Continuing with the "make your life easier" theme, the Pre allows you to create multiple calendars to show various facets of your life. If other people give you access to their online calendars, you can have those included as well. You can then look at these calendars individually ("When does my husband not have hockey games?") or in a combined format ("What day could the whole family go out for dinner?").

Coverage
It's probably obvious that the Pre will rely heavily on Internet access; while Palm hasn't clearly indicated this, most reviewers assume that the device will simply revert to an "airplane mode" when not in a coverage area, using only its own information and not attempting to access the Internet.

Speaking of coverage, the Pre will first be available only through Sprint, and only in the U.S. Palm has said that other carriers will get the Pre, but not sooner than ninety days after its mid-2009 release and possibly as much as six months later. No information about foreign availability has been released at this time.

The other interesting piece of information missing is the price point, both for the handheld and for the service plans. I would guess that both will be somewhat in line with the iPhone ($199 for the iPhone on a two-year contract and approximately $150 a month for an unlimited data access/phone minutes/text messaging plan) since Palm is clearly positioning the Pre as a competitor to the iPhone and to the various Blackberry handhelds as well.

Concerns
While overall I am impressed with the Pre, I do find several design decisions surprising. The Pre has only 8 GB of memory, and does not appear to accept additional memory cards. (Palm's specifications say it can use "USB mass storage", which gives me the image of a flash drive sticking out of the Pre.) While 8 GB is decent built-in memory for a handheld (my Treo has 70 MB), once you start loading it up with music, pictures, and videos it will fill quickly.

You won't be recording your own videos, though. While the Pre does have a 3 megapixel camera with LED flash, it has no voice recorder and apparently cannot record videos. For an always-connected device in the YouTube era, this seems like an odd choice.

One last thing the Pre will NOT do: run old Palm applications. The current Palm operating system has been desperately in need of revamp for years, and Palm has, wisely in my opinion, decided to leave it and its existing applications behind and move forward with the new webOS.

Since the new operating system is based on standard Internet languages and technologies, Palm says that rewriting applications will be easy. They also plan to provide tools for developers to help their users get their information out of their old applications, and there will also be some method to transfer data from the old built-in Palm applications.

[There also doesn't appear to be a Palm Desktop anymore. While the Palm Desktop has certainly gotten long-in-the-tooth, excellent synchronization with PCs has long been one of the characteristics that defined a Palm device. Given how annoying (personal opinion) it is to use an iPhone without any real desktop synchronization (and iTunes doesn't count--you can't synchronize notes, for example), we would have hoped that the Pre kept up this fine Palm tradition. Oh, well. - Ed.]