A couple of weeks back I got a renewed hankering for a Palm Pre. Having missed the original launch and availability, mostly because of silly pricing and, at that time, the O2 exclusivity. At that time O2's coverage where I work, live and play was dire, and therefore beyond my consideration for use.

Fast forward into 2011 and briefly the Palm Pre 2, the best of the bunch in terms of performance, became available for literally silly money. I paid £150 for mine and subsequently found it for £30 less on eBuyer.com (see an earlier discussion on Talk3G here: https://talk3g.co.uk/showthread.p...-new-HP-Palm-3 ). It does now seem to be discontinued, there were about 3,500 between the pair of those sellers, and there appears to be no stock now. Not surprising really, as the Palm Pre 2 is a rather nice device.

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Obvious Comparisons
The most obvious comparison is to put the Pre 2 alongside what is arguably the first device that springs to mind when someone says "smartphone" and that is the iPhone (in my case the 4).
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Right away you can see that the Pre 2 is considerably smaller both in physical dimensions as well as screen size. This in itself is not a huge problem because the character sizes are very similar between the two. Of course, that means the Pre 2 displays less for a given application panel, but it is not unusable. Just different.

The Pre 2 is, however, quite a bit thicker, chunkier, I would say by as much as at least a third more so. It reminds me in some ways of the Motorola Pebl of a similar time back, another American-designed phone. Is there a trend there?

The OS
Whatever negatives the Pre 2 has in terms of size are more than made up for by the WebOS that is the operating system at the heart of the smartphone.

Coming to the Palm Pre 2 completely cold, I have never had any practical experience with the device, I found it largely intuitive to use. But WebOs is not some iOs or Android clone, even though it has Linux at its heart. No, the creators of WebOS have taken user friendliness and intuitiveness to heart and turned out a rather friendly on-screen UI. It has its subtle differences to iOs and Android, these are significant enough to make it distinctive.

Learning the new OS
The temptation when trying out a new OS is to try using similar operational actions that you're used to with other smartphone OS. That will only get you so far, and with WebOS that is no exception. But, and this is the nice part, the OS has a rather comprehensive tutorial built in as standard, a neat System app called Gesture Tutorial. This is a fully interactive tutorial that takes you step by step through how to use WebOS. It tells you what and then gets you to try out what you've just learned. And you can return to the tutorial (albeit back to the beginning) whenever you like.

After about ten minutes of fiddling and fumbling, getting it right and getting it wrong in almost equal measure I submitted myself to the tutorial. There was no going back after that. WebOS is now firmly planted into my grey matter.

On screen, the Dock
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The bottom of the screen contains the Dock which holds shortcuts to the four most likely to be used apps. Any or all of the four apps may be substituted by other apps installed on the smartphone. The Dock also contains a non-removable button to the Launcher that itself may be customised by the owner.

In use, the apps launch very quickly, taking just under two seconds from being tapped on the Dock or Launcher.

Once an app launches it stays running until specifically closed. Stepping back to the desktop the app will shrink to a small card, and these may be scrolled left and right if there are several already running. Cards may also be arranged in a "fan" to show several on-screen at once. In this arrangement, tapping on any card in the fan will bring it to the foreground and fill the screen with its contents.

This is actually quite a powerful way of working - all of your running apps are immediately apparent there in front of you. WebOS takes care of all the memory management so there is no need to worry about running out of resource doing this. When I am carrying the Palm Pre 2 with me I typically have half a dozen apps open.

Dismissing, or closing, apps was a complete mystery to me. There was no obvious way to do so. But once again, a few minutes in the tutorial and all is revealed. The playing card paradigm is carried throughout. And so to shut down an app all you do is literally flick it up and off the top of the screen, as if you were discarding a playing card. Simples.

The Keyboard
When you look at the Pre 2 everything about it seems to be in miniature, even the keyboard. But it was surprisingly easy to use. Each key feels slightly sticky, the plastic used has a tackiness to it (I don't mean ugly) and are raised so are easy to feel. The letter F has a pimple on it to act as a home key, those with poor sight could easily feel that key, which is a nice touch.

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So, when talking about keyboards the best comparison, probably, is the RIM BlackBerry kit. So placing the Palm Pre 2 up against a BlackBerry 9800 torch it is very apparent that there is not a lot of difference in terms of size. The Pre 2's is most definitely the more compact of the two, but for all of that it is no less usable. And this is coming from someone who typically does not like physical keyboards, more so BlackBerry's.

In use
As a mobile phone the Pre 2 is up there with all of the others. Audio quality is crystal clear, there is no vibration of tinniness. The Dialler.app is simple to use, bringing up a numeric keypad. If you want to find someone in Contacts you simply start tapping away their name using the keyboard. There is a Favourites button where you can allocate those you call the most.

SMS and MMS is a snip using the standard the Messaging.app. It decides which messaging service to use depending on the message content. Add a picture from the Pre 2's memory or take one with the camera and MMS is automatically selected.

The camera is a 5 megapixel device that takes clear images. It has an LED "flash" that works as well as any other.

Memory is 16GB of factory-installed Flash and not upgradeable. Although I dare say that if you are handy with working on these devices you should be able to find where the Flash is installed and substitute it for a larger memory if you really want or need to.

Applications
No smartphone is going to be much of a threat if it is not supported by applications. The Palm Pre 2 uses HP's App Catalog, that is their App Store or Market equivalent. Both free and paid for apps are available, all of the usual suspects can be found such as Twitter, Facebook and several other IM apps. Finding apps is simple, following the WebOs paradigm, just start typing on the keyboard and a search bar appears. Enter in what you're looking for, press the Return key and the App Catalog goes off to find what you're after.

I have to say that there is an uneven balance of paid for vs free apps, biased towards paid for. That doesn't mean there aren't free apps, there certainly are. But you may have to hunt around to find what you're looking for.

WebOS has some way to go yet. It really does need more developer support, and a lot of free "stuff" to draw in the crowds. We will have to wait and see how HP promote and support their new family member.

Conclusions
Do not let anyone tell you this is not a smartphone. It most certainly is. And a very capable one at that. It will do everything that any other smartphone will, always allowing for similar apps to be available.

The Palm Pre 2 is still available in limited quantities and at less than £160 from a number of on-line sources (see http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=Pal...&aq=f&oq=&aq=f ). But the stock is going quickly, what there is in Europe will not last at those prices. Clearly, HP is trying to get rid of as much of their back stock as possible before the Pre 3 arrives - which is due to be later in 2011.

I did not think that I would particularly like the Pre 2 but I have to say that I do. My original thinking was to pick one up, play with it for a few days and then bang it out on eBay for upwards twice what I had paid for it. They still are advertised for more than £300 from the established traders and lots of eBay sellers.

The Pre 2 is quite a capable smartphone and well worth considering if you want something that little bit different. It