It's no secret that Palm's been struggling to keep up with the competition and has come under heavy criticism for its lack of innovation and delays in releasing its new operating system. So can you blame us for thinking that Palm might disappoint again?

User interface and OS
To us, the real highlight of the Pre is the user interface and OS. The UI reminded us a little of HTC's TouchFlo interface, with the various swiping gestures and cool animated motions, but Palm certainly put a fresh take on it. It's beautiful and smooth, and just plain cool. It's pretty evident that Palm put a lot of thought into the UI, as everything seamlessly works together to give you the best user experience and making the smartphone a really useful tool in your daily life.

Synergy on the Palm Pre
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)

The smartphone makes multitasking easy with the Deck of Cards feature that lets you scroll through various applications and toggle between them without having to open and close windows. It's slick, but most importantly, it's easy. We also think Synergy is a huge player, since it brings all your email accounts, contacts and calendar information from various sources into one place. Again, it's about simplicity and whether you're a consumer or business user, you have to love that.

Design
To facilitate all this is a best-of-breed design. First, you've got a multi-touch screen that's absolutely sharp and brilliant in colour with its half-VGA (320x480) resolution. Not only can you use the screen to navigate, there's a gesture area right below the display where you can use finger swipes and touches to launch menus, toolbars, applications, go back, or advance. Of course, our favourite part might be the slide-out full QWERTY keyboard. The Pre's keyboard is similar to that of the Palm Treo Pro; the buttons are a little on the smaller side, but there is a good amount of space between them to reduce any problems.

Again, looking at the design of the phone, we could tell time and thought was spent on the device. The hardware feels solid and not as plastic-y as the Palm Centro. When you slide open the Pre, it has a slight curve that makes it comfortable to hold against your cheek when talking on the phone or even when typing out messages. Also, going back to the touchscreen, it felt responsive and — hooray! — on web pages, you can pinch the screen like the iPhone to easily zoom in and out of pages.

Pre's web browser
(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CBS Interactive)

Speaking of the web, the Pre's browser is pretty outstanding. It renders sites on-screen as you would see on your desktop, and quickly at that. When asked about Flash, Palm said they were not commenting on that at this point. We do know that there will be an app store, and Palm will release an SDK to developers. The company reiterated throughout the press conference that the Palm webOS was built with developers in mind and based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so that's all one really needs to know to develop apps for the Pre and other web OS devices.

Multimedia
As far as multimedia, the Palm Pre offers a 3-megapixel camera. Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to snap any photos, but early reports say that the quality is pretty good. Disappointingly, the camera won't have video recording capabilities at this time, but those could be added in the future. In terms of music, like the T-Mobile G1, Palm has partnered with the Amazon Music Store, so you will be able to purchase songs over the air from your Pre.

The rest
The Palm Pre offers so much that we could write on it forever, but we'll save some for when we actually get the unit in for review. Just to cover some quick specs: the Pre offers integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 (with support for stereo Bluetooth), EV-DO Rev A and GPS. There's 8GB of storage, a 3.5mm headphone jack, and high-speed USB 2.0.

Outlook
The Palm Pre and Palm webOS isn't necessarily going to revolutionise the smartphone market, in that it doesn't offer any crazy, new features, but it definitely brings a fresh look into the way you interact with a device and how it organises information. It also brings innovation and life back to the struggling company and has certainly set the tech world abuzz. Palm's undeniably taken a beating from the media and general public, so it's good to see the company respond and take action.

As much as the Pre is important to Palm, the smartphone will also be a key player for Sprint. It needs an iconic phone to compete with the likes of AT&T and the iPhone and Verizon Wireless and the BlackBerry Storm, and Pre could certainly be the one to do this for Sprint. Pricing will be key of course, but we suspect the Pre will be priced competitively with the iPhone and Storm. We also think its chances of overtaking the Storm are pretty high. It offers a better user experience and has more consumer appeal. There are still some unanswered questions about everything that will be offered with the Pre; in our opinion, and we know these words are thrown around a lot, but we think the Palm Pre could truly be the stiffest competition for the iPhone.

Palm took a bit of a gamble announcing the product early at CES 2009 and not closer to its release date, which is expected some time during the first half of 2009. Both Palm and Sprint will have to be careful to deliver on their promise and not delay the phone. (You can pre-register for Palm Pre at Sprint's website.) Still, the Palm Pre and webOS has certainly gotten everyone excited and we can't wait to get some quality hands-on time with the final product.

This CDMA version of the Palm Pre won't be available in Australia, but Palm has confirmed that it is working on a UMTS capable handset to be released later in the year.