On Thursday, a new touch-screen smart phone and operating system was released by Palm Inc., which is being seen as the company’s latest effort to compete with from Research In Motion's BlackBerry and Apple Inc.'s iPhone.

The executives of Palm demonstrated their Pre at the International Consumer Electronics Show. Surprisingly, it looks quite similar to the iPhone, and has a 3.1-inch touch screen and single button on its face. The Pre that is supported with a full QWERTY keyboard that slides out from the bottom has a black body, which is slightly curved as well.

The company’s target customers for the product are from business as well as consumers league. The features of Pre are exciting as well, that includes Wi-Fi, stereo Bluetooth and GPS, as well as 8 gigabytes of storage space, a 3-megapixel camera and music and video playback.

Furthermore, a range of sensors are also included in Pre like an accelerometer so images on the screen will rotate when a user turns the device on its side.

Pre comes as a hope for Palm to re-establish itself once again, as it had lost its position due to tough competition given by rivals like RIM, Apple, HTC Corp. etc.

It has been learnt that the users can get their hands on Pre in the second half of the year, exclusively on Sprint Nextel Corp.'s wireless network. However, no information regarding the pricing is yet available.

The users would also be happy to know that Pre would be backed up Palm's new operating system, Palm webOS, which the company also debuted Thursday. This operating system aims at connecting several applications. To illustrate an example, the system will on its own synchronize contacts stored in Facebook, Gmail and Outlook, strip out duplicates and present the information in a master list.