I really, really want an iPhone.  They are sexy and fun and intuitive, and all the cool kids have one.  But . . . AT&T’s cell coverage in San Francisco is horrid, and Sprint still has the best cell coverage in the City, so Sprint remains my carrier.

This weekend I picked up a new Palm Pre at the Sprint store near my house.  It was only $200, which isn’t bad at all (especially considering what I originally paid for the Treo).  I’ve been playing around with it as time permits.  Here are some early observations:

Likes

• It’s much smaller and lighter than my old phone.
• The screen is beautiful and bright.
• The built in camera has great resolution, and a built-in flash.
• It backs up all of your data on a server at Sprint’s headquarters.  If you lose your phone, they can issue you another one and download all of your data to the new phone, and ta-da!  Back in business.
• I can now see actual web pages, instead of the smashed-down versions I had on the Treo.  I can even zoom in and out on the pages using simple finger gestures.  Actually, I usually have to zoom in, because your average web page today looks very tiny on the screen of the Pre.
• It automatically syncs up with all of my mail accounts everywhere, and checks for new mail at intervals.  My old phone wouldn’t do this, and would often choke up and freeze if I tried to check my mail.

Dislikes

• It appears that you can’t change the paging/text chime.  The default chime is rather lame, and I’m not sure it will wake me up.  Since I rely on my cell phone to do so when I am on call for work, this could be problematic.  It’s nothing they can’t fix with an OS update; still, it seems an odd thing to exclude.
• There aren’t really any interesting applications available for it yet.  This should change going forward.  I doubt it will ever match the app library for the iPhone, though.
• It doesn’t synchronize with stand-alone Outlook.  There is a small program available that allows you to do a one-time transfer from your Outlook to your Pre, but it’s not the same as Hotsynching.
• I think having all of my phone data in a “cloud” somewhere is kind of creepy.  But I am old-fashioned, I guess.
• No more voice and video recording.  I’m sure there’ll be apps for that, but my Treo did it out of the box.