We knew that it would take some time before Hewlett-Packard showed us some new Palm webOS products and we may have just seen the update to the ill-fated Palm Pre.
The SFR website has some details on what it claims to be the Palm Pre 2 and it looks to be a good, but not quite great, update to the hardware.
The site says the Palm Pre 2 will sport a similar form factor but with a “refined” screen. We can also look forward to a 1 GHz processor (probably a TI OMAP, like the previous version), 512 MB of RAM and WiFI, GPS and all the expected features. There’s no word on if the camera will get a boost to be able to record 720p HD video, but I’m sure that will happen.
I liked the Palm Pre well enough but the handset had some physical design issues – the keyboard was a bit too small for my liking and the screen isn’t as good as what we expect from high-end devices nowadays.
The physical design wasn’t awful though and the Palm Pre 2 should receive a major boost by having webOS 2.0. The next version of the webOS platform should include multiple new features like stronger Facebook integration, the ability to group cards into “stacks” and more support for more e-mail clients.
Is this enough to get Palm and HP back in the smartphone market? It’s way too early to tell, as this device hasn’t even been made official yet.
We do know that HP is working on a variety of smartphones – the Palm Mansion should be one of those – and I honestly can’t wait to get my hands on the PalmPad in a few months. With the Apple iPhone, Android handsets, Research In Motion BlackBerry and the full crop of just-announced Windows Phone 7 devices, it’s going to quite a crowded field.
[Via SFR]