For European consumers, the Palm Pre has been a long time coming. Announced – in CDMA form – back in January 2009, with Palm coyly dancing around the matter of a GSM version until its Sprint launch took place in June, the smartphone has even gained a sibling (in the shape of the Palm Pixi) before those across the Atlantic have had a chance to play with the original. That’s all finally changing this month, with carrier O2 exclusively offering the Pre in the UK and Ireland from October 16th and Germany from October 13th. Has time dulled the Pre’s appeal? SlashGear have been testing out the GSM Palm Pre; check out our full review after the cut.

In terms of hardware, the O2 Pre is almost exactly the same as the Sprint Pre we reviewed back in June. That means you get the same 3.1-inch 320 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 3-megapixel fixed-focus camera and both Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and WiFi b/g. Where they differ is in the 3G connectivity; while Sprint’s Pre uses EVDO Rev.A for its high-speed mobile browsing, the O2 version has UMTS/HSPA with EDGE/GSM support.

What the GSM Pre won’t have, at least initially, is the latest version of webOS. For manufacturing deadline reasons, Palm and O2 will ship the Pre with webOS 1.1.3, a few updates behind the Sprint CDMA model. According to Palm, the eventual aim is “parity” between the two devices, but that won’t come until later on in 2009.

There’s also, despite it being ten months since the Pre made its surprise debut at CES in January, no microSD memory card slot; the handset still makes do with 8GB of onboard storage, of which around 7GB is available to the user. That seemed short-sighted in January, miserly in June and now, in October, feels downright unacceptable. When Apple’s iPhone 3GS offers 16GB as a baseline, and other platforms – Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian – use microSD cards for up to 32GB of swappable storage, for Palm to limit their flagship device in this way seems ridiculous.

The physical design is still a mixed bag, with what feel like high-quality plastics let down in places by unduly sharp edges to the keyboard-slide lip and elsewhere at the split-point. While the Pre opens with a satisfying click, there’s side-to-side wobble in the screen hinge which is disappointing. As for the QWERTY keyboard itself, that’s provoked different responses; the keys are hard rubber and are reasonably spaced given the limitations of the hardware – the Pre is a surprisingly compact handset – but we don’t feel they offer a significant knock-out blow over and above an on-screen keyboard.

Where the Pre really shines is in its software, and webOS has proved an ongoing pleasure in its harmonious use of gestures and multitouch. The central concept is that open applications are “cards” splayed across the main display, and which you can reshuffle by dragging them into new orders, or dismiss by flicking them up off the top of the screen. New alerts are quietly pushed up at the bottom of the display in the form of tiny icons – an envelope for new email, a speech bubble for an SMS message, etc – and are then previewed when you tap on that icon; a further tap opens the message, while a sideways flick dismisses it.

These sideways flicks also feature in the messaging inboxes, used to delete unwanted emails and texts. We’ve been impressed by how quickly it’s possible to triage a hectic inbox on the Pre, in many cases without even needing to open most messages. As well as showing sender, subject and part of the first line by default, you can also pinch-zoom on an individual message to see a bigger preview, even with HTML formatting maintained. Unlike in loading new cards, which can be punctuated by the occasional lag as the Pre’s CPU catches up, churning through email is generally slick and speedy; the handset supports POP and IMAP accounts, together with Exchange push-email.

The Pre’s main menu is split into two, with a quick-launch bar of four shortcuts and the menu launcher that runs along the bottom of the homescreen, and the full menu itself. The launcher can be called up by tapping and holding in the black section under the display – what Palm call the gesture area, and which has an invisible capacitive touchscreen layer – then pulling up, at which point the launcher floats above the active card. In the center of the gesture area is a small silver stud (illuminated when new messages arrive) which takes you back to the card view. We covered more of the basics of webOS navigation back in our original Pre review, and they haven’t changed in this new GSM version.

Something else that hasn’t changed – unfortunately – is the accuracy demands of webOS, and we’ve been caught out a few times when taps fail to be recognised. The Pre’s small, round function buttons, such as the trash or reply controls, are particularly prone to this, as is the small drop-down menu button in the top left-hand corner of the display.

Back at launch, Palm made much of their universal search and Synergy on the Pre, two areas where rival platforms have quickly caught up. Despite the name, universal search isn’t quite all-encompassing; start typing from the homescreen and it will pull up apps and contacts, then offer Google, Google Maps, Wikipedia and Twitter search, but in 1.1.3 there’s no email or calendar searches. As for Synergy, this pulls together Facebook, Exchange, Google Contacts and other sources of contact-data and harmonises them into a single address book; it works reasonably well, though as with any data-convergence system it depends on how many contacts you have in each source. Meanwhile calendars are also combined, intelligently showing empty space for new appointments; however you still can’t add a single new entry to multiple calendars at once.