Matt Crowley, Palm product manager, is holding a week-long Q&A session on Facebook about the company's latest device, the Pre. The discussion is being moderated by Palm Director of Online Communications and PR Services Jon Zilber. One of the most interesting answers Crowley has given until now is related to the phone’s lack of a microSD slot.

According to him, the fact that Pre does not feature an external memory slot has been a design decision, also driven by the fact that it includes enough internal memory to satisfy the user. The handset comes with 8GB of internal memory storage, which can be used right out of the box, and it is considered to be a greater advantage than external memory. Crowley also said that some people would not agree with this: “We know that not everyone will be happy, but that is one of many decisions that needs to be made and the product goals.”

“‘Design' was the highest goal on the Palm Pre project. The phone has to look and function great in the hand and up against the face on a call. The decision to include or not include expandable storage is an easy one when design is the highest priority. The physical size of the device would have been compromised if we added another physical component to Pre. Just a millimeter can seriously impact the curvature of the design in a way that minimizes the design intent. We wanted to maintain a slick curved slider design without building out too much thickness. When you look at the two parts of the product and see how thin they really are, you may be amazed that we were able to fit everything in. And yes, all the stuff does fit,” stated Crowley.

Another feature Pre will not come with, although it is present on all other Palm devices, is infrared beaming. Matt Crowley said that the decision to remove it from Pre was a rather difficult one to make, yet, given the fact that the overall IR usage is dropping, they finally agreed to make the move, as the cost of including it seemed unjustified.

“I still think there is a need for simple pairing and content sharing in a personal space. I also believe there are some really cool ways to handle similar behaviors without the use of IR. Sony did a great job with their PSP on application demo handling via WiFi. For example, some games you can send a demo version of the game via WiFi to your friend's PSP directly. To be honest, I like the "Remote" application on iPhone. I don't use it a lot, but it is a cool demo and the implementation was done really well,” Crowley stated.

The Palm chat on Facebook runs from January 21st to January 28th.