Mini-Pre sheds some bulk and drops the slide actionThe Pre was never going to be Palm’s only new smartphone – a company doesn’t go through the trouble of building a brand new mobile operating system only to release a single handset. Except if it’s Apple, perhaps. Even so, the Pre’s successor looks like it’ll be arriving sooner than expected, possibly a matter of months after its bigger brother.
Yesterday, we brought word of the new model, dubbed the ‘Mini-Pre’. Today, those early rumours have been furnished with additional specs and a new name. Say hello to the Palm Eos.
Eos is still officially unofficial – Palm’s probably more concerned with getting the Pre out the door right now – but shadowy sources reckon they’ve got the skinny on the new smartphone’s specs.
The Palm Eos will drop the slide-out keyboard used by its Pre-decessor (hurr hurr, geddit?). Instead, it's opting for a candybar design with full QWERTY keyboard below the 2.63” display. Its rounded edges make it look a lot like a BlackBerry Bold.
As hinted earlier, it’ll pack a lot less girth than the Pre. It’s believed to be just 10.6mm thick (1.7mm thinner than the iPhone 3G) and weighs 100g. The display boasts capacitive touchscreen and a resolution of 320 x 400 pixels. You’ll also get a fairly pathetic 2.0 megapixel camera on board, 4GB of storage, quad band GSM/HSDPA and four hours of talk time from the battery.
There’s no word yet on whether the Palm Eos will share the Pre’s Touchstone wireless charging tech.
It’s believed that US mobile network AT&T will be taking on distribution duties. This is good news in the sense that some have feared the decision to use rival, less popular carrier Sprint would undermine Pre sales. This way, Palm seems to have all of its bases covered, giving the new webOS a better chance of picking up a decent number of applications.
Link: Palm
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