During the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the new Palm smartphone, Pre, was acclaimed by most reviewers on the internet. However, the most surprising feature of the phone is that it runs a new Palm operating system, which is called webOS.

Analysts fear that Palm will not be able to face the harsh competition in the business-class smartphones, still dominated by Windows Mobile. Still, there are other big competitors out there, such as Apple’s own iteration of a stripped down Mac OS that comes with the iPhone, Google’s open source Android OS and last, but not the least, the new version of the BlackBerry OS from Research in Motion.

It is hard to predict whether Palm will manage to market its new smartphone and operating system as reliable business-oriented products on the market. Still, analysts consider that finding a niche will enable Palm to regain its long-forgotten popularity, as these days, most mobile operating systems try to embed desktop-like functionality and hence, turning them into slow and sometimes unreliable software.

It looks like Palm did its homework, as its press releases focused on business application functionality and web-smartphone integration, rather than multimedia features and other nice-looking but sluggish applications.

Speaking about the increased functionality between the web and the Palm smartphone, the webOS SDK will allegedly come with Mojo Application Framework, a mobile iteration of the AJAX platform. If this turns out to be true, this feature will be a first in mobile platforms class.

Reviewers state that Palm will certainly get a generous share of the mobile devices market if the company will keep things simple, as they were a few years ago when the company was the leading PDA manufacturer.