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The biggest development here comes through the software. The latest version of web OS enables Pre and Pre Plus owners to record video, which comes better late than never. It's a very basic video camera with no choice to alter the settings or zoom.
However, it does emulate the excellent clip editing functionality from the iPhone 3GS, which enables you to easily trim the beginning and end of the clip, by dragging the in/out points to the desired time.
From there, videos can be uploaded with exceptional ease and speed to YouTube or Facebook. Once up, the phone presents you with the option to share a link to the video through Facebook, SMS or email. It captures video at VGA resolution which is fine for YouTube.
Footage is 4:3 as opposed to widescreen and is surprisingly good, with a fair amount of detail in the image. Colours can appear desaturated at times, but are vibrant in daylight. Just make sure you remember to shoot in landscape mode.
The 3-megapixel camera is deceptively good despite the lack of shooting options, or the capacity to zoom.
The touchscreen capture icon is a tad sensitive, but the mechanism is very fast. The application does take a while to open, so it's best to leave it minimised if you don't want to miss any big moments.
The lens can yield some excellent results in the right conditions, as evidenced by the shots below.
To get around the fact that the Palm Pre Plus has no shooting settings to speak off, Palm has introduced a 'revolutionary technology' called Extended Depth of Field (or EDoF), which apparently is better than an electromechanical autofocus mechanism. Depth of field is actually quite good though, keeping foreground and background largely in focus.
It's also got auto white balance and auto exposure, which basically means there's no white balance or exposure settings, but that doesn't seem to matter much.
There is an LED flash, however, and a very powerful one at that – lighting even a completely darkened room, as you can see below. There's lots of room for improvement in the camera, it's not as good as the iPhone, but better than the HTC Hero. It's certainly not of CyberShot standard, but it's good enough to justify its existence.
