Palm Inc, a pioneer in handheld devices but suffering hard times lately, unveiled a touch-screen smartphone on Thursday which impressed reviewers and sent its stock price soaring.
The Palm Pre, released at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) here, runs on a new operating system, the Palm webOS mobile platform, developed by the Sunnyvale, California-based company.
Palm, which came out with some of the first personal digital assistants (PDAs) but has been lagging behind rivals Nokia, Apple and Research in Motion, said the Pre would be available through US carrier Sprint by this summer.
It did not reveal the price for the device, which notably allows users to move seamlessly from one application to another like with a desktop computer and run multiple applications at the same time. "It replicates the way you work on a PC or a Mac." The Palm webOS mobile platform is also open to other developers to write programs for the device and Internet titans such as Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and Amazon are among its partners.
"We believe there will be hundreds of thousand of applications on the platform very quickly," Palm chief executive Ed Colligan said. "These are standard tools, any Web developer can do it. It was built with developers in mind."
Encased in an ergonomic black plastic case, the Pre is slightly smaller than rival smartphones. In addition to the touch-screen offered by rival models such as Apple's iPhone it also offers a slideout QWERTY keyboard.
Other features of the Pre include a Web browser, Wi-Fi, integrated GPS, stereo Bluetooth, a 3-megapixel camera, video playback and eight gigabytes of internal storage space.