Further thoughts on Palm Pre and WebOS

Ben did a great job outlining the nuts and bolts of the just-announced Palm Pre, but the story may be even bigger than Ben lets on to. Frankly, it's already clear that CES is looking at a serious "best of show" contender here.

Down but not out, Palm is back. In a matter of hours the Pre has become the talk of CES. It's as if someone looked at the iPhone, asked what its biggest problems are (namely no multitasking and no keyboard) and set out to explicitly fix them with lots of solid engineering and a little magic.

There's nothing in the core feature set of the Pre that doesn't at least match what the iPhone can do: Messaging looks simpler on the Pre, particularly with its threaded SMS/IM feature that combines all forms of short messages to a single contact into one history file. The web browser looks just as good as Safari -- complete with multitouch pinch to zoom. And the smart, automated way that Facebook and web contacts are integrated with what's on the Palm looks like an outright killer feature. Pre handles alerts and reminders with absolute aplomb, too, dropping them to the bottom of the screen much like the way Outlook nags you in Windows when you get an incoming email without distracting you from the task at hand. I love the idea.

Put simply, Pre is nothing like anything we've seen the Palm we've come to know (and likely mock), and the gadget is nothing short of a second coming for Palm. You can see the excitement in the eyes of the executives, who firmly believe -- and rightly so -- that they're on the verge of a comeback for the ages. It's hard not to share their excitement. These guys have finally created a handset that truly competes with the iPhone, something that has eluded every other cell phone maker on the planet to date.

If there's one sore spot to Pre, it's the choice of carrier. There was an audible groan in the room when it was announced that Sprint would be the exclusive U.S. carrier of the Pre at launch, and even though Sprint's CEO was on hand to assure everyone that his network was the "most dependable" in the country, consumer sentiment in the room was decidedly otherwise.

Pre also leaves us with some question marks, a few of them quite big. There's no word at all on pricing. Availability is pegged at somewhere in the first half of the year (though the hardware and software look awfully mature). And there's no talk of whether WebOS will fix some of the iPhone's other flaws, like the lack of cut & paste and support for Flash. Palm is touting its easy development platform (just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and openness, but it remains to be seen what a WebOS app store will look like. Answers will be forthcoming, I'm sure, and maybe soon: I'm hoping to get some hands-on time with a real Pre unit tomorrow morning.