According to the latest news on the Web, Palm's next-generation Pre mobile phone is reported to come with another interesting feature that would make it a little more valuable than Nokia's smartphones or even Apple's iPhone. What we are talking about is the Pre's capability to take picture after picture with its 3 megapixel camera.

The handset allows for the pictures to be taken either using the onscreen shutter, or the QWERTY’s spacebar key. In addition to that, it can snap photos fast enough to capture stills so as to be able to create stop motion animation of the subject. This would be an impressive feature of the webOS, although it hasn't been talked about until now.

As you probably already know, smartphones like the Nokia Nseries or even the iPhone would need a lot of time to snap a picture and then process it. That action could take up to almost five seconds in some cases, which means that the handset needs this time to get ready for the next shot. In between the exposures, a lot of other pictures could be lost, so having a device that can take photos faster would be a great thing.

If Palm manages to keep this feature in the webOS even after the platform is upgraded from the beta version, then Apple and Nokia would really have a strong competitor out on the market. Surely, anyone that is confident in Pre's future is entitled to be so. Palm seems to have managed to make a nice step forward with both the handset and its operating system.

The video bellow shows Peter Skillman, Palm's design VP, stressing out some of the Pre's capabilities, including the phone's user interface. Some words on the handset's design emerged on the web a while ago, and more is expected to surface in the future, so stay tuned.