HP/Palm Pre3 Coming Soon

Palm's models have traditionally been targeted mainly at corporate and professional users because of the large full keyboards. Now dubbed HP's Pre3 it is the first model to take after Palm after the acquisition by HP, and the target audience is no different from before.

Among other things, the phone has a huge keyboard, is equipped with a 3.6-inch screen with a resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, so yes it's pretty big. The display is a refular LCD screen that provides decent color reproduction, although not quite as good as Samsung's Super AMOLED variants.

The CPU is a Snapdragon chip from Qualcomm with a singlt processor core. This one is clocked to an entire 1.4 GHz, so this should mean a very rapid interface. Moreover, the smartphone gets 512 MB of flash memory for operating system and applications. For the user's data, 8GB or 16 GB of storage is available depending on version.

Multi-tasking is also one of the areas where the WebOS operating system has received a lot of praise. most praise for the former. Each application is a card in a flip-box menu, and these are easy to toggle between.On each of the application cards, you'll see a preview of its content.

Just like in Apple's iOS and Google's Android, the applications in the background essentially go to sleep while not in use. The Pre3 also has a few things in common with BlackBerry's Playbook. For example, most of the menu navigation is done by pulling your fingers across the screen, instead of pressing buttons.

The phone is perceived as very fast and responsive in all situations, and the menu system looks stable. The keyboard is also very good, even for larger fingers. Again, it's a large phone, with both a big keyboard and a relatively large screen, but it's not that heavy at 156 grams.
HP's smartphone is characterized by matte plastic on the back, in addition to an aluminum panel that sits behind the screen when the phone is open.

On the technical side, the phone offers up a couple of new items; if you have a so-called dual-band home router the Pre3 supports connectivity with the latest standard wireless network standard in the frequency ranges 2.4 and 5 GHz. The latter will provide less interference from neighboring networks and household appliances.

Pre3 is also compatible with the Palm Touchstone - a wireless charger that uses induction to charge the phone.