Yes, yes, I know, we had our review back in June, but hey, that was the CDMA Sprint review. This one is the GSM O2 review of our beloved Palm Pre. Since Sprint launched the Pre on June 6th, the webOS smartphone even gained a sibling (in the shape of the Palm Pixi). And finally, our European cousins will get their Pre and webOS fix, with the UK and Ireland launch from October 16th and Germany from October 13th, and as far as we know, Spain will launch the Pre on October 14th. Our good friend Chris Davies over at SlashGear had a chance to play with the GSM Palm Pre.

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. Which is unfortunate for our European friends, but hang tight, we’ll get there.

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.

We here at MyPre differ with some of our opinions of the hardware keyboard – Chris thinks an onscreen version on rival devices is just as good – but overall the Pre made a good impression.  Check out the full review here.