Palm Closes D7 with Pre Demo

The D Conference came to a close this afternoon with the Palm guys – Jon Rubinstein and Roger McNamee – taking the stage to talk about the upcoming launch of its Pre. The two have high hopes for the device which launches next Friday and, after seeing the demo, we do, too. The features below were highlighted on the new smartphone. The first thing the two showed was how the contact information is all pulled in from various Web sources including Google, Facebook, etc.

The OS, as we saw at CES, is based on cards. You can flip through the cards to different open tasks. Of course, we knew all of this. But we didn’t know how easy it was to get music and multimedia on the Pre. You can download over the air from Amazon.com and you can sync with iTunes. The Pre appears right in iTunes and syncs right from iTunes, just like an iPhone or iPod.

The Pre app store was also shown. You can access the app store and download over the air. A Fandango app was downloaded in less than 50 seconds. With that app can then buy tickets and it will sync with the WebOS calendar. The SDK will be rolled out for apps in the next few months.

The last thing that was shown was the universal search feature. Clicking the search icon on the toolbar anyplace on the phone allows you to search the Web and the phone. Beyond Web search you can even search services like Wikipedia, Twitter, etc.