Palm needed something amazing during its CES keynote today. Basically, today was Palm’s last chance to live. Guess what? Palm is going to live, and they are going to live well. The Palm pre not only is a great looking device, it has a touchscreen worthy of competing with the iPhone and it has a slide-down keyboard for great texting as well as navigation. But that’s just the hardware, the interface on this device is fantastic. With similar MultiTouch gestures as the iPhone–flicking, zooming, etc–the pre’s interface organizes all of your web information together without creating duplicate information. The pre also has Microsoft Exchange support for the corporate types. Getting into the device’s core applications, the Calendar and Contact applications are pretty slick. The Calendar literally crunches free time when displaying the day’s events so the actual events are displayed. The Contact application can gather information from all of your information sites on the web and organize them together. The Mail application is relatively normal, but the Messaging application is pretty great. One messaging application for all your instant messaging services as well as text messaging, so less applications to clutter your device. Another cool feature of the phone: along the bottom of the display, the operating system leaves room for notifications from any of your applications. So if you get a message or got an email, it’ll pop up on the bottom. Dealing with price and release date: both are unknown; however, we do have the first half of 2009 as a launch period and Sprint is the exclusive carrier (a downer if you were hoping to use the device unlocked on a GSM carrier), hopefully we’ll see a GSM version down the line. Overall, the pre is a pretty sweet looking device. Coming from the standpoint of an Apple fanboy and an iPhone user, this device is tempting. And if it’s tempting for the Apple fanboys around the world, then it will definitely sell a good amount of phones. Hopefully the device’s Sprint exclusivity won’t kill it though, because Sprint is definitely not the most popular carrier out there. So good job Palm, you’ve finally done something right (and well).

UPDATE – Palm has confirmed to Engadget that a GSM version of the phone is still in the works.

Filed under: Gadgets, Mobile Devices, Phones, blargKABOOM