The Palm Pre. A phone touted to reverse the US manufacturer’s fortunes, revolutionise smartphone technology and topple Apple’s iPhone from its ivory tower in one fell swoop.

Now it’s on shelves, we know that it hasn’t quite done any of those things, but we look closer at why the Pre is still a great little device, and one that shouldn’t be overlooked in the quest to find an all-in-one connectivity device.

First impressions when looking at the phone, it’s easy to see why the Pre’s design had the world in a lather.

The cute, pebble-shaped device immediately endears with curved and compact shape that manages to blend touch input, a QWERTY keyboard hidden behind a sliding recess, and something in between with a touch-sensitive gesture area.

The Palm Pre’s actual build quality, however, was surprisingly below average. Perhaps having changed hands a few times before reaching Omio’s desk, the hinges felt really loose with each slide of the screen feeling like its last…

For such a cutting edge piece of hardware, you’d expect the Pre to handle a bit of punishment but it simply felt brittle, with the cheap frame and cluttered, tiny keyboard taking away much of the initial appeal of the device.

The Pre opens on a curved hinge, which results in a slight bowing of the device when open. The 'lip' of the Pre then results in a sharp, almost serrated edge that can as easily give a close shave as call a friend.

Whilst the form itelf seems steeped in style, actual practicality beyond the size – namely durability and long term comfort in the hand – are lacking.

Then we turned the Palm Pre on, it introduces us to the Palm Web OS for the first time with a beautiful tutorial video, and immediately we fall right back in love.

The 3.1-inch capacitive screen is a perfect canvas for the vivid, crisp and clean layout, whilst the multi-tasking, fresh gesture-based interface and all-round slickness is the first to genuinely close the gap between the iPhone and The Rest.

Using a combination of the screen itself and the inch-wide strip beneath for gestures, the Pre offers a wealth of new ideas in Web OS and is genuinely a breath of fresh air. 

Menus are simple, concepts like Universal Search – a Spotlight style search box that spans across both online and the contents of your phone – work well and the Synergy app merging contact details between mail, FaceBook and phone is seamless, if a little…busy. The absence of dedicated Facebook and Twitter support is a real missed opportunity at this stage, though.

Multiple applications run in tandem, with a ‘deck of cards’ look to each one running, which can be seen when pressing in the nubbin within the gesture area. This shows every program at a glance, and a single tap brings it to the fore, whilst a swipe banishes to the ether.

Navigating the Pre soon becomes a fun and intuitive process, but switching between interacting with the screen itself and an abstract area beneath it  (used with applications like the browser) takes some getting used to.

Speaking of the browser, it is an…intriguing experience. The smaller size of the Pre starts to become noticeable when bringing up your favourite site has a font that can fit on the head of a pin, but the kinetic scrolling, fast orientation changes, multiple windows and (gasp!) multi-touch pinch-to-zoom! Wi-fi makes the browsing sliky smooth, but 3G will more than suffice for navigating the internet.

What was previously thought the preserve of the iPhone somehow makes it to the Pre intact, and the experience is favourably comparable as a consequence. The high resolution screen makes browsing far less of a chore than on many a smartphone, easily comfortable enough to surf on for more than football scores and train times.

The big question these days is not how many megapixels (3, alas no autofocus but we’ll get back to that), but what kind of App Store equivalent it has. Well, the Palm Pre dos not disappoint with the App Catalog.

Well, it kind of does disappoint, with a relatively bare virtual store of 40-odd applications. This pales into insignificance alongside the App Store’s 100,000 titles and the 20,000+ Android offerings, but the mix of free and paid as well as a selection of decent games makes it a worthwhile, if brief, port of call.

Without iTunes (or the shortlived workaround), the Pre is a serviceable home to multimedia, but nothing to rave about. Movies are vivid and free of blurring, music equally great, but the effort of moving contacts or data across from a computer is a chore without third party applications like The Missing Sync. YouTube is well integrated, as is the (flakey) GPS, and it all works really well, albeit once the initial learning curve is overcome.

Battery life was not the best. Even with the phone laying largely dormant, the (admittedly gorgeous) drained battery logo would rear its ugly head by the end of even a mild day’s play. Five hours talktime, with a bit of e-mail, browsing and a game of Tetris was usually enough to end it.  The TouchStone charger is an interesting gimmick in that it boosts the Pre’s battery power merely by the device resting on it,  but we found jamming a USB cord in there had much the same effect.

The Pre’s camera is another facet that is merely there as opposed to making an attempt to wow the user.

It has a 3-megapixel camera but lacks auto-focus, video recording and is functional at best with resultant photos. Yes, that phone is little better in the snapper department, but let’s aim to beat rather than merely match that one, shall we?

As a phone, the Pre is more than capable with the curved frame fitting the face nicely and the O2 reception proving more than stable for calls, mails and texts alike.

As a taste of things to come, the Pre is a tantalising morsel of what Web OS will be able to provide in terms of multitasking, connectivity and communication.

As a physical device, the Palm Pre lets itself down with shoddy build quality, a fiddly form factor and a slightly overcomplicated profusion of input methods. Web OS is nothing short of a revelation, proving super-slick menus, transitions and multi-tasking can be done, with a side helping of originality, no less.

It may not topple any of the big boys, but improvements on the tentative first steps of the Pre (and more importantly Web OS) could well see Palm go from also-ran to a company that could shake the foundations of the smartphone elite.