Get used to seeing some musings from David. He has kindly agreed to write for PDA-247 and here is his first article- a mini-review of the Palm Pre.

I’ve always loved Palm, I loved my m505, I loved my Treos, but do I love the Pre? Well, yes and no. I love the feel of it in my hand, they were going for the pebble feel and have got that just right but the build quality leaves a lot to be desired! The slide mechanism wobbles from side to side and sometimes won’t open and the keypad area feels cheap and nasty. The track ball thingy is a complete waste of time (and has been removed on the latest “Plus” models) and the screen is plastic, not glass, so will scratch quite easily. I do keep picking it up and turning it over in my hand, (and the last phone that made me do that was a Motorola MPX200), so they must have got something right.

All the usual suspects are here, 3g, GPS, Wi-Fi, accelerometer, camera and 8GB of storage, one missing feature is a memory card slot, but so far that hasn’t bothered me as much as I thought it would.  One nice touch is the internal memory can mount as a USB disk, I wish the iPhone could do that. I also love the Touchstone inductive charger, I know it’s not that hard to plug in a wire, but there is something futuristic about just plonking the Pre down and watching it start charging.

I love webOS.  It’s as easy to use as an iPhone, five minutes tuition and anyone can use it, and it’s the only mobile OS I’ve seen that makes multitasking so obvious you don’t even notice it: to steal a phrase, “it just works”. The built in apps are about average and with the latest OS update you get video recording, bringing it up to par with the opposition. OS updates are handled nicely, with the phone telling you when one’s available OTA, but application updates have to be looked for. The app store isn’t a patch on Apples, but most of the stuff you need is there and there is a healthy homebrew community, which Palm seem to encourage, so you can find a lot of patches and apps there as well, really adding to the phones functions.

The integration with Google and Facebook (Palm call it Synergy) is quite good, enter you details and a few minutes later all your calendar and contacts information is on the phone. But it could go much further and if you’re not living in Google’s world things are not quite as easy. Getting media on the phone is a pain since Apple blocked the iTunes route, you pretty much have to drag and drop or dig out a third party solution but that’s really no different to everyone else except Apple.

On the whole I think the Pre is a winner, apart from one thing- price. For o2 to try and sell it at the same price as the iPhone is crazy. It maybe almost as good, but the Apple hype makes it a non starter; at that price no one will even notice it. Offer it at half the price or for 99 quid on pay as you go and it will sell loads.

So, on balance I do love the Pre, just not as much as my iPhone.