Palm’s Eos has been the surprise leak of the day, with details about the rumored smartphone spilling out across the net. Although the handset is nowhere near official, there’s enough detail to at least compare and contrast the Eos with the Pre. It seems clear that the Eos is aiming to take the spot currently held by the Palm Centro, at the entry-level point of the market; that’s proved a cash-cow for the company, and it’s unsurprising that they’d want to continue to occupy it with another, up-to-date device that could borrow some of the Pre’s sheen.
Likely to be a key marketing point for the Eos is its dimensions, and it’s certainly a compact device. The thickness - or lack of - is particularly impressive, especially when you contrast it to the Centro or even the Pre, but it’s also a relatively narrow handset. The payoff to that size reduction is in screen and keyboard size. Where the Pre has a 3.2-inch touchscreen, already critiqued by many for being smaller than that found on the iPhone 3G, the Eos is tipped to have a 2.63-inch touchscreen, running at just 320 x 400. The QWERTY keyboard will also be smaller, to fit into the minimal lower section.
The single render we’ve seen so far would suggest that Palm have squeezed a gesture area in-between the keyboard and the display. As on the Pre, this won’t be for softkeys but as a launch-point for the context menus and shortcuts in webOS, the capacitive panel stretching below the Eos’ LCD display and allowing for touch recognition in that central portion. Similarly, the chromed home key is also present as on the Pre, likely to perform the same, predictable single function of taking the user back to square one.
Where the phones differ is in their connectivity and storage. The Pre - at least in its first US form - is a CDMA phone on Sprint’s network, supporting EVDO Rev.A for its high-speed data, while the Eos is a GSM device (as the Pre will be in Europe) that’s expected to use AT&T’s HSDPA 3G network. WWAN speeds will vary more as a function of carrier coverage than they will individual phone technology, but where the Pre does edge ahead is in capacity: the Eos has just half of the flash storage, 4GB. This might, though, be enough for the entry-level market it’s aimed at: many buyers of the Centro will never have slotted in a microSD card, leaving them with at most 128MB of integrated memory.
Another obvious difference is the absence of WiFi in the Eos. This, again, fits in with the Centro pattern, and is an example of how Palm are looking to distinguish the Pre and the Eos by their “business” style features. We’re thinking, though, that with the rise in home WiFi connections and café hotspots, more people will miss WiFi on the Eos than did on the Centro.
We’re also wondering how Canon might react to a smartphone using the same name as in recent years has come to be associated with their DSLRs. Of course, a similar issue affected the iPhone when that was first announced, resulting in a usage agreement between Apple and Cisco.
Finally, we have questions about where the specifications and render of the Palm Eos came from. Given one source has already suggested that Palm is acting cautiously with the smartphone, hoping to see how successful the Pre and webOS are before publicly announcing their second model, is it too much of a stretch to wonder whether the company themselves released the details to Engadget? We’re unlikely to get a confession from the company - who are currently sitting pretty with Sprint, a carrier that has a lot to lose if would-be Pre buyers decide to wait for the Eos on AT&T - but it would certainly lay the foundations for any users unwilling to sign up to the CDMA network.