Palm Pre hitting UK "in time for Christmas"

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 7 Jul 2009 at 10:57

The Palm Pre will hit UK shelves "in time for Christmas" according to O2, which has secured exclusive rights to the handset.

The deal is a major coup for O2, which already has a similar deal in place for Apple's mighty iPhone.

The network is thought to have beaten out Orange and Vodafone for the rights to the highly anticipated smartphone, which has sold around 300,000 units in the US since its launch last month.

The company will not confirm a specific release date or price beyond a vague statement that it will be "in time for the holidays". In the US, the Palm Pre is priced at $200 (£126) on a two-year contract with carrier Sprint.

The Palm Pre has been turning heads since its debut at CES in January and sports a number of nifty features. Among those is Synergy, which amalgamates contact information being pulled from different sources - say Google Mail, Facebook and Outlook - into a unified listing.

Unlike the iPhone, the Pre is capable of running multiple applications at once, allowing users to flip between them like a deck of cards.

The Pre also offers a combined messaging service that presents all conversations from the same person - whether they were in an IM client or SMS - in a chat-view style window.