PLUGGEDIN-Palm's Pre shines in ways, not in others

By Sinead Carew

NEW YORK, June 4 (Reuters) - The long-awaited Pre has nice new touches, but Palm Inc has a lot of work to do if the device is to be a serious competitor to the iPhone.

The device seemed to live up to some expectations but fall short on others for this reporter, who played around with the Pre for just a few days.

The interface does feel new and interesting with some lovely bells and whistles. But features like photo-viewing and surfing are sometimes painfully slow and social networking integration does not go as far as this correspondent hoped.

SHAPE AND SIZE

So what's Pre like? It's shaped like a soap bar with a smooth touchscreen display that has a discrete round button protruding from the lower part that minimizes applications. It has an unobtrusive on/off button at the top edge, plus a volume button on the left edge.

Gently push the bottom edge of Pre to reveal a tiny QWERTY keypad that tilts slightly to you. The keyboard is very compact, and people with relatively big fingers may find it too small.

This may upset anybody who hoped the physical keyboard would be an improvement on the iPhone's virtual one.

MESSAGING

Perhaps Pre's biggest novelty is how it handles messaging. From within one application, you can exchange texts with phone contacts and swap instant messages with buddies who use either AOL instant messenger or Google Talk.

Accessing multiple messaging systems from a single platform is great because different users like different services.

Another treat is alerts containing the first line of new, incoming messages, which appear at the bottom of the screen whatever you might be doing: messaging, Web-surfing or gaming.

This may be a welcome change from, say, checking your message when BlackBerry's flashing red-light alert appears.

But, for email, Pre does not seem to provide the alerts. It was easy to set up Gmail but to get new email, you tap on the inbox tab and wait several seconds to view it, whether the email was short or included heavy attachments.

This may deter those looking for a BlackBerry alternative. But they may be happy to hear that once an email is open, it is very easy to download a word document or a PDF. To magnify the text, spread two pinched fingers apart on the screen.