Palm Pre News and Reviews Round Up

T3 have kindly rounded up most of the Palm Pre buzz found on the interweblogosphere to save folk like me time trwaling through the interwebs.

So is the Palm Pre all that?

Is this the handest to save Palm?

Is it good enough to knock the iPhone of its throne?

Or is it just gonna crash and burn?

Here is a selction of what’s being said – for the full lowdown nip over to T3.

Wall Street Journal

“The Pre’s biggest disadvantage is its app store, the App Catalog. At launch, it has only about a dozen apps, compared with over 40,000 for the iPhone, and thousands each for the G1 and the modern BlackBerry models. Even worse, the Pre App Catalog isn’t finished. It’s immature, it’s labeled a beta, and Palm has yet to release the tools for making Pre apps available to more than a small group of developers”.

“The Pre is a smart, sophisticated product that will have particular appeal for those who want a physical keyboard. It is thoughtfully designed, works well and could give the iPhone and BlackBerry strong competition — but only if it fixes its app store and can attract third-party developers”.

Boy Genius Report

“WebOS itself is off to a great start we think. Taking the hardware aspects of the Palm Pre completely out of the equation, it has a bunch of potential. Especially with being public version numero uno. It will be interesting to see how developers try to take advantage of the operating system, yet we can’t help but feel it’s going to be iPhone web apps all over again until Palm releases an SDK that lets everyone (not just special partners) access areas of the OS that are needed to create applications that aren’t just “fluff”.”

Newsweek

“Apple fanboys can breathe easy. The new Palm Pre smart phone has arrived, and while it’s a terrific phone, it’s no iPhone killer. But it does have some things that the iPhone lacks, like a physical keyboard. Its software and user interface are magical. And its multitouch screen is arguably better than the multitouch screen on the iPhone, which pioneered this technology”.

Wired

“The keyboard’s too small for thumb typing (welcome to fingernail typing) and makes handling non-alphabetic characters a bit difficult. While I generated text more slowly than I did with the iPhone, my tweets and e-mails were more accurate”.

Slashgear

“Perhaps it’s the threat of financial ruin, but the company seems far more attuned to user feedback than previously; there’s a lot riding on the Pre, and Palm know we know it. Thankfully they’ve delivered a smartphone not only capable but honestly impressive and distinctive. Improvements to webOS will only make it better, but even in this fledgling state we’d readily recommend the Palm Pre.”

Website: Palm Pre