In general, I found myself far more frustrated with the Pre's physical keyboard than with the iPhone's virtual keyboard. To be fair, I have been using the iPhone for two years and the Pre only for around two weeks, but I found typing even short messages--texts, IMs, Twitter updates--a slow and torturous affair.

The iPhone has a very smart auto-correction function that helps make typing a lot easier by correcting common misspellings and offering to complete your words. The Pre has a similar system, but it's far less aggressive than the iPhone's, and there's no visual prompt or feedback to let you know it's working until it actually corrects a word. There's also no auto-completion. I tried in vain to get the Pre to fix my typing, but I discovered that pretty much the only reliable way to see it in action was by typing a common contraction without the apostrophe--a move it would immediately jump to fix. The rest of the time, the Pre leaves you to the vagaries of your own spelling, for better or worse. On the upside, however, fans of typing certain expletives will find that the Pre doesn't immediately insist on censoring them.

Oh what a tangled webOS we weave

Of course, the design of the Pre is merely the appetizer before the entrée that is Palm's webOS. It's not really the Pre on which Palm is betting its company, after all, it's the totally new, built-from-the-ground-up OS. The Pre is merely the first phone to run the software, and rumors are already rampant about the next models to use it. So, how does the webOS stack up?

From my time with it, surprisingly well. While it may not have the attention to detail and design nuances that the iPhone's operating system does, it's still a friendly, eminently capable foundation on which to build a smartphone.

The webOS gets its name from the fact that it's largely built upon technologies commonly used in constructing Web sites: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That's not to say there isn't some secret sauce underlying it all, but the goal on Palm's part seems to have been to make the Pre very Web- and Internet-friendly.

Unlike with Android, Palm has set out to truly create a touchscreen-focused operating system. That's a good thing, since it gets away from the identity issues that the G1's multitude of user-interface options spawned. And Palm's done surprisingly well at it, thanks to the the very fact that they didn't spend too much time holding on to the vestiges of the outadated PalmOS on which the company made its name.