Palmer Plays With A Pre 16

Bear with us through this, as we don't know Chinese and are relying on Google Translate for most of this.  It would appear that a user named Palmer got a chance to try out the Pre with some rather interest-peaking information.

In one thread, he shows a photo of the Pre on iFanr.com, which goes a long way to validate his other details.  Palmer then goes on to say that the Pre device that he has (a prototype maybe?) doesn't have any Chinese support.  However there does appear to be some rumbling of adding Chinese via hacking into the Pre's Linux.  Could this imply the Pre has root access? Doubtful, but stranger things have happened.

In another thread, Palmer says that it appears the battery life is only about half a day with heavy usage of video, music and internet. We pray that's wrong, but at least the Pre has a replaceable battery.  He then goes on to mention Vodafone will have a GSM version, affirming what we've suspected for a while now.  Palmer goes on to compliment the sturdiness of the Pre; after accidentally dropping the device on a concrete floor, the device stills works fine. Let's hope not all of us have to go through such measures to test build quality.

In a third thread, Palmer brings up the point that while the Pre may be optimized for one-handed navigation, some things are just out of reach of a thumb.  That's not too much of a worry, though still good to keep in mind.

One should also keep in mind that it's very possible that Palmer's device could be just a prototype, which would explain the bad battery life and lack of Chinese support.  Only time will tell.  Hopefully we'll know more details in a few days at MWC.

[The iFanr forums via Treo8 via TreoCentral forums]