Two weeks ago I went down to the local Sprint store to check out the new Palm Pre.  I had already spent the past few days looking up info on the unit and the morning reading the in depth Engadget’s in depth review.  I held the tethered unit in my hands and aside from the pull of the cable, it felt really nice, looked really nice, I had to get one.

I have just come off using a HTC Touch Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro.  Before that I have a Motorola Q, running Windows Mobile 5.0, a non-touch screen device.  So my last two phones had been Windows based and well, as much as I ever tried to get excited about them, they have more or less left me feeling like it just wasn’t working right.  I won’t go into details as I‘m not here today to bash an OS. in fact, just the opposite.  But I will say being a long time Sprint slave, I would have a much different post more or less about the iPhone 3G had I been on AT&T.

Enter the Palm Pre running WebOS.  Exclusive on Sprint in the US as a CDMA phone running at 3G speeds.  This by my opinion (and I gather others) is the first real contender to the iPhone.  Running at about $300.00 with a $100 mail in rebate leaves you walking out the door with one (plus taxes and other surcharges, duh).  I walked out with mine and it became a hard experience to put it down.  I immediately put the instruction manual away as if this are hard enough I needed a manual, I would have been disappointed.

Out of the box the unit has you get a Palm Pre, a USB micro cable for sync and charging, a wall charger with a USB port for the cable, and a nifty suede pocket to put the unit in when it’s cohabitating in a purse, bag or pocket.  The wall charger alone to me looks like a perfect travel charger for all your USB charging devices.  The cable is also made for travel with it’s own cord wrap, not something you usually see.  Unfortunately that nifty Touchstone wireless charger is in a separate box with it’s own price tag.  CNETtv has a nice unboxing video if you want to check it out.

Playing with the OS was a dream.  The capacitive touch screen has made me look at the touch on my Archos 5 and my past HTC touch pro with disdain.  It’s feather sensitive yet in my pocket had a much less tendency to ‘butt dial’.  The unit is slick, and made to store most of your data in the ‘cloud’.  It comes with a sync to Google for mail, calendar, and contacts.  Contacts and calendar can also be synced from Facebook (would have been a nice touch to add Facebook mail and chat too.  Synergy on the Palm Pre has done something only Windows Mobile fan boys can dream of, letting you sync with multiple Exchange Servers, letting you have your work connection, home connection, and what not.  It keeps your contacts separate, but if it finds enough similarities, it merges them visually on the contacts screen.  Because if you have Joe Smith from work, and he’s a friend from Facebook and even your buddy so you have his mobile and email info in Gmail, you still only see him once in all your apps.  How slick is that?

Unlike past PalmOS units, you are not greeted with a Launcher, but whatever last app you had open.  The Launcher can be accessed at any time by selecting it when you minimize your current app or from the ‘wave’ menu, a menu you can activate over the current app by slowly dragging a finger from off the screen at the bottom middle up onto the screen.  Each app is called a ‘card’, and an app can have more than one card visible.  Switching cards is as simple as pressing the little button at the bottom and scrolling left/right to find the card you want.  Card can be reordered by tapping below a minimized card and then dragging the card out of the pile and putting it at another position.

The App Catalog is a little disappointing compared to the monster on the iPhone, but being only around for a few months, it’s understandable.  A few must have apps for me now are Evernote, Tweed, Pandora, Linkedin, and Fandango.  Another is ‘fileCoaster’, the homebrew App Catalog from PreCentral.net, more on that later.  Of the ‘must have’ list, I believe I’ve used Pandora the most.  Having an unlimited access to Pandora along with unlimited bandwidth has left my Archos 5 idle during my work day.

So far, every day with this phone is that much better.  Time will be the true test.  I know when I got my Moto Q I was a little excited, but battery life left me quickly disgruntled.  Also lack of basic MMS support has been very common amongst Sprint Smart Phones.  This persisted on my HTC Touch Pro which had an extension to allow MMS as a separate mailbox.  The mailbox was unusably slow which led to me almost never using it.  The Pre, solved all that.  Finally I had a useable way to quickly send images to others. 

PreCentral.net has created a hub for home brew apps.  Their installation instructions are pretty straightforward, and I had their fileCoaster app installed in about 15 minutes.  From there we have access to download and install anything from their catalog is as simple as the Palm Pre App Catalog.  I have installed already a Google Voice dialer (gDial Pro), drPodder, Music (remix), Shoutcast and FriendsFlow (facebook app). 

All in all, this phone has been my answer to most of my frustrations in the past.  Maybe in the n3ext 3 months I may change my tune, but right now, ‘I love my phone.’  iPhone, maybe I’d have given you a chance, but with it being locked onto AT&T and not CDMA, there wasn’t much of a chance of us meeting.

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