Reviews

Palm Pre 2 review

We take a look at the Palm Pre 2 – the first HP webOS 2.0-powered smartphone to be launched. Is it good enough to tempt you away from an iPhone, a Blackberry or an Android phone? Read our review to find out.

19 Nov 2010

.polaris__post-meta--date { display: none; } .polaris__post-meta--date.no-script { display: block; padding-left: 45px } 19 Nov 2010

Navigating the Pre 2 is done through three simple gestures: swiping left to right for Back; swiping upwards to put an application into Card view (from below the screen upwards); and, finally, from the middle of the screen upwards, which flicks the app off-screen closing it. It's a little fiddly at first but there is a tutorial. Once you get used to the gestures you'll find yourself flying around the device, opening apps, downloading documents, checking emails and sending texts at a rather alarming rate.

Your apps are organised and opened using the Launcher, a series of homescreens which you can customise to your heart's content. By default there are screens dedicated to the basics: Applications, System and Extras. You can add as many as you like to these and order your apps into the categories of your choosing such as Business, News, Friends and Websites for example.

Synergy, which lets you aggregate contacts from all your social networking and email accounts in one place, has been improved, but not as much as we'd like. At present there's support for AIM, Facebook, GMail, LinkedIn and Microsoft Exchange. If your favourite service isn't supported, all is not lost. Third parties can develop plug-ins for Synergy, adding support for their own services although none were yet available at the time of writing.

Once you've activated an account it stores all the relevant information from it in your Contacts application. Although you can now pick and choose which bits of information are downloaded from each of your accounts, such as phone number of email address, you still can't choose which of your specific contacts are downloaded. This is especially problematic for services such as Facebook, where you may have many contacts, not all of whom you'll want cluttering up your Contacts app.