Today at CES Palm debuted its new mobile phone called the “Palm Pre Phone” .  The anouncement in and of itself is not that surprising as it has been expected for many months, but what is surprising is the depth of the product.

Most people expected it to actually be a big flop as Palm has been in a downward spiral for many years that has only been accelerated by products such as Apple’s iPhone and Googles Android.  These competitive products have really stolen the PDA/multi-function phone market away from Palm.  Even serious Palm fan-boys had to move to competing products due to the age and lack of new features in the Palm products.

Palm did the right thing and came back strong with an impressive product in the Palm Pre Phone.  The product is flooded with all of the top features for a smartphone and to top it off the phone actually looks good.  Now for why we are talking about it here….

At the core of the phone is the operating system called “palm webOS”.  From the looks of it at this point its just that, a web browser.  Palm is bringing us this new operating system for phones based off of typical web standards such as CSS, XHTML and JavaScript.   This was a very smart move for Palm to go with these standards as it drastically increases the developer base for making applications for the new platform.  Apple has been overwhelmed by the massive quantity of applications made for their iPhone platform due the wide user base.  Palms OS choice may be the only way that can have an opportunity to get anywhere near the amount of applications that Apple has available.

While the actual performance details of the operating system are not known yet we can expect to see the reviews start pouring in now that the details of the phone have been made public.  Since the release of the details today Palm’s stock price has jumped almost 35%

Pre Phone

Check It Out> Palm Pre Phone, Palm stock price, MobileCrunch