When Hewlett Packard acquired Palm mobile earlier this year, it was clear the esteemed computer manufacturer was about to make a serious push to compete with the best of the mobile industry. Palm had been making a good name for themselves with handsets like the Pre and the Pre 2 and as we welcome the launch of the HP Pre 3 it is interesting to see how the collaboration with HP has altered Palm’s approach.
At first glance, the HP Pre 3 has the look of a slightly stretched version of its predecessor, measuring around 5mm wider and 10mm longer than the Palm Pre 2. It bears the hallmarks of a top-of-the-range smartphone, with a bright, crisp, 3.58-inch screen displaying an 800x480 resolution, along with smooth, rounded corners and a glossy black finish. Like the Palm Pre 2, the Pre 3 features a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, compacted to fit the portrait-oriented layout of the phone.
The keyboard is the largest that Palm have ever placed on a product running the WebOS operating system, signaling a shift in the Pre’s marketing towards business-minded users who demand high quality emailing capabilities.
The Pre’s photo and video capabilities have been upgraded considerably, with VGA video capture giving way to 720p HD video capture on the 5 megapixel primary camera, as well as the addition of a secondary, front-mounted VGA camera for video calling. The Pre 3 also boasts a dual microphone, making it ideal for recording sound on videos and for speaker phone usage. There is even a 3.5mm headphone jack socket for plugging in your headphones.
These powerful features require a powerful technical specification and the HP Pre 3 delivers in spades when it comes to processing power and memory. The Pre 3 runs on a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM 8x55 processor, supported by 512MB of RAM and 8GB of storage. Why does the Pre 3 need all this power? In order to run the new WebOS 2.1 operating system.
WebOS 2.1 is again designed to meet the needs of business users, as well as catering for users who wish to use the phone for personal matters. Multitasking is no problem for the HP Pre 3, with WebOS 2.1 allowing users to stack their open applications up together and flick between them. The operating system also collects data from web sources automatically to populate the user’s calendar, contacts and other resources.
This is a phone that could have the likes of Apple, HTC and other leading mobile manufacturers looking worriedly over their shoulders. Well built, ergonomically designed and capable of handling business tasks with expert precision as well as personal tasks quickly and efficiently, the HP Pre 3 could make waves in the mobile world this year.