Alright, now that I've had some time with it (and can now talk about it), I thought I'd give a brief review of the Palm Pre.
Bottom line - It's a very impressive phone, that on occasion left me with a little phone envy from my Touch Diamond. Like all phones, it's not without it's faults, but given that it's a first stab, I'd say Palm gave themselves plenty of room to make this into the top 2-3 phones out there.
Light and sleek, the only downside to it's physical appearance is that it's a fingerprint magnet. Otherwise, I love everything about it. It's small enough to fit in mans pocket and for having a keyboard is extremely thin (HTC should take notice with it's touch pro line).
It uses gestures very smartly to navigate around the phone, but might have missed the boat by not including a soft keyboard (touchscreen) with a hard keyboard. The good news is, the soft keyboard can always be added later and Palm should do just that. There were a couple times (like when looking for a contact) that I would have like a soft keyboard rather than sliding down the hard keyboard. If the SDK were out, this would be the first app I develpoed and sold for a dollar - I'd make enough to send a kid to college in the first week. For all the posturing I did about not missing the hard keyboard, I typed about 65% faster in my tests with the hard keyboard than with my soft keyboard. There's no more questioning that a hard keyboard is simply more efficient.
While not as powerful as my HTC Diamond for multitasking, it does handle multi-tasking much better than Windows Mobile. MS should have never let this happen, but Palm did an amzing job of combining the navigation features of the iPhone with the multitasking of the WinMo phones into one amazingly simple and fairly powerful little computer. It is so easy to switch between open applications on the Pre that I was visually upset when I got back to my WinMo phone and was switching applications. By far the best feature of the phone that most people will take for granted.
It's not without it's faults though. It's horrible with Exchange Server - there's about a 50% success rate of it configuring properly and no one has yet figured out why. Palm promises a fix soon. It worked with my server, but not with Smackette's work server, for example.
In addition, the App store is fairly light and Palm has been slow with the SDK. Most importantly is that they have been slow with the Apps for the Professionals who put Palm on the map - medical professionals. Doctors love Palm and not having the Doctor apps ready to go at launch was foolish. They have an emulator that runs the classic PalmOS to run the old apps but it's $30, and it reminds doctors of how far Palm fell behind the iPhone. Palm should subsidize the emulator until their app store has more than 18 programs ready, and really get those doctor apps to market.
It does have a lot of really cool features that are a little intircate to explain, so I'll just use one example of something built into the phone that I found most impressive. During the testing, I left the phone connected to my Exchange Server, but it's smackette's primary phone so she keeps it during the day. She was at work, but the phone knew that I had an appointment via Exchange. Using GPS, the phone realized that the owner was nowhere near the meeting location and asked if the phone should send an email to all the particiapnts of the meeting letting them know that you were running behind, or just to my assistant (who I assigned during setup unbeknownst as to why). She obviously declined because I was at the meeting, but it still displayed how much thought went in to making this phone. There are so many little things like that that explain why Palm spent so much time developing the phone.
Kudos to Palm and, welcome back.
