I disagree.

The UI looks great. In fact, I think it's better than the iPhone's in many ways. The calendar, contacts feature, the merging of conversations across different platforms, and the universal search are all great, for example. It all seems super-slick.

Multitasking looks great, and it's a massive oversight in the iPhone's featureset. The fact that you can't run a MSN Messenger client or a streaming audio application in the background, for example, kind of cripples it. The fact that Apple hasn't managed to do it doesn't mean that the Pre can't, any more than the fact that Internet Explorer Mobile didn't mean that the iPhone browser was crap. The card interface in particular looks fantastically intuitive and deserves all the praise it gets. On the other hand, "Notifications" are simply a poor substitute from proper multitasking functionality. I think Apple will reveal proper multitasking, possibly exclusive to a next-gen iPhone, over the next year.

People are divided over the QWERTY people, but it's undeniable that it some people prefer physical buttons. In particular, the audience that Palm are likely aiming at, which is primarily business Blackberry users, prefer physical keyboards. I don't think trying to differentiate itself from the iPhone will do them any harm though.

I've not used the SDK, but I understand their approach. It's a trade-off. It's not very useful for real-time applications like games. However, web applications are becoming more and more popular, even on the desktop with applications like AIR. Whatsmore, people know HTML/CSS/JS tech (particularly compared to Objective-C), and that makes it easy for them to encourage people to develop applications on their platform, even if it remains a niche. It seems like a reasonable trade-off. I'm not convinced games are really that important either, the case in point being Mac OS X users.

The iPhone has a leg up over the Pre in sheer quantity of applications. On the other hand, long did Palm OS and Windows Mobile. And Windows still does over Mac OS X. It doesn't really matter as long as there's thriving communities on all unless there's one single-platform "killer app" which can't easily be replicated on the others, which currently doesn't, and is unlikely to, exist. All that matters is that there is a thriving developer ecosystem.

Hype doesn't have to equal to sales, as Blackberry and Nokia have shown by outselling the iPhone in the United States and Europe. It's also worth adding that if Palm sell half the amount of units that Apple do, they'd probably be celebrating in the streets and their share price would rocket. Palm's measure of success is almost certainly not anywhere near "beating the iPhone".

If we measure success by innovation and "X did it first", Opera would be the most popular browser on the planet and we'd all be running BeOS right around now. Being a "game changer" really doesn't matter in the long-term.

The price is higher. But it is a brand new phone with a brand new operating system, and they likely want to charge early adopters more. I doubt Palm are going to choose the Apple pricing strategy of keeping the price static for months or even years, and are more likely to compete in price as time goes on, especially when their exclusivity agreement ends and if they remain the underdog.

There's also other reasons. The fact it's on a different network to the competition works in its favour - not everyone has a choice of having good coverage for all the networks. The lack of a removable battery has likely discouraged corporate users from the iPhone. The DOC/PPT/XLS and PDF viewer will appeal to corporate users and is a nice touch. I regard avoiding iTunes as a big win. A decent camera with flash is a nice touch too.