HP announces the UK launch of the Palm Pre 2, available on November 15

Today, HP announced the UK launch of the Palm Pre 2 that's set to be released on November 15 for £399 ($640). Now under the HP brand and with the new Palm OS on board – webOS 2.0 – the Palm Pre 2 will try to succeed where its predecessor fell short. We all remember that when the original Palm Pre was released in early 2009, a lot of people thought that this is the iPhone-killer and that the Palm Pre is destined for dominance in the mobile market. As history shows, things turned out to be rather different, so let take a look at the Palm Pre 2.

It's set to be powered with the new webOS 2.0, that has all the goodies Palm promised – like true multitasking, Just Type and Adobe Flash Player 10.1 beta – along with some other useful features like Quickoffice for webOS 2.0, Text Assist and the webOS browser.

In terms of hardware, it packs 1GHz processor, physical QWERTY, Gorilla Glass display and 16GB internal memory, but to be absolutely honest, we are less than impressed with its 3.1-inch screen with a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels, not to mention the 5MP camera that's lacking autofocus. After all, the Palm Pre 2 is a flagship device, but it's kind of hard to imagine that it would beat the competition – like the two Motorola DROIDs (DROID 2 Globaland DROID Pro) or Samsung Continuum – but that's only our opinion. In the States, the handset is scheduled for release in Q4 and its US carrier is Verizon.

source: HP