iPhone 3GS vs Palm Pre

Palm Pre UK prices and deals

Apple iPhone 3GS UK prices and deals

Palm has remained pretty silent of late. The reason for the quietness? It was cooking up the latest so-called ’iPhone killer’ in the form of the Palm Pre. US users got the new handset first, back in June, whereas poor UK users had to wait until Friday last week.

So after many rumours, some of which turned out to be true and some of which were completely made up, the Palm Pre is here to make its mark on the mobile world, offering something solid for businesses and consumers alike. But will it punch the iPhone’s lights out in the process?

Read on to find out.

Looks
Most reviewers spend a lot of time ascertaining just how different the handset in question looks to the iPhone. Interestingly, straight out of the box, it’s actually quite uncanny how similar the Pre and iPhone are. They could almost be from the same family. OK, maybe distant relatives.

Palm has clearly tried not to just serve up another iPhone wannabe like so many other manufacturers, but there are distinct similarities between the two, in addition to obvious differences.

Both put large screens centre stage and prefer the minimalist approach when it comes to hard keys. Each features just a small rectangle above the display and a round, home button at the bottom. The latter is a more polished silver affair on the Pre, which gives it a slight one-upmanship in the class stakes design-wise. To the untrained eye, that is all you see, whereas next to the home button you’ll find touch sensitivity in residence, which comes to life when swiping apps into and out of play.

The Pre’s display is quite curved. It almost feels as if the items on the screen have been laid on a tablecloth and stretched over the surface. That’s not necessarily a bad thing but it does take a bit of getting used to. Our reviewer described the Pre’s display as “luscious, with a bright image and vivid colours.” We’d have to agree.

Indeed, as the Pre’s screen is a tad smaller than the iPhone’s it benefits from pixel density and is therefore capable of serving up slightly sharper images than its Apple-flavoured nemesis.

Both displays are crisp and offer great clarity, despite the obvious greasy finger issues that plague all touch screen handsets these days. Mark-for-mark, the iPhone doesn’t suffer as much from irksome smudges as the Pre.

Icons on both the Pre and the iPhone are vibrant and easy to navigate, with both screens being very responsive to users’ commands.

That’s where the aesthetic similarities end. The iPhone’s keyboard is a virtual one, while the Pre’s is neatly hidden underneath the screen and slides out smoothly whenever required.

But that’s all that’s smooth about it. The keys are fairly small and hard, akin to an 80s calculator watch and using it feels a little bit too alien and awkward. That said, the keys are well spaced and you can get up quite a bit of speed with some practice, not unlike the iPhone’s virtual QWERTY, which has the same training levels as a pre-requisite if you want to type emails and texts quickly.

The Pre’s volume rocker is also less pretty than the iPhone’s, with black plastic offered up rather than a brushed chrome effect. Sometimes it’s these little touches that can add that deal-breaking level of finesse to a handset, particularly if you’re a style conscious business user.

While users can easily charge their iPhone via their USB port or in the traditional way, the Pre features a fiddly little USB port that is hidden beneath a ‘nubbin’ on the side. At first it feels like you’re breaking the phone by trying to open it but you’re not. Our review unit also came with a Palm Touchstone Charging Dock that makes it easy to charge the handset wirelessly.

As we said earlier, on first glance it doesn’t look like there’s much in it between the iPhone 3GS and the Pre so we’ll let the stats do the talking.

Both handsets weigh in at a nifty 135g, which is very lightweight when you consider just how much the two devices are packing inside their tiny bodies. We’ve then got the Pre’s 59.5mmx16.95mmx100.5mm (WDH) against the iPhone’s 62.1mmx12.3mmx115.5mm (WDH), revealing the fact that the iPhone is slightly taller and slimmer than its marginally more portly counterpart. That said, both are very pocketable and certainly unlikely to cause any questionable trouser pocket bulges, or conversely get buried at the bottom of a bag or briefcase.

While the iPhone has a 3.5in (480x320 pixels resolution) screen, which overshadows the Pre’s 3.1in offering of the same resolution, the fact that pixel density is greater means you’re not missing out that much.

At three megapixels, give or take, each, the cameras also match up when it comes to raw numbers. But the iPhone does beat the Pre when it comes to storage. The 3GS is available in 16GB and 32GB flavours, while the Pre boasts just 8GB. Neither have microSD card slots for additional storage capacity, which is a shame.

Most business users are fully aware that using Wi-Fi and checking emails frequently and so on is going to drain the battery more than someone who simply sends the odd text and makes a few calls, but the Pre and iPhone 3GS seem to be on a fairly level playing field from the off. Both handsets claim to offer five hours’ talk time, but the iPhone has a slight edge when it comes to standby figures with 300 hours to the Pre’s 250. That said, at least the Pre’s is removable and therefore you could, in theory at least, carry a spare. Although, neither could claim innocence as a battery sucker upper.

