Palm Pre Plus review

The smartphone market has come a long way since Palm first showed off the Pre at the beginning of 2009. HTC’s Android handsets now rival the best Apple has to offer, and there’s a whole host of bargain basement phones vying for your cash, all offering multitasking, web browsing, and app-downloading loveliness. The Palm Pre Plus – the second generation Pre – has its work cut out.

Anyone hoping for dramatic improvements, though, is going to be disappointed. The only obvious visual difference is the removal of the button from below the screen on the front, leaving more room for the touch-sensitive gesture strip, allowing you to swipe back and forth without anything getting in the way.

In the button’s place is a thin horizontal LED that lights up to confirm those gestures – a nice touch.

Subtle changes improve the ergonomics slightly too, with the previously stiff screen-slide mechanism smoothed out, the keyboard raised a touch, and key action made more clicky. Otherwise, the Plus is the same size, shape and dimensions as before, and with the same 3.2in 320 x 480 resolution screen.

Those small ergonomic changes make a bigger difference to usability than you might think. Typing in particular is much more comfortable than before (although the outer edges are still a touch too sharp). It’s also nice to have an extra 8GB for storage – the Pre boasts a total of 16GB now.

And webOS makes as good an impression as it did the first time we encountered it. It can be confusing at times, with messages assigned separate tasks from the email inbox, but largely browsing through open applications is elegantly handled and intuitive. The Messaging view is likewise excellent, as are Calendar and Contacts, seamlessly bringing all your Facebook, LinkedIn, Exchange, Yahoo and Google information together in one unified view.

The 3-megapixel camera (and associated LED flash) is also fine, call quality is excellent, and browsing quick and generally reliable. In the Acid3 standards test, the Pre Plus scored a creditable 92 and it loaded the full BBC homepage in an average of 11 seconds over a fast Wi-Fi connection – again, it’s very good. Note, though, there’s still no Flash support.

But in the cut-throat world of smartphones, all this – nice though it is – is no longer good enough. Battery life, which was poor in the original device, is also below par here. The Pre Plus, in fact, didn’t even manage to last the full 24-hours in our test, where other phones last a day with 60% or more capacity remaining.

A year on from its release, the number of apps available from the Palm App Catalog remains pitifully thin – fewer than 1,400 just doesn’t cut it when the Android market boasts around 60,000 and iPhone owners can choose from many more than that. And, finally, although equipped with GPS, there’s no free voice-guided navigation app as with Nokia and Android phones from 1.6 and above.

It’s a shame, because, aside from the odd stutter here and there, we like using webOS and the Palm Pre Plus a lot. But, right now, there’s no way we could possibly recommend this over an iPhone or a good Android handset, and high prices seal its fate. When the Palm Pre Plus hits O2 on May 28, it will be free on only two-year contracts from £35 per month and up. Until battery life is sorted out, apps are given a boost and prices come down to realistic levels, we’d advise you give it a miss.

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