The top of the Touchstone has a strong magnet it, so all you need to do is place the phone on top of the charger and it should stay put and start charging. It's not perfect, though. You'll need to make sure you align the Pre and the charger correctly--it won't charge horizontally, and there's a specific section of the back that needs to make contact. And, of course, it goes without saying that you probably shouldn't slap a hard drive or your credit cards near the Touchstone, given the magnet.

Those minor complications mean that using the Touchstone is about as difficult as plugging the iPhone into a dock--which is to say, not very hard in either case. But it is pretty cool, nonetheless, so if you don't mind shelling out extra money to look futuristic, go nuts. For most people, using the included AC adapter or plugging the USB cable into a computer will be sufficient.

The good, the bad, the ugly

I could run down every single feature the Pre has, but as several other venues have taken the time to do that, let me focus on a few specific things that the device does well and a few it does poorly. For the most part, the feature list of the Pre is pretty close to the iPhone and the G1. But there are some places where I found the Pre to offer functions that the iPhone did not, and vice versa.

The Pre's mail client is pretty similar to the iPhone's, but it adds in a couple of features I've been longing for on the iPhone. For one thing, if you have multiple e-mail accounts, you can choose to display a unified inbox that collects the new mail for all of those accounts into one. You still have the individual inboxes for each account as well, but if you just want to skim all the mail you've recently received, it's easy to do so. The mail client also allows you to flag messages you might want to go back later and it provides a single mailbox that lets you easily view flagged messages in all your accounts. Even better, the flag-state syncs to your other clients, so when I looked later, the same messages were flagged in Mail on my MacBook.

I did run into one major problem with the mail program, however: despite much playing with configurations, I could not get it to talk to my work e-mail account, which uses an IMAP server based on Notes. I added several other accounts, including Gmail, MobileMe, and a personal IMAP account, all with no problems.