Palm Pre’s Power

Palm Pre

One of the common questions surrounding the upcoming Palm Pre is in regards to the battery size and battery life Palm will be offering up in their new product. With the smart-phone market becoming ever more crowded(although still being dominated by the iPhone), the size and life of the batteries used in the phones will become of greater interest as consumers make a decision about which route to go.

Following a keynote address and a little one-on-one with the folks at Palm, Pre Central stated that while Palm is remaining fairly tight-lipped surrounding the Pre battery issue, “the size of the battery will almost surely be 1150mAh, because it uses the same battery as the Palm Centro and the Palm Treo 800w.” While current Palm users will be thrilled to hear this, as this will already leave them with back-up batteries from their previous Palm, 1150mAh isn’t exactly up to the standard of 1400mAh used on the iPhone. It will, however, carry a little more juice than the notoriously weak G1.

While on the outside it seems that this will just be another battery that needs to be charged nightly, Pre Central was quick to note that this doesn’t exactly mean that the Palm Pre battery will be a glaring weakness- “You might be thinking that’s a little small and you’re not wrong about that — but listen: we have literally no idea how the webOS handles batteries, power management, and the like. Until Palm releases the device, we’re not going to know how it performs in real life.” Here’s to hoping they exceed all of our expectations and then some.