Let me begin by providing you with my background so you have a basis upon which to base my reviews.  My time using (Personal Digital Assistants) PDA’s dates back to the HP OmniGo, one of the original devices.  I have owned about ten different Palm devices, along with smart phones from BlackBerry, Qualcomm, Motorola and Nokia.  I am a very heavy user of calendar, tasks, notes and contacts and have tens of thousands of entries.  In all the time I have used PDA’s I doubt I have played an hours worth of games.  I do rely on reading PDF’s, Word documents, some Excel spreadsheets, and am a heavy user of email, texting and the Internet.

Recently I tried an HTC Imagio running Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional.  I found the screen very touch and the time to complete a task dramatically longer than when using a BlackBerry device.  I couldn’t take more than about 10 days of using it as my productivity dropped and the phone just doesn’t cut it for business purposes, in my opinion.  The only positive to the device was the ability to manually set how far back I wanted the calendar to go.  Syncing with Microsoft Exchange worked as expected with no issues.

This past weekend I purchased a Palm Pre.  The form factor is very good.  Once you get the hang of the gestures, the user interface works spectacularly.  While the keyboard is small, I found it easy to use and the accuracy very good.  When typing, the Palm Pre does not automatically add a period when pressing the space bar twice as BlackBerry’s do.

The Palm Pre does not have the ability  to set items as private, so if you are synching to an Exchange Server and others have access to your calendar, everything typed into the Pre calendar will be available for all to see.  Memos and tasks do not automatically synchronize with Exchange.

While reading PDF documents on the Palm Pre works, it requires a fair amount of scrolling.

The multi-tasking is fantastic.  I had Verizon’s VZ Navigator, the calendar, Opera, the weather and several other applications running simultaneously.  Very cool.

Overall the Palm Pre is a very nice device for those who do not require a heavy duty business PDA.