It didn’t take long for someone to get a good close up of the new Palm Pre.  It’s not a full on review as they were not allowed to actually hold the device only touch it but they were able to get some really good details about it.

“It’s straight up gorgeous, but it’s not perfect – yet. During our demonstration, a few things went on the fritz: there was a bit of lag, certain menus wouldn’t open no matter how many times they were poked. With Palm only promising “by the end of the first half of 2009″, they’ve still got nearly a full 6 months to crack out the bugs, so we won’t judge them too much.

At the very bottom of the screen is a notifications bar, similar to that found on Android. Icons light up when a new e-mail or IM comes in – touch the area, and the notifications menu opens to tell you what’s going on. To clear the notification, you simply swipe it off the screen.

The “Cards” window management system is fantastic – it reminds me of alt-tabbing on a full blown desktop OS, with the added ability of being able to gesture swipe programs upward to close them.

All demonstrated gestures (single and multi-touch) appeared to work well. A small glow appears on screen beneath your fingers when doing multi-touch gestures – I’m not quite sure what the point is, but it’s a nice visual.

The quick launch bar, which is activated by dragging your finger upwards from below the screen, is great. Drag up, highlight any of the 5 applications you’ve got tucked away in there, release – the application launches.” – Greg Kumparak @ MobileCrunch

Judging by the feedback and features that they have posted, the device and operating system are looking like they will be well received by most users.   With the comparisons to Andriod and iPhone I personally don’t think it will be any sort of iPhone killer but it might have a really good run at the Android market share.  Either way this is going to liven up the smartphone market and make things substantially more difficult for Microsoft’s smartphone platform.

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