Palm Pre

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We met for more than an hour today with a Palm product manager responsible of the company’s new smartphone the Pre. Then we received a live demonstration, shown here.

Palm assumed a substantial amount of debt as part of a private equity deal with Elevation partners, and paid out the majority of their cash as special dividend to shareholders. Then the company was battered with competition from Research in Motion and Apple.

Jon Rubenstein, formerly an Apple Executive, is Chairman of Palm and lead the design of the company’s newest offering. In our opinion, the device is substantially more advanced than an iPhone, offering all of the iPhone’s features plus a number of things Apple’s phone cannot do, such as true multi-tasking and global search for contacts and apps. Also, there is likely to be substantial third party development for the Pre because programmers can write applications in JAVA Script, HTML and CSS, which are very common languages. They do not have to conform to the more challenging development environments of iPhone and Android.

There is also a second demonstration by Palm uploaded as another video.