Palm Pre to rival Apple iPhone
Updated on 07 July 2009
A smartphone to rival the dominance of Apple's iPhone will be launched in the UK before Christmas, it has been announced.
The Palm Pre has been on sale in the US for a month already and technology expertgs have said features such as a touchscreen as well as a proper keyboard make it an alternative to Apple's popular gadget.
The phone will be available only through O2, which is also the sole UK carrier for the iPhone. It has not yet been announced how much it will cost British consumers but in America the Palm Pre sells for 199 dollars (£123) with a two-year contract.
The Pre allows users to navigate by dragging a finger over the screen and open applications can be "shuffled" like a deck of cards and the unused ones thrown away.
The phone can synchronise calendar appointments and contacts from a series of different applications, such as Outlook, Facebook and Google into one simple display on their phone
Instead of being plugged into a charger it can be charged simply by being placed onto a special "touchstone".
But Palm's new offering has just a handful of downloadable applications to compete with Apple's ever-growing store of thousands and has half the memory of the latest iPhone 16GB S.
Matthew Key, chairman and chief executive officer of Telefonica Europe - O2's parent company, said: "We are fast becoming the home of the smartphone with the addition of the hotly-anticipated Palm Pre to our already extensive portfolio. Our customers will be the first outside North America to experience one of the most successful mobile devices of the year."
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