O2 gets Palm phones on May 28

AFTER A TURBULENT YEAR Palm is finally getting back to the business of selling smartphones by releasing the Palm Pre Plus and the Palm Pixi exclusively on O2.

These will be the first Palm devices released in the UK after the company's purchase by HP earlier this year for $1.2 billion.

The previous O2-only device, the Palm Pre, was originally tipped to be an Iphone beater, but got nowhere near that thanks to fair to middling reviews and more recently the influx of better Android phones.

The Palm Pre Plus is essentially the same phone as the Palm Pre, but with a few hardware differences. It will have 16GB of storage, more RAM and a slightly improved slider keyboard. There also will be no front button, as that will be replaced with a touch-sensitive one on the screen.

The Palm Pixi is smaller and less powerful but has the same WebOS system, and is aimed at first-time smartphone buyers.

It difficult to say what kind of impact these phones will have, considering that Palm has already been bought up by HP and changes are likely to be made in the future. The Palm Pre, although it was hyped to the max, didn't exactly set the world on fire.

Palm is also faced with having to compete with the popular Android devices, with HTC's line of smartphones making a huge splash. Meanwhile Apple's next-generation Iphone will come out in June.

So at the moment, we suspect that Palm doesn't really have a lot of hope, but it might surprise us. µ