Today at CES, Palm, Inc., announced the Palm Pre smartphone, an upcoming device which features a completely new mobile operating system called webOS. First impressions are powerful things, and I must say this one looks like a winner.

Of course, the proof of the smartphone is in the using, and we won’t be able to take the Pre for a test drive until it’s released sometime in Q2.  On paper, however, the Palm Pre is a jaw-dropper: a TI3 OMAP processor, 8GB of flash storage, EV-DO Rev. A, a sliding QWERTY keyboard, a 320 x 480 3.1-inch multi-touch display, GPS, 3MP digital camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth… and even a wireless charger featuring Touchstone wireless conductive technology.

As you can see, the new webOS is clearly a giant leap forward for Palm as the Palm OS is somewhere between old and ancient.  We don’t have a great many details on this new OS, but what we do know based on the Palm announcement is that it it relies heavily on Web technologies such as CSS, XHTML and JavaScript.