The headphone jack is also stuck in back of the opened slider, so beware if you have an L-shaped plug--you'll have to orient it correctly before sliding the unit open, else the slide action might knock the headphone plug loose.

Since the Pre is slightly tapered at both ends, the point at which the display slider and the rear assembly intersect when the unit is in its opened form are not quite even. Unfortunately, this is also where the volume controls reside while the unit's open, which makes using those controls annoying--and the edges of the opened unit are sharp, too.

That aspect of the Pre's construction is worth commenting on. While I didn't slice any cheese with it, I did agree with the assessment that the edges around the keyboard feel particularly sharp. You're not going to cut yourself on them, to be sure, but should you end up with the edges pressed against your skin, it's often uncomfortable. With the exception of the Center button, all of the other physical controls--the power button, volume controls, and ring/silent switch--feel loose and cheap. As a whole, the unit gives the impression of being a kid's toy. The slide action is all right, but it lacks the pleasing ka-chunk feeling of the T-Mobile G1's slider.

The phone is also clearly not designed for one-handed operation in its opened state. Given the position your hand is likely in when you slide the unit open--with the thumb pressed on the middle of the display in order to push it upwards--the screen display slides away from your hand. This means that your thumb can't reach the top of the touchscreen any more. That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the Pre places several controls in the top right and left corners of the display. In the end, this means that every time you slide the phone open you'll either have to change your grip so you can reach all parts of the display--which means you'll have to change it back when you want to type--or you'll have to use two hands.

And then there's the keyboard.

Keys to the kingdom

The question of physical versus virtual keyboards is one of the Mac-versus-PC debate of the smartphone niche. To hear Palm tell it, users everywhere are demanding physical keyboards. It's true that physical keyboards hold some advantages over the virtual keyboard popularized by the iPhone: the tactile feedback of actually pressing a key, for example. However, the more I used it, the more it became clear to me that the thumb keyboard will eventually be considered a kludge, a holdover, a vestigial input method--an evolutionary road not taken.