Palm's Smartphone '09 Game Play: The Pre

Palm, the creator of one of modern history's most successful smartphones, the Treo, is trying to put itself back among the top-handset contenders with a brand new offering just unveiled at CES: a combo touch-screen/QWERTY keyboard smart phone called the Pre.

The Pre, which has rounded edges similar to some of the more popular Blackberry models, is notable more for its original feature set and software than its design. The phone is using a new operating system Palm designers are calling webOS. The system allows the handset to run several different programs at once so users can multi-task both business tasks and social networking all at once.

Original to webOS is a feature called "Palm Synergy" which keeps track of a user's contacts and messages across all sorts of programs. So, if you talk with a person in e-mails, text messages, Facebook messages and via IM, the Pre will display all of those back-and-forths as one chronological conversation.