Palm Pre 2 Review

After several months of delays, HP's Palm Pre 2 is finally available on Verizon. Like the first version, the svelte Palm Pre 2 is a finely crafted smartphone with a beautiful operating system. But the Pre 2 suffers from a thin app catalog, a cramped design, and last year's hardware. It compares poorly with the Apple iPhone 4 ($199, 4 stars) and Motorola Droid 2 Global ($199, 4 stars), not to mention Verizon's upcoming 4G LTE devices like the HTC Thunderbolt and Motorola Droid Bionic.
Design and Call Quality
The Palm Pre 2 looks like a slightly crisper version of the original. It measures 4.0 by 2.3 by 0.7 inches (HWD) and weighs 5.1 ounces. It's made of glossy black plastic, with a glass front panel and a soft-touch battery cover. The 3.1-inch capacitive touch screen sports 320-by-480-pixel resolution. It's bright, colorful, and responsive even to light touches. The area below the screen is a touch sensitive swipe controller. The slide-out QWERTY keyboard is quite cramped, but the sticky rubber nubs are easier to type on than they look. A sharp ridge at the bottom of the keypad can be a bit uncomfortable, though. Dialing numbers was easy using the on-screen keypad. There's no camera shortcut button, but the Pre 2 includes a hardware ringer switch, which is increasingly rare and welcome.
The Palm Pre 2 is a dual-band EV-DO Rev A (850/1900 MHz) device with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. It connected to my WPA2-encrypted network without a problem. It also works as a 3G mobile hotspot for up to five devices with the appropriate data plan. Call quality was good overall. Voices in the earpiece sounded clear, although there wasn't quite enough gain available for noisy environments. Callers said I sounded crisp and clear through the microphone, and reception was fine (a sore spot with the original Palm Pre).
Calls also sounded fine through an Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99, 4 stars) Bluetooth headset. Sadly, there's still no voice dialing of any kind, Bluetooth or otherwise. The speakerphone sounded tinny and didn't go loud enough for use outdoors. Battery life was quite good at 6 hours and 24 minutes of talk time.

Specifications

Service Provider

Verizon Wireless

Operating System

Palm OS

Screen Size

3.1 inches

Screen Details

320-by-480-pixel, 16.7M color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen

Camera

Yes

Network

CDMA

Bands

850, 1900

High-Speed Data

1xRTT, EVDO Rev A

Processor Speed

1 GHz

More

Hardware, OS, and Apps
HP has improved the original Palm Pre's hardware specs, but remember: this phone first came out in October 2010. The 1GHz TI OMAP 3630 CPU and 512MB RAM let the Pre 2 run more sophisticated apps, but they aren't cutting-edge parts as of February 2011. In addition, the Palm Pre 2 runs WebOS 2.0, a modest if welcome upgrade that brings Adobe Flash 10.1 support to the browser, a new Stacks layout for managing, and support for VPNs, Skype, and Bluetooth keyboards. WebOS is as fun to use as ever, with its sliding window panes, a new type-ahead feature for the search box, and smooth menu and Web page scrolling.
As before, the Palm Pre 2 syncs Microsoft Exchange e-mail, contacts, and calendars, as well as most major Webmail services, POP, and IMAP accounts. HP has added support for Facebook and Yahoo instant messaging. The WebKit browser makes viewing both desktop and WAP pages enjoyable. VZ Navigator offers voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions for $10 per month; there are no free or one-time cost options like on Android or the iPhone. There's almost no bloatware on this phone, which is great.The Palm App Catalog contains several thousand apps, and it's easy to browse. HP and Palm have made things simpler for developers to code apps, including a new suite of APIs with HTML5 support, plus a new desktop docking mode that can change app behaviors. That said, the App Catalog is still very thin compared to the options for Android and iPhone. For example, the "News" category is missing most major brands other than AP, there's no Kindle or Nook app, the music category has Pandora and Slacker but not Rhapsody, and so on. We think of this more as a fancy messaging phone than as an app-centric smartphone.
Multimedia, Camera, and Conclusions
The Palm Pre 2 includes a standard-size 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can easily use the phone as a primary music player. There's 16GB of internal storage, but no memory card slot. To transfer media, you can drag and drop your files or use the free app DoubleTwist, which no longer has specific Pre support but works with any drag-and-drop-compatible phone. Music tracks sounded clear through the comfortable bundled earbuds, and a little hazy through Motorola S9-HD ($129, 3.5 stars) Bluetooth headphones. You can buy music tracks over the air from Amazon MP3. Standalone MP4 videos played back smoothly in full screen mode, but the Pre 2 wouldn't transcode my 720p files on the fly.
The new 5-megapixel camera offers an LED flash, geo-tagging, and what HP calls extended depth of field, but no actual auto-focus. The latter didn't matter; test photos were sharp, and exhibited exceptionally vibrant color for a camera phone. But dark areas indoors and even some outdoor shadows were a problem, with some obvious noise and lost details. Tree leaves outside also looked smudged, as if the phone had no trouble focusing but lacked the power to resolve them. Recorded 640-by-480-pixel videos played smoothly at 27 frames per second, but looked excessively pixelated, as if the bit rate wasn't high enough.
The Palm Pre 2 is a nice midrange smartphone, and WebOS 2.0 is slick and fun. But Android and iOS devices are running away with the third-party app market, and WebOS isn't keeping up. The Pre 2's good-but-not-great hardware specs aren't going to win many converts, either. WebOS needs a cutting-edge, flagship device and enough market share to encourage third-party developers. HP just announced two new phones, the Pre 3 and the Veer, but we're waiting to see if and when those appear on any US carriers.The Palm Pre 2 is a fine smartphone for messaging and the Web. But most of today's smartphone buyers would be better off with the Apple iPhone 4, the Samsung Fascinate ($199, 4 stars), or for hardware keyboard fans, the Droid 2 Global. All three of these phones offer larger and sharper screens, HD video recording, and compatibility with hundreds of thousands of third-party apps.
Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 6 hours 24 minutes