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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.