I hate it when new cellphones come out.  Even if I'm happy with the one I already own, I inevitably lust after whatever's new, eagerly rationalizing the extra costs involved, and at some points in the past, even considered owning two phones (and on two occasions, actually did.)  Which is, like poodles and most vacations to Vegas, wasteful yet entertaining.

As such, here begins a new chapter in my endless gadgetry novel... the Palm Pre.  I'm seriously wondering whether Apple/AT&T is going to lose some customers over this little beauty... there's a lot that it does that's really tempting.  Here's some of the reasons why I (and probably others) would consider defecting to the Palm-side...

Multitasking

Duh!  I could multitask on an old Windows 95 computer, why can't I do it on my iPhone?  The Pre allows you to have multiple apps open, drag stuff between each, have more than one browser window open, etc.  This is a long missed feature in the iPrecious and is not to be underestimated.

A Real Keyboard

Being a big guy, I'm somewhat ham-fisted at times.  I've gotten pretty nimble with the iPhone's not-keyboard, but I still type up my fair share of "Eat up Martha's" from time to time, and it's annoying.  I recently unearthed some old gadgets to sell on the 'Bay, and realized how much I miss a hard keyboard.

Better Notifications

This sounds trivial, but it's not.  I have a lot of calendar entries that will pop up on my iPhone from time to time in addition to text messages, voicemails, etc.  The iPhone does a crappy job of organizing these on screen, truncating them and lumping them all together.  The Palm's solution is much more elegant, displaying them in neatly organized categories on your dashboard.

Conclusions

Well, just when you thought Apple was on top of their game, longtime favorite Palm comes out with this gorgeous phone with an all-new OS that's already knocking geek-socks off around the world.  True, the iPhone features much of the functionality of the Pre, but Palm is beating Apple to the punch on a few key features... which will easily be enough for iPhone lovers to migrate.

I'm still a bit married to my iLove and MobileMe (not to mention that I have, like, 1 year and 10 months left on my new contract since I just upgraded to 3G) but I didn't think that something would come along that would cause me to question my loyalty quite this soon.