What they found, says Rapid Repair cofounder Aaron Vronko, is a device on the cutting edge of smartphone technology. However, Vronko stops short of calling the Pre revolutionary, as the phone's hardware is not "light years ahead" of what rival smartphones offer.

The key feature that differentiates the Pre from other smartphones, Vronko says, is that it is the first to use Texas Instruments' OMAP 3430 processor, which runs at 600MHz and integrates several different functions, such as graphics processing, onto one single chip. The advantage to this, Vronko claims, is that the Pre can reduce the number of chips it uses in the device, thus lowering its power consumption and making its design more compact than other smartphones. To put it into perspective, Vronko notes that the OMAP 3430 processor is "almost 50% faster" than the same class of processor used in the rival Apple iPhone.

In addition to its processing capabilities, the Pre also features 256MB of memory from Elpida Memory, which Vronko says is "twice as much system memory than what's in the current iPhone."

The combination of a faster processor and larger system memory has allowed Palm to implement its that is layered to allow users to keep several applications open at once and to let them flip seamlessly between them. The Pre's main button, at the bottom center of the device, acts as an all-purpose "zoom out" button that shrinks applications in use and gives users the ability to browse through other applications.