PC World - French mobile carrier SFR has spilled the beans and confirmed some details of an upcoming Palm Pre 2 smartphone in a blog post this week. The page is down now, and didn't reveal too many details of the new phone, besides a faster processor, more RAM memory and a few design improvements.
Hewlett-Packard bought Palm this year, and the future of smartphones based on the WebOS mobile operating system was uncertain. HP said it would make a tablet based on the OS inherited from the Palm purchase, and now it looks like the former smartphone pioneer is back to take another shot at the iPhone and the Android army.
SFR posted on its blog on Monday basic specifications and a couple of images describing a new Palm Pre 2. First spotted by the Pre Central blog, the page has been taken down, but a couple of important details about the upcoming smartphone from Palm managed to slip out.
According to translated reports, the Palm Pre 2 will have a 1GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM, on the par with the iPhone 4, a big improvement over its predecessor, which had a 600MHz processor and 256MB of RAM. The product description page promised that these improvements would make the phone faster, and better at multitasking.
From the two pictures attached to the blog post, the Palm Pre 2 looks very similar to its predecessor, except it has a slightly flatter screen, which Pre Central speculates could be made of glass, like the iPhone 4. No other specifications, pricing or release date were disclosed.
The Palm Pre 2 will presumably come with the WebOS 2 operating system, which, according to earlier reports, will include some updates to the multitasking interface (based on the cards metaphor), and better HTML5 support in the browser. Other improvements expected in WebOS 2 include widgets when the phone is docked, and a new feature called Just Type, which will let you perform certain tasks (send e-mail, create a list, etc), by typing certain keywords into a search field.
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