And that forgetfulness can come at a price. While the Pre usually handles multiple tasks pretty well, if you start loading it up with processor-intensive jobs (media playback, GPS directions, etc.), then the whole system starts to take a hit. More than once I found that using a number of other apps while playing music in the background would cause the music to skip, a problem I've encountered only infrequently on the iPhone. Battery life also takes a hit, especially when using features like the GPS, which consume a lot of power. Playing music and using the GPS on a not too long car trip one Saturday saw me running out of battery well before I returned home.

Look at me, look at me

The ability to run multiple apps brings with it an issue of how to handle all these multiple channels of information. What if you get an e-mail while having an instant message conversation, or what if you want to pause your music while browsing the Web? Like the iPhone, the Pre allows for notifications of what's happening in other apps, and I actually found myself liking its implementation better than the iPhone's.

When a notification comes in, the bottom of the card you're looking at slides up, and an icon and message appears below it. For example, you might get a notice of an e-mail message you just received: the icon displays an envelope icon badged with the number of unread messages, along with the sender and subject line of the most recent message. If you want to look at the message, tap it and the Pre will take you to the Mail client and clear the notification. If you're playing music, a bar at the bottom tells you the name of the current track and the artist, along with previous track, play/pause, and next track controls.

If you don't tap the notification, then after a few moments, it shrinks down and just becomes a small icon in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen; you can tap it to expand the notification. In the expanded view, you can slide notifications off the screen to dismiss them. Overall, it's simple, efficient, and above all, non-disruptive. Contrast that with the iPhone's pop-up notifications, which demand your immediate and complete attention.

You've got the touch

Touch interfaces are a hit-or-miss affair; the Pre's is a solid double. Many of the motions the iPhone introduced to the world--pinch to zoom, swipe to delete--are here, at least in some form. Some might cry foul and accuse the Pre of stealing the iPhone's mojo, but without a legal court case to back that up, I'd argue more that the iPhone's gestures have become conventional, part of a tactile "language" that the Pre has adopted.