On the whole I was hugely disappointed by the new phones at MWC. Mostly trying to copy the iPhone and not doing a terribly good job. Worst were the much hyped Samsung Omnia and Beat and LG’s KM900 and KC910i. The touch screens were not responsive and UI’s lacking true user friendliness and not a patch on the iPhone. Notably Apple (and Google) were not at the show and it was looking like they didn’t need to be as noone was close to rivaling them.

Then things started to look up, the garmin asus nuvifone G60 had a great touch screen and a clean clear UI. LBS-centric with all the LBS features you would expect plus “Ciao”, a find my friends near me application that is becoming more common.

Then we found the almost hidden Android device the HTC Magic. Even though it had been announce this week by Vodafone, the Vodafone stand didn’t seem slightly unnerved that they didn’t have the device to show. On the HTC stand huge fanfare around the Touch and Diamond, Windows Mobile and pretty poor comparatively. Two HTC guys in plain clothes had the Magic who we tracked down. Very nice device, great touch screen, Android working well. The other Android device that looked good from a distance was the Huawei. When we asked if we could touch it the Huawei guy just laughed.

Then we got to see the Palm Pre. It was meant to be press only and it took us two attempts to blag our way in but it was definitely worth it! Ed Colligan, president and chief executive of Palm, said the platform was brand new, created for the Internet age, from the ground up. It’s aimed at “redefining the center of your access point to the Net.” Sounds poncy but I think they have got it just right.

Two years in development, fabulous touch screen, fast hardware and amazingly well thought out UI with productivity written all over it. Highlights:

Palm Pre draggable task/app bar

• magnetic inductive charger
• area around the screen is touch as well and used for device navigation and the browser
• browser is webkit
• 3.1 inch multitap screen, very responsive (I hear Apple are thinking of claiming IP over multi tap and may go after Palm)
• ambient light sensor adjusts the screen brightness to save battery,
• new ‘card’ concept where everything is a card, whcih helps with multi tasking, e.g. new email is a card, browser windows are cards and it’s easy to flip between them
• GPS + Google maps
• Wi Fi
• styled like a polished pebble with a flip out portrait oriented keyboard, keys were sort of sticky which really helped typing with the small keys
• 8 Gig internal storage (can’t expand)
• 3mpx camera
• Texas Instruments 3430 processor
• will automatically go to speaker phone if you take it away from your ear
• the big thing re the UI is “Synergy”, this brings all sorts of things together in one view but manages to not get messy, e.g. multiple inboxes, calendars, contacts. It worked really well, would de-duplicate and also would notice, for example, if a contact changed their facebook phone number and would then update the phones contact list
• full phone search e.g. if type in matt would get shown contact details, any SMS’s, emails etc.,
• new XML SDK and there will be a free O’Reilly developers book
• there will be an app store
• it’s so well thought out it will rotate photo’s 180 degrees if tilting the phone to show someone else

A great end to MWC and as we finished talking to the Palm guy they wheeled out the wine, which was also the best we’d had at the show.