HP has announced the UK launch of its Palm Pre 2 smartphone.
The company first announced the Pre 2 last month, but unusually decided to launch the handset in France first.
It’s the first Palm smartphone launch since HP took over the company earlier this year, and also the first to carry the new webOS 2.0 operating system.
“HP webOS 2.0 is the biggest leap forward for webOS since it launched 17 months ago,” said Miles Norman, UK sales director for HP’s Palm division. “It expands the features that make webOS great for consumers, enterprises and developers, and introduces powerful new features that make it easier to get more things done.”
You can pause a game, tap an email notification, check your calendar, read a restaurant review, send an email reply, then switch back to the game without closing anything
HP claims one of webOS 2.0’s biggest advantages comes from improved multitasking. “You can pause a game, tap an email notification, check your calendar, read a restaurant review, send an email reply, then switch back to the game without closing anything,” the company said in a statement.
“WebOS lets you easily manage multiple open applications and notifications using natural touch gestures.”
HP was equally bullish about webOS 2.0’s web content handling, taking a jibe a Apple’s iPhone by stressing that “webOS now supports a beta of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 in the browser, which provides access to rich, Flash-based web content”.
The revamped OS also claimed improved support for HTML5 features, including geolocation.
Handset highlights
The Pre 2 itself sports a 3.1in multitouch glass screen with a 24-bit colour, 320×480 resolution HVGA display and a pull-out QWERTY keyboard.
According to HP, the Pre 2 is the first Palm phone with a gigahertz processor and features a 5-megapixel camera with an LCD flash.
On top of 16GB on-board memory the Pre 2 supports USB mass storage and various multimedia formats including MP3, AAC, AAC+ for music and MPEG-4, H.263 and H.264 for video.
The Palm Pre 2 will be available SIM-free and unlocked from Monday, starting at £399, while the webOS 2.0 update will be delivered to existing Palm users with older handsets over the coming months.
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