Engadget published a very nice and informative in-depth review of the Palm Pre. They take a closer look at the hardware as well as the OS and the applications.

The new webOS looks like a winner, and the touchscreen seems to be incredibly sharp and clear. Reading through the review, there are some issues which stood out to me. It seems like Palm is really not utilizing the default startscreen for any kind of today agenda. So that means you will have a nearly empty startscreen with only 5 shortcut icons at the bottom. And there is no way to change that yet, the space is reserved for the cards system. Hopefully there will be the possibility for 3rd party developers to release some kind of plugins for that page, because otherwise this would be really wasted space.

Furthermore engadget states that there are some issues with the build quality of the hardware. Seems like it can’t compete with the sense of high quality hardware popular windows mobile devices like the Touch Diamond 2 provide.

But overall the new webOS and the UI is really looking great, and i like the look much more than the current Android UI. Now let’s hope that the Pre will be commercially successful, so we can get a good bunch of 3rd party apps. Those apps are the rise and fall of a new OS. And after that we should get a Palm Pre follow up, with a storage card slot soon. I would love to give the Pre a try because it’s a very interesting device, but 7gb is just not enough space for me. And i think there are many people out there who think the same.