In the minds of many, the unreleased Palm Pre may be the biggest potential threat to Apple's growing iPhone marketshare. Announced at CES, the Palm Pre is an entirely new platform developed by Palm to replace their long-running Palm OS.
The Palm Pre will be the first multi-touch mobile phone to be released following the iPhone. This fact has generated a number of veiled legal threats between the companies.
Palm was demonstrating the Palm Pre at CTIA Mobile this week. Computerworld provided some early impressions:
the webOS is layered to allow users to keep several applications open at once and to let them flip seamlessly between them. The Pre's main button at the bottom center of the device acts as an all-purpose "zoom out" button that shrinks applications in use and gives users the ability to browse through other apps. Although this sounds like it could be confusing, Palm has designed its operating system to make flipping through apps a breeze. Basically, users can flip through their open apps by moving their fingers from left to right -- or vice-versa -- along the phone's touch screen, just like flipping the pages of a book.
A promo video from Palm is also available showing the operating system in action.
Meanwhile, Pre Central has an actual hands on video showing the operating system in real usage.
The Palm Pre uses the ARM Cortex A8 (not multicore) CPU and PowerVR SGX GPU, which are a step beyond the technology Apple currently has in the 3G iPhone. Apple has been rumored to be working on a major hardware refresh for the iPhone that is due this summer.
