Palm Pre: The closest competitor to the iPhone so far.

It's highly unusual when we write about a non-GSM phone exclusive to one of the least liked wireless carriers on the planet. But this is the Palm Pre, and the sheer amount of hype that has been generated by the Pre rivals only Apple's flagship phone. To say that the Pre is anticipated is, pretty much, understatement of the year.

And this is for good reason. The Palm Pre introduces the struggling company's latest os, called WebOS, a touch-friendly, multi-tasking operating system. It's a step above Windows Mobile (and Symbian), is definitely a step in the right direction for Palm.

At first glance, the Pre looks like an HTC Touch phone. It's got a iPhone-ish capacitive touch-screen, and slides open to reveal a smallish QWERTY keyboard. Under the hood, however, is an ARM Cortex 600 mhz processor, with plenty of computing power and snappy performance. Add to that a decent 3.2 megapixel camera, GPS, Bluetooth 2.1, and wi-fi, and the Pre is looking to be one of the few serious contenders to Apple's juggernaut.

However, like many a device before the Pre, battery life is a huge issue, and the smartphone loses a couple of points for its mediocre 1150 mAh battery which cranks out a mere 5 hours of talk time. For such a serious multimedia device, we'd expected better.

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