This morning Palm Canada showed me their latest prototype of the Palm Pre, a remarkably innovative touchscreen smartphone that, as Bell Canada announced today, will be available in the second half of this year. As with previous demonstrations of the Pre, the device looks ready to hit store shelves right now; its design is polished and complete, its software fully operational and running smoothly, but still the company asked me not to take photographs of the device nor would they make any estimates of what kind of battery life it might have. Their still tweaking, trying to get it perfect as expectations are high and competition is strong.

 

The Pre has gained notoriety for its touchscreen interface, the first to really match Apple’s iPhone software in delivering a natural, simple, pleasurable flow to its navigation, in the way users can easily move from one menu screen into another, diving into an application with a simple flick of a fingertip and quickly gaining a depth of information. The Pre goes one step further, however, and achieves that same kind of natural flow to the way it moves and shares information. When you enter details into one application, such as a contacts list, it will automatically update that same information as it appears in other, similar programs on the phone. When you perform a search, it automatically looks through all the programs and content on the phone to provide results. It can move and track your text conversations across different messaging clients. If you begin chatting with someone on Facebook and they close down their laptop, the Pre will automatically switch your conversation over to a mobile instant messenger client and reconnect with the person on their cellphone to keep the conversation going. It has an interface that can provide a view of the latest updates, messages, and notifications from all your main applications, and achieves this without having to first grab and mash all of the data together into its own client. The way it smoothly and effortlessly maneuvers incoming data to always be where you need it is quite beautiful and something that no other cellphone on the market has matched. Think of the way the iPhone’s menu visually morphs and changes with ease, now imagine a phone that does that with your information.

The Pre’s interface supports the way it plays with your data. Much like a computer it has a desktop and when you open an application it appears first as a window, in this case one the size of a playing card. As you open more applications, they appear as playing card-like windows, making it easy for you to quickly shuffle through them and follow information as it flows from one running program to the next. At any time you can tap a card to make it full screen or give it a flick, sending it flying off-screen, to close it. A thin strip of screen landscape at the bottom can be activated to provide dashboard controls for other apps running in the background. If you have a music player open, for example, you have its playback controls appear at the very bottom of the screen so you can change the music that’s playing without having to leave the program you are currently focused on. Some smartphones, like the Blackberry Storm, allow you to keep multiple applications open, merely for the sake of having them open, the Pre uses its gesture-based interface to allow users to maintain their focus on one task while allowing the Pre to still trigger the events of others. An incoming call, for example, won’t force an interruption if you’re deep in composing an e-mail.

The phone also has an additional “gesture” area underneath the screen for simple swipes to access quick actions, such as the “back” command for getting out of menu screens. I haven’t seen enough on this to know how useful it really is.

Physically, the Pre’s design is more attractive than promotional pictures will have you believe. It is a very flat, wide, polished, and rounded handset. Palm says they designed it to look like a river-washed stone, the kind you find in rock beds when looking for skipping stones, and its shape and presence is exactly that. When you slide the physical QWERTY keyboard out, it elegantly rolls out along a carefully calculated curve, one you have to look closely at to notice. The angle is designed to both put the keyboard at a comfortable angle and to give the phone a curve that feels comfortable when you hold it against your face. I’ve yet to spend much time with the keyboard and so can’t speak to how well it performs, but the choice to use a physical keyboard sidesteps the issue many have with a virtual one.

The Pre includes many of the features from other smartphones in the top league. It has 3G internet access, built-in GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, speakerphone, both corporate and personal e-mail support, multiple messaging capabilities, 8GB of internal memory, proximity sensors, an accelerometer and the ability to download and install “apps” that will be made available through an online App store that will launch alongside the Pre here in Canada.

Although it has strong multimedia features, including a 3 Megapixel camera, a 3.5 mm headphone jack, and the ability to play videos , the Pre won’t have the same focus towards innovation in video games and creative multimedia applications as the iPhone. Palm states that their focus will be towards the flow of information, finding new ways to manipulate data than new ways to entertain.

The Pre’s battery life is likely to be one of the handset’s biggest weaknesses. Any phone that utilizes multiple wireless radios, a graphics-intense interface, with multiple applications running, is sure to be a battery hog. One hint towards this concern is the Touchstone inductive charging dock. No need to connect docking ports, simply placing the phone on the black puck is enough to have it connect, sync, and charge. Palm says the Pre was an excellent handset to introduce the new charging technology, partly because it’s expensive right now to add to a handset, which the Pre’s premium cost covers, but also because the ease of charging will help counter the inconvenience caused by the Pre’s increased need to be charged.

While I am reserving final judgment until Bell and Palm can provide a final version of the Pre, with enough time that I can use it for a long period of time, what Palm has been comfortable to showcase to me so far is very exciting and I expect the Pre will be the most talked about smartphone of the year and certainly the best of the CDMA market. Palm’s Matt Crowley tells me that Bell, tired of the often year-long gap between handset launches in the US and Canada, worked considerably hard to make sure that this time, with the Pre, that Canadians would have it in a timely matter. Knowing the frustration that many Canadian gadget fans have had at the cross-border delays, it’s quite something to see that conviction in the works and to see it actually pay off. The Pre is coming and yes, it is worth being excited about, and you can be excited about it, no delay.