Now many of you are probably surprised to hear that I’ve been a Mac guy for a little over 6 months now, and what a Mac guy I’ve become.  I’ve got the Macbook (the white one, I still can’t be bothered to drop $2700 on a laptop), the iPhone, I even have the bluetooth keyboard and mouse so I can hook my macbook up to a monitor and use it like a desktop.  Hell, I even have the Apple TV… so believe me when I say that I’ve kind of become my worst nightmare: a proprietary software using Mac geek… so believe me when I say that I love my iPhone.  The iPhone is actually what prompted all of this Apple insanity.

Imagine my surprise this morning when I open Mail.app and see the Palm Pre.  If you haven’t seen it, take a peek over here: http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/

Many of you also know that I have a history with Palm devices.  Particularly with GNU/Linux use, until the release of the more recent Android and Nokia GNU/Linux friendly devices, Palm was pretty much the best choice for smart phone for non-Windows and non-Mac users (in my opinion).  Now, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Palm for some time because their devices are ugly, they don’t always work that well, their performance is crap, and they don’t do a very good job of working with the Free Software community to keep the sync software up-to-date… but who does, right?

I’m not saying all of my beefs with Palm are gone, matter of fact I’m still skeptical about how cool this Pre device might be (I HATE SLIDE-OUT KEYBOARDS), but I don’t think that there’s any denying that this device looks sweet.  Let’s face it, the screen-shots are sexy, they show colorful software that looks functional, simple, and shiny.  It’s vaguely reminiscent of our friend, the iPhone.  This device is using several new things that Palm seems very proud of: Palm WebOS, Palm Mojo Framework, and Palm Synergy (their new sync tool presumably).  It looks like a vast improvement on the Centro for sure, but as I said, I’m skeptical about the prospect of iPhone competition.

I dig the idea of iPhone competition, I certainly don’t think the iPhone is the end-all of mobile devices… there are some problems such as a severely bluetooth functionality, a lack of MMS, no video recording, no multi-tasking, no instant messenger support other than a handful of App Store programs which aren’t as good at IM as they could be; there are problems with the iPhone.  There are a couple reasons why I think that I’ll still be an iPhone user for a while: iPhone syncs with OSX seamlessly, and wirelessly if you have Mobile Me, iPhone is all one device and there is no slide-out keyboard (I HATE SLIDE-OUT KEYBOARDS), and the variety of neat applications on the iPhone is just astounding.

My hat, however, is off to the folks at Palm.  They have crafted what looks like a sexy device–though I still hate slide-out keyboards–and the software shown in the screen-shots also looks pretty sexy.  I just hope that they’ve removed the scourge of the Palm Desktop software and the Palm Hotsync software which has been the cause of much weeping and gnashing of teeth for me over the last decade.