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If you’ve been rooting for Palm, they’ve finally delivered with the Palm Pre.  Designed not only to compete in today’s crowded smartphone market, but Palm has done what so many of us hoped: go beyond what is out there today.  The Palm Pre, for me, brings back the wonderlust of the first Handspring Treo and opens a path around the iPhone I was starting to believe didn’t exist.  Palm is back, here is why:

Pre has a breakthrough interface and hardware design that makes it the most integrated and user-friendly phone for mobile users. Featuring a smooth, rounded ergonomic design and a physical keyboard that slides out only when needed, Pre is engineered to feel natural in the hand and comfortably small in the pocket. When closed, the phone is ideal for phone calls, web browsing, music, photos and videos; when open, Pre is optimized for email and text messaging. With its curved slider and gesture-controlled touch interface, Pre fuses exquisite design with the revolutionary webOS software for fast access to anything on the device or web. It’s an instinctive user experience that seems to anticipate your needs.

Watching the press conference, the phone looks very responsive and very iPhone-like in elegance.  The screen interacts with you, not just responds.  While buttons are kept to a minimum, except in the slide out full qwerty keyboard, gestures bring back full functionality.  Applications function in the background and selecting them in their “card” view looks intuitive.

For guts, the phone has all the latest acronyms and buzz words: GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Evdo, HSDPA, 8GB of storage, 3.1” touch screen, accelerometer, 3mp camera, Micro USB connector with USB 2.0 speeds and much more. 

Pre will support a variety of differentiated on-device Sprint services, including Sprint TV(R), offering an extensive selection of live and on-demand programming. Sprint Navigation provides GPS-enabled audio and visual turn-by-turn driving directions, one-click traffic rerouting and more than 10 million local listings. Sprint also offers more than a dozen streaming-radio applications, including Sprint Radio with more than 150 channels.

The phone will launch on Sprint exclusively though we hear an unlocked GSM version will be out at somepoint.  Palm stressed they are still working on this phone but promised it in the first half of this year.

Company site [Palm]