CES 2009: Palm Pre Video
CES 2009: Palm Pre Video Transcript
>> Kent German: Hi Kent German, Senior Editor at CNET.com. Cell phone editor, I'm here at CES 2009 with a very special First Look. This is the Palm Pre. It was announced here in Las Vegas this week and it is the winner moments ago of CNET's Best of CES award: not only the Best of CES award but also the People's Choice award. Real excited about this device. We've been waiting awhile for Palm to come up with something new: something to really wow us; to really amaze us and surprise us. And we can say that after careful consideration by all of our CNET Editors, we really thought this device did just that and thus we chose it our Best of CES award. It is a little different than we've seen Palms in the past. It does have a slider motion -- or is a slider design. Turn it up just like that. Really like that design. It's great because it does have a full keyboard here down below. I prefer the physical keyboard. I just like the tactile touch to my -- the buttons with my fingers. It makes it easier a little for the typing, so excited about that. Also we have this curved shape right here. And what that allows us to do is it does allow you to put the device next to your ear: gives a little curve to it so it comes down to your mouth. We like that sort of design. Now there are a couple of things that are great about this device. It does allow you to multitask. It's not the case for a lot of smart phones: certainly not the case in the iPhone. You can always run music in the background there, but you can't get into email and choose [inaudible] the same time. This device actually does allow you to do that, so a number of windows that sit here on the top of the display. And you can actually slide back and forth, just like that. So we've seen that sliding action on the G1 of course and on the iPhone. So the thing that's great about that is it does make the touch screen really user friendly and does a lot more with it. A lot of touch screens, basically they just function as 1 big button. You press something. It opens. You press something else, it opens. You type something, it opens. The thing that's great about this, is actually you can use your fingers to go back and forth and to do lots of different things. It really makes that touch screen useful so that's great. Other things that we like about this phone is [inaudible] it is. EVDO Rev A for Sprint so it will be a Sprint device: EVDO Rev A is their latest 3G network and so it's pretty fast: pretty powerful. Has messaging and email of course. It has personal organizer options. You'll find WiFi. You'll find Bluetooth. You'll find access to GPS. So functions that are really useful and user friendly and it will be great for work and also for having fun at the same time. Does have a mega pixel camera. You can see it here on the back. We do know that the device does not have video recording. A little disappointing but the fact it has a 3 mega pixel camera's pretty good. Actually it does have an [inaudible] for parts of it so you can turn it and that means you don't have to press a button to get the screen to rotate its orientation. So that's always a plus. As I said, this is a Sprint device. They have not announced pricing yet, so we really don't know what that will be. We expect it to maybe be in the 250 range with service of course. We may even see it down to 199. I'm hoping for that but we'll have to see when that comes out. It will be out during the first half of this year though. Again this is the Palm Pre, the winner of CNET's Best of CES awards. I'm Kent German, Senior Editor for CNET.com here at CES 2009 in Las Vegas.
