can run multiple applications in the same time.
Users of the Pre will be able to link contacts that are common in several sources such as Outlook, Facebook and Google, to use web-connected apps and it combined calendars in a single view. The device weighs just 135 grams.
