Palm Pre 2 Review
By Ruben Corbo on October 26th, 2011
The phone is 3.96 inches tall, 2.34 inches wide and is 0.66 inch thick. It weighs a total of 5.1 ounces. The first thing will strike you about its appearance is its pocket-friendly size, harking back to the days of flip-up feature phones. The phone’s display remains at the size of 3.1 inches, supporting HVGA and a 320x480 resolution. As with all devices that boast a small size, there is a price to pay in a smaller screen. It doesn’t have the same clarity or sharpness as the higher resolution screens out there. Nevertheless, it remains bright and the touch screen is consistently responsive.
Though it is not delineated with lines or marks of any sort, there is an area below the main screen which acts as a gesture space, allowing you to perform simple navigation and return back to the home screen by double tapping. On the top of the phone are the usual power/lock buttons and a 35mm headphone jack.
With the Palm Pre 2 comes a new operating system, the WEBOS 2.0. This brings some significant improvements on the functional side of things, particularly in regards to the interface. The main difference it brings, however, is superior multitasking capability. This is all done through the feature called Stacks, which groups together similar tasks in a deck-of-cards layout. A single stack can consist of, for example, all messaging applications or all multimedia applications.
The Pre 2 features a 1GHz TI OMAP processor. This provides stable performance throughout the phone’s day to day operations, with applications and tasks all responding quickly. There are instances of slow performance but these are rare, usually occurring when the phone is under heavy load or using more system demanding applications.
The phone also features a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash. The picture quality is of a good standard with rich detail and bright colors. Lastly, the phone has 15GB of available internal memory for the user, with no expansion slot. The call quality is of an acceptable standard with little background interference, though this will largely depend on your location and provider.
