Palm Pre 2 WebOS 2.0 smartphone

Refined rather than revamped

Hardware hiccoughs

Facebook and Twitter apps are available from the App Catalog, and you can sync your Facebook contacts and pics, but as yet there’s no FriendStream or Motorola Motoblur-style app to pull all your message updates together.

The screen's not the sharpest around

Palm’s browser is decent enough, even if it’s a bit lacking in functionality. There’s no word search or multi-page viewing for instance, but it’s certainly fast, you can pinch or double tap to zoom. It also supports Adobe Flash 10.1, though disappointingly BBC iPlayer isn’t supported yet. There’s also a YouTube app on board.

The screen isn’t the sharpest so watching videos isn’t exactly of the first water but there is at least the option to stretch them to fill the screen, which is always welcome. The sound from the music player is surprisingly good through the supplied headphones. And there’s an impressive 16GB of storage on board which will be enough for most. It'll have to: there's no memory card slot.

Another flaw: the really rather tiny battery doesn’t quite hack it and delivered barely a day's worth of admittedly fairly heavy use.

Verdict

Palm has won fans among those who like a phone to be cute, smart and intuitive, enviably quick, but not too complicated, and the Palm Pre 2 continues to refine that proposition with faster processing power, a better camera and, thanks to WebOS 2.0, improved functionality. ®

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