Shortly after announcing the new Pre, Palm CEO Ed Colligan sat down with USA Today’s Ed Baig to discuss the handset and put webOS – Palm’s new mobile operating system – into context.  In the short video interview, which you can see after the cut, Colligan demonstrates some of the new gestures and operations you can do with the touchscreen smartphone, together with describing the newly “connected” ethos of webOS: where the center-point is the internet, rather than connecting to a desktop computer and getting all of a user’s information from that.

Colligan also reiterates the idea of the Pre being a device you can use one-handed.  Other touchscreen cellphones, he suggests, are intended to be used with both hands – one physically holding the device, the other interacting with the screen.  The Pre’s gesture area – the capacitive strip below the screen – means you can use your thumb to navigate, make calls and dismiss notifications.

The Pre’s keyboard also gets some love, with Colligan suggesting that a hardware QWERTY ‘board is “essential” for a business phone.  Palm, he claims, see the Pre neither as a business device nor a consumer one, but instead as the first phone that will organize your entire life.