Palm apparently authorized review models and briefings for selected Web sites and blogs in advance of Saturday's release of the Palm Pre smartphone. A nubmer of sites have highly detailed reviews, based on days of putting retail Pre models through their paces and on interviews with Palm staff, with plenty of photos to illustrate.
Engadget has a three-part review, blessedly free of extraneous, distracting snark.
Engadget's review approach is essentially evaluative and its conclusions reflect that approach: generally the Pre gets what I would call B+ rating on the hardware, and an A to A+ on the webOS software and GUI.
Gizmodo's review is less extensive (though it touches on everything) and much more opinionated from beginning to end. They're much more critical of what they see as Pre's hardware shortcomings, through equally impressed with webOS and its implementation on the Pre.
PC World's review, actually more of a slideshow format, of the Pre is online.
Wired gives the Pre 8 points out of a possible 10. As with several other reviews, this one says the Pre keyboard is no match for that found on BlackBerries. The battery gives out after less than a day of heavy use, according to this reviewer, a problem somewhat mitigated by the Pre's replaceable battery.
UPDATE: PC World's David Coursey, using a baseball metaphor to describe his week-long Pre experience, says the Palm Pre is at best a "solid double" and not the homerun Palm was hoping for.
He puts the Pre's multitasking in context: "My take on multitasking: It won't be a big as deal for users as it is for reviewers, who are (or should be) power smartphone users. The ability to run multiple apps simultaneously will be useful, for sure, but isn't an iPhone-killer. Besides, it's reasonable to expect Apple will soon open its multitasking capabilities up to developers."
But I don't think multitasking is a FEATURE. It's significance for mobile users is that it creates the ability for the OS vendor and for application developers to create a device that 1) is continually plugged into the Internet and to the data, services, and applications users rely on, and 2) is an intelligent actor and interactor on behalf of the user with all those resources.
Cox is a senior editor at Network World.
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