Palm just premiered its new operating system, Web OS, along with the first phone featuring it, the Palm Pre. The pre is a touchscreen slider with full-QWERTY thumbboard and a mini-trackball for precise pointer control. Under the hood, the handset is powered by a high-performance Texas Instruments OMAP processor and features some innovative hardware, like a wireless charging circuit. The phone's 3.1-inch 320 x 480 touchscreen supports multi-touch input, just like an Apple. In fact, most of the specs look extremely iPhone-competitive, including EV-DO 3G support and 8 GB of built-in flash storage. All the hardware in the world won't make a phone popular without a great OS, but this time it looks like the software is just as strong as the hardware, based on our first look at Web OS.

Web OS is based around a launcher dock, from which you can scroll through a bar of applications with a flick of your finger and pull up the one you're interested in. The motion of on-screen objects is designed to be very fluid; icons pour onscreen in a wave when you pull the launch dock up from within an application. You can multi-task by zooming out of active applications and manipulating them like icons, sliding them off the screen to save and close. A system called Synergy organizes your data and keeps you synced up. It can pull together data from sources like Google and Facebook and present it all in one unified format. Multi-tasking extends to within applications, letting you work with multiple emails drafts at once.

The web browser takes full advantage of the multi-touch screen for gesture input controlling page navigation and zoom levels. Again, the multi-tasking system, based on "cards" representing program windows, works here, letting you keep track of multiple websites at once. Pop-ups from programs running in the background alert you to when tasks have been completed. Palm is opening the Web OS API format to developers, supporting interfaces crafted with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. The Pre is just the first Palm device taking advantage of the new platform, but we're sure to see more handsets soon, if Web OS and the Pre take off like we think they will. The Pre will be available sometime before summer through Sprint, but there's no word yet on its price.

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