HP Pre 3 - the business smartphone. Together with the TouchPad, Hewlett Packard has announced the Pre 3, a device for 'professionals who require a powerful mobile productivity with an eye on personal connectivity.' This is another great result of HP`s acquisition of Palm and I hope they will continue to release such products in the future. And you will see why if you will read this article below.
Hardware. This is a powerful word these days when talking about smartphones. But it is the most powerful if we are referring to this phone`s CPU. I can not believe it (as there were rumors that we will not see any CPUs with frequency higher than 1.2 GHz this year) but Pre 3 has a Qualcomm Scorpion at 1.4 GHz with Adreno 205 graphic chipset. So it`s not dual-core, but this is the fastest mobile CPU I have seen so far. RAM memory has only 512 MB and the storage can come with 8GB or 16GB as there is no support for slot card. The screen is a 3.58 inches multi-touch display with 24-bit color and 480x800 WVGA resolution. Yes this is not as large as other smartphones have because Pre 3 is a slider - has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Connectivity does not show too much with the 3G HSDPA & HSUPA, Bluetooth 2.1 with AD2P stereo support. But the Wi-Fi is a little different with 802.11a/b/g/n 5 GHz and WPA, WPA2, WEP encryption. The wireless connection is different because the phone can work as a router which can support up to 5 devices connected simultaneously through HP mobile hotspot. There is also a microUSB 2.0 port, A-GPS, a 3.5 mm jack and sensors like accelerometer, ambient light, proximity or compass. If you want to take pictures or record a HD (720p) video there is a 5 megapixels camera on the back and if you need to attend a video conference there is a VGA front camera, a mono speaker as well as the dual-microphone with noise cancellation. The battery has only 1230 mAh - so I do not believe that can offer a great performance although they say is a high capacity one.
As the TouchPad, this smartphone is running the webOS with HTML5 amd Adobe Flash support for internet browser. HP Synergy is again present which can connect almost any POP3, IMAP or corporate Microsoft Exchange server. An important application is the Quick Office Mobile Connect Suite with Word, Excel, PowerPoint editing, Pdf viewer including support for Google Docs and Box.net support. Other applications are: Google Maps, YouTube, Amazon MP3 store, Foursquare and more. The HP Touchstone is also there if you wish to exchange data with TouchPad or other webOS device. New is the HP Touchstone charging dock as can charge the phone only on contact (so without any plug-in cable).
In conclusion - the HP announcement has many business environment words like: professionals, multi-tasking, productivity, customers, tasks, corporate - speaking clearly about what this phone is all about. In my opinion they could have done a better job if the Pre 3 had 1GB of RAM, a slot card support, a HDMI port and perhaps NFC (the future of mobile payments). But is great as it shows and I wonder what RIM with Blackberry has to say about this. Oh yeah... I do not hear anything :). So we will see this released this summer.