The Palm Pre is certainly harder than the iPhone. Quite literally, if the Gizmodo video below of someone using it to slice cheese is anything to go by. But being harder doesn’t necessarily give it what it takes to win this particular head-to-head battle.

Features
The Palm Pre is the first of its handsets to feature webOS. Bearing in mind it’s as new to us as anyone else, it’s incredibly intuitive and pleasant to use.

Just like the iPhone wowed everyone with its sleek interface when it first launched, we’re pretty impressed with what we’ve seen of webOS so far too. It certainly has lots of potential.

Being able to swipe away items to discard them, like throwing them into a virtual dustbin, is a really neat touch. It may be the novelty factor, but it certainly at least attempts to out innovate the press-and-you’re-binned mentality the iPhone OS employs.

The quality of images served up by the Pre’s camera are good. But the iPhone’s are much better. There’s no auto focus or video recording capability, which is a massive let down for us. That said, we lamented the camera in the first generation iPhone, so we should cut Palm some slack.

Both the iPhone and the Pre feature Google Maps, although we had a few issues getting up and running here. We launched the app at the same time for both handsets to see what happened. The iPhone found our location in a matter of seconds, while the Pre was still struggling to load the app.

After a few minutes, internet connection dropped and it gave up. So did we. As both handsets are on O2 we can only assume it’s an internal issue but we’d want to test this more thoroughly before suggesting it’s a mainstream fault with the Pre.

That said, finding Wi-Fi on the Pre was a breeze in the same way as it is on the iPhone. Call quality was also far superior on the Pre compared to the iPhone, although both handsets suffered from the heat when charging and under hard usage as their base gets very warm indeed.

Video quality on both devices is a very pleasant experience – whether YouTube or something else - and perfect for winding down between meetings or, of course, watching your company’s latest motivational training video. That said, the Pre wouldn’t let us view them in portrait mode, for some reason, which niggled somewhat.

But, back to business. Both the iPhone and the Pre stack up well when it comes to surfing the web, with a webOS brower and cut-down version of Safari put to good use. Both also feature good search facilities in the form of the iPhone’s Spotlight and the Pre’s Universal search, although the iPhone steals a march here as being slightly more useful.

Indeed, the Pre’s search offering throws up related results across the board, starting with what’s on the handset, then what’s on the web, while the iPhone has a dedicated search function for email or contacts alone, as well as across the rest of the handset and the web, which certainly helps to find exactly what you want speedily.

When it comes to email, both handsets support the usual suspects of Exchange and POP3/IMAP so which one is best comes down to personal preference of how the emails appear on the device itself. And, of course, the speed of delivery. The Pre does offer a one-stop-shop for multiple inboxes, providing access to different accounts through one logical place.

The Pre really wins out on its multi-tasking ability. The O2 website describes it as like “shuffling cards’ and it’s something business users will most definitely appreciate. Apps continue to run in the background in snapshot form when you go back home, which works for us. Yes, the iPhone can ‘multi-task’ to a certain extent, but the Pre takes things one step further, juggling multiple applications and making it look very easy indeed – a boon for business users who are more often than not trying to do three things at once at any given time.

If you’re a business user overwhelmed by too many contacts, or a consumer trying to keep track of different friend groups, the Pre has something for you in the form of Synergy. This handy tool unites your contacts, calendaring and messaging together in one place, saving you both time and effort.

If you’ve had a conversation with one person spread out over multiple mediums, for example, Synergy will thread them together in a unified view. Synergy also unites your calendaring information so you know what you’re meant to be doing when at a glance rather than having to trawl through multiple online diaries.

AOB?
You can pick up the Palm Pre for free, provided you’re willing to shell out £30 or so a month and commit to O2 for two whole years, which is a long time to be stuck with one phone. For the iPhone, however, things could all change very soon.

Orange will be making the iPhone available on its network by the end of the year, followed quite soon after by Vodafone (although it will only say early 2010 at this stage). This flurry of activity is likely to result in better pricing for users.

The Apple App Store is maturing nicely and growing in popularity every day. As such, Palm’s App Catalog looks barren in comparison. But, due to the age factor, we’d be comparing apples and oranges here by suggesting it was fair to make a call. So we won’t. Although Apple’s is clearly superior at this stage. For obvious reasons.

Verdict:
It is a tough call. The Palm Pre offers users who are scared of saying goodbye to their keyboard the best of both worlds. But for that safety blanket they have to compromise a little on the comfort of the keys. It’s also got lots of business-focused goodies on board, but lacks the support network of a big app portfolio.

The iPhone, on the other hand, is more of a finished article as it stands now. Particularly when you consider that there’s an app for pretty much everything, whether work rest or play, waiting for a loving home in the App Store.

In some respects, the Pre may well be a caterpillar waiting to butterfly, but in those areas it’s not there yet. But when it comes to features we can’t really argue with the facts.

The ultimate winner will depend on whether inner beauty or aesthetics are more important to you.

From a comparison written by IT PRO

Palm Pre UK prices and deals

Apple iPhone 3GS UK prices and deals

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