Palm Pre Keyboard

Palm Pre's Fold Out Design

One drawback of a slide-out keyboard is that you are either left with a phone that’s too bulky, or a nice thin phone with a keyboard tray that is too thin to have an effective and tactile typing experience. Where there isn’t room to push down, there is too much room for clumsy guesswork.

The Palm Pre is smaller than the iPhone in all dimmensions except one: thickness. While the iPhone measures in at 115 x 61 x 11.6 (mm), the Palm Pre measures in at 100.5 x 59.5 x 16.95 (mm). Palm appears to be attempting to avoid both thick and thin pitfalls by making the Pre a bit on the thicker side to give room for a decently useable keyboard.

Palm Pre Keyboard Close Up

To know what the Palm Pre Keyboard is like without actually having it in your hands, you have to imagine the Palm Centro or Palm Treo Pro keyboards. The buttons are about as small, maybe a tad larger, than the Palm Centro keys, but spread out more, giving room in the way that it counts the most. The buttons themselves feel pretty rubbery and are quite clicky, but sadly, not as rubbery and clicky as the Treo 700 for instance. The buttons also lie quite a bit closer to the surface of the base than those of the Treo 700 in order to make the fold-out as slim and flattering to the entire profile of the phone.

The Palm Pre keyboard features a full-on QWERTY keyboard complete with a shift button that doubles as a caps lock button when pressed twice, a secondary function button that allows you to use the additional symbols on the keys (this also locks when pressed twice, lasts for one symbol when pressed once), a backspace button, a space bar, and a return key. When dialing a phone number while the Palm Pre is in phone mode, the orange numbered keys are used.

Palm Pre Keyboard vs. the iPhone Keyboard

The iPhone keyboard uses a visual representation of a QWERTY and the touchscreen interface while the Palm Pre uses a real tactile keyboard interface. There are obvious advantages to having a real keyboard which allows you to intuitively feel that you are pressing the correct key, while the touchscreen approach leaves guesswork unless your finger is the shape and size of a stylus. So unless you are either part avian or don’t send very many text messages off, the Palm Pre keyboard will often be more efficient.

The iPhone’s big plus is a significantly larger touchscreen since there doesn’t logistically need to have any moving parts. So if you’re wondering about iPhone vs. Palm Pre, the real question is, how much do you type vs. how much do you value touchscreen real estate?