The day I unboxed my Pre, I was wowed with some of its features. Aside from the iPhone, no other device had shown me a satisfying mobile web experience. The Pre came through on that like a champ. Pages load quickly, they look nice, and navigation is completely intuitve. Getting contacts onto a new phone was always a hassle. With the Pre's sync to Gmail and Facebook, I not only had a full address book in mere minutes, I even got pictures with my contacts. (Exchange support is there too, for you corporate users.) Getting software updates on previous devices was always a tedious endevour. The Pre's OTA updating couldn't be easier. Previous touch screens were always frustrating to me. The Pre's is responsive, accurate, and a pleasure to use. The included free nav software, while not quite in the same league as a dedicated TomTom unit, is both reliable and easy to use. I never had any faith in streaming content to a mobile device, but the first time I fired up Pandora and drove all over town without a single drop, pop, or hiccup, I was blown away. And the UI... the UI manages to be somewhat novel with it's card model yet remains completely intuitive. All around, it's just a pleasure to interact with it.

On the hardware side, the actual build quality could be a little better. I would have liked to have seen a glass screen instead of plastic. It feels like it would scratch easily, but that could just be my perception. Since I immediately put an Invisishield skin over it, I can't say how durable the screen really is on its own. Everything about the device "feels" a little fragile. Although, after 6 months, I haven't had a single hardware problem. Inside, it's got all the expected radios (3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS), an accelerometer (but no compass), and a dedicated GPU.

The real hardware win is the TouchStone wireless charger. It's a small disc that plugs into the wall through a detachable micro USB cable. All you do to charge is lay the phone down on it. Magnets lock the phone into place and pass the charge through to the battery via induction. It might seem a small thing, but the charger really changes the whole experience of the phone. All smartphones suffer inadequate battery life, and the Pre is no exception. However, since charging is so convenient, it never ends up being a problem. The design of the charger encourages me to always have the phone on it. As an unintended consequence, since the phone has a "home", I'm never doing the "where's my phone" dance when it rings at the house.

But for all those things that it excelled at (plus multitasking and a decent camera), it was sorely lacking in both apps and customization.

Fortunately, the thing is a tinkerer's dream. The OS is easily modifiable, and there's a thriving homebrew community pushing out all kinds of tweaks and enhancements. Within a few months, thanks to the homebrew community, all of my gripes about 'this menu is laid out wrong' or 'there should be a button that does x' had been resolved. Best of all, Palm is openly embracing that community. I genuinely appreciate doing business with a company that doesn't treat me like some kind of deviant just because I have a different idea about how I want to use the device they made.

On the app front, things are picking up. At the time of this writing, there are about 1,100 available, and at least 100 of those are actually useful. If you're curious whether there's a specific app that you would need, both the official app catalog and the homebrew catalog can be browsed sans phone over at PreCentral.net. At CES 2010, Palm brought us a big step forward by unveiling support for 3D gaming. I never thought I would have any interest in gaming on a phone. Then I played Need For Speed on my Pre. Very enjoyable. They also confirmed that the Adobe Flash plug in is expected to be available soon and that video recording would be coming in a February update.

For all the progress that has been made, there are still some gaping holes to fill. PIM is nowhere near as robust as it was back in the PalmOS days. The SDK does not allow access to the mic yet, so there are no voice command apps. Even basic voice dialing is non-existant. The podcatching app is languishing in beta while the developer waits for Palm to tiddy some things up in WebOS. You can easily add media to the device since it acts like a USB drive when you plug it into a computer, but if you want any advanced content management like playlist sync or folder sync, you have to wade through third party solutions that generically work with the Pre but clearly were not specifically designed for the Pre. It has codecs for all of the popular audio formats, but it strangely has trouble scrubbing (fast forwarding and rewinding) through certain files. As nice as the TouchStone is on its own, it would be so much better if it were integrated into things like speaker docs or dashboard mounts. Not a word yet on that front. It streams music to my Bluetooth headset beautifully, but it's spotty at best at reacting to the track advance and pause buttons on that headset.

The world of smartphones is about compromises these days. There is no clear cut superior phone. The iPhone is sleek, has great accessories, and has an app for just about anything, but the total cost of ownership is incredibly high, you get locked into AT&T and Apple's walled garden, and you suffer Apple's planned obsolesence model. The Nexus One has all that Google goodness baked in, is highly customizable, and sports that gorgeous screen, but no multitouch, no 3D gaming, and the weakest 3G network behind it. The Pre is affordable, has a great developer community around it, great hardware inside, and a very promising OS, but the app selection is adequate at best, the hardware is packaged in a mid-grade shell, and it still needs work on some of the basics.

Personally, I am exceedingly pleased with my Pre. I would buy it again in a heartbeat, but I recognize that is partially just my own tastes. Objectively speaking, I see it as a member of the upper echelon of smartphones but feel equally strong arguments could be made for purchasing any of several devices in that class.