Hands-on with the Palm Pre at CES

We had the opportunity to sit down with the new Palm Pre at CES today and we’re pleased to report that it’s just as impressive in the flesh as it looked in yesterday's video demo.

The Pre is a real return to form for Palm, although we don’t think it's ever come up with a PDA or smartphone that’s anywhere near as sophisticated. It’s a lot smaller than we first thought too, but has a pleasingly curvy shape that still feels substantial in the hand.

The design is very striking, particularly the curved slider mechanism, but we didn’t warm to the keyboard. It has the same closely-packed rubbery keys as the Palm Treo Pro and the top row sits a little too close to the bottom edge of the screen for our liking.

The Pre is the fruit of Palm chairman Jon Rubinstein’s labours. He’s a recent arrival at Palm (who came along with a much-needed cash injection from Elevation Partners) who was instrumental in the development of the iPhone and iMac at Apple, and he certainly seems to have worked some magic. Palm is being careful not to pitch the Pre as any kind of iPhone killer, but the consumer-friendly design and clean, colourful interface are clearly an attempt to take on Apple.

Palm will still continue to sell Windows Mobile-powered smartphones, but intends to aim these at business users rather than consumers. The Centro will be its last PalmOS-powered smartphone, though – it’s WebOS all the way from here. However, Palm has yet to make any statement on the availability of a GSM Pre in Europe and stories that have been circulating to the contrary are unfounded, it says.

We managed to take a few photos of the Palm Pre alongside a few other smartphones to give an idea of its size, plus we took a very short video that shows it playing video.

There were some worried comments about Palm deliberately avoiding any mention of the Pre’s multimedia capabilities at yesterday’s unveiling, but our video of the demo clearly shows how it handles music playback. We managed to shoot a short video of it playing a movie trailer earlier today and we’re pleased to report that it handles video with aplomb.