A employee of Sprint posted some details about the new Palm Pre on Inside Sprint Now. Some of the excitting features include:

Cool Stuff

  • “Data wipe” feature that allows you to remotely remove personal data if your phone is ever lost of stolen. This is critical given the high profile stolen government laptop stories and ever since Paris Hilton’s phone was stolen we keep hearing about in the news. There’s a pretty useful security application for the Blackberry
  • “Trackball Mode” which will evidently let you swipe one character at a time. Furthermore the user can also so the same thing with the shift key and result in selecting text as they swipe. There is also a “Smart deletion” where the user holds down the delete key and can thus delete a complete word, and there is also an auto-correct feature as well.
  • Universal search allows you to enter text and be given matching application and/or web results.
  • Palm Synergy feature is a key feature of the webOS platform that brings your information from all the places it resides into one logical view. With the Synergy feature, when there are matches of contacts, it automatically connects the information in a linked view
  • Contacts is an example of an application that can use data from the Internet and from internal storage. For example, Contacts can get data from a Facebook account. It retrieves this data through its Internet connection. If there is no internet connection, Contacts will simply pull the data from on-phone storage so that you can still see your contacts.

Disappointments

  • No ‘phone as modem” aka tethering. There are plenty of great Blackberry tethering (phone as modem) options, and I know of people who would pay big money for it, but alas, doesn’t look possible on the Palm Pre
  • It will support up to 8 email addresses, but it won’t support Sprint PictureMail, Sprint Music, or the Sprint Digital Lounge
  • Flash won’t work in the web browser. SkyFire might be an option. I know they’re coming out with a new Blackberry compatible browser.

Most of the other details are things we already knew, but it was nice to read about them as well including “cards”, internet connectivity, etc. The new Palm is definitely cool, but is it enough to make you give up your Blackbery, iPhone, or G1?

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