Decisions are made with your emotions and if this is news to you, perhaps you should buy some books or therapy or a vagina or whatever will help you understand that instead. I will wait for you to continue reading (actually because of how time works, I will be doing something else entirely, probably shouting or driving).

If this decision is even possible for you, it means you’ve signed a mobile phone contract with Sprint. Good news: the discomfort caused by this terrible choice may have finally come to an end, as you are now, by complete accident, finally in a position to benefit from it! Surprise happy ending! You can stop cramming iPhone envy down into your emotional Ghostbusters Containment Unit and replace it with the kind of smugness usually reserved for landing a vicious burn at your high school reunion. Here’s why:

The Palm Pre is a Better Phone than the iPhone

The iPhone is a very good phone. You can tell because it creates feelings of pleasure in your body as if each time you use it, you’re doing a bump of knowledge off a stack of Steve Jobs’ medical bills. I used to work for Apple, have been a user of their products for 25 years, I even bought two Newtons, so I am not a bigot (except when it comes to Lutherans!). The only way to convince people you’re right is with a list, so you basically asked for your own time to be wasted, you idiot:

• The Palm Pre feels smaller and lighter.

Being lazy means everything feels like a huge pain in the ass, so I am not backing this up (they both weigh the same, actually), but it’s obvious from holding the two devices at once: the iPhone feels like a stack of 200 iHop comment cards. It’s slabby, which is great if you’re a 1983 Chevy Caprice, but not cool if you’re a phone. Actually if you’re either of those things and reading this, that means the machines have awoken and I am too busy dodging semi trucks with Hobgoblin masks to care about what’s cool.

• Formfactor factors.

The form factor of the Pre is very pleasing to the hand and eyes (both eyes!). When it’s closed it’s how you picture the iPhone when you’re not actually looking at one: you could easily skip this thing across a lake in the summer between 8th grade and freshman year, your very first kiss coming later in the afternoon. You’d never do that though, on account of the linear nature of time and because money is real.

My only gripe about the molecules that make up the part of the phone you can measure with science is that the little clit that seems like and was probably supposed to be a trackball, isn’t, which is as confusing weeks into owning the device as it was when I bought it and this sentence is to read. Maybe the guys at Palm ran into the same durability problems the girls at Blackberry pretended not to notice and decided not to make it one. Also, and this is likely because I’m damaged, the phone looks upside-down all the time.

Otherwise, tournament-caliber win. Everything is flush and smooth, like you wish your body was. It doesn’t rattle or squeak when you handle it. It feels like all one thing. It doesn’t overflow your hand. The headphone jack makes sense and it has a hardware button to turn your ringer off. It charges from a micro USB cable you might even already have, and can replace at a poor-person store like Target or Frys.

• It has a keyboard

Having a real keyboard on your phone is more productive than Asians.

Software keyboards are not for me, and I suspect that they’re not the best thing for people that deal mostly in creating large amounts of text, or text with a lot of unusual characters in it. Content creators, if the content is text or computer code, could use a real keyboard. The Pre has one you slide up the screen to reveal with your thumb fully in the center of the display. It feels weird mashing around the screen like that, but you get used to it and it doesn’t hurt the screen, except to leave a smudge, which you have probably already stopped being such a faggot about if you touch the screen of anything. Until masturbation is lubricated with windex and produces a puff of lemon juice vapor (ouch!), you are going to leave sticky prints on stuff, like the murder weapon and your the Palm Pre. Trying to kill someone with a Palm Pre is ridiculous, it’s a phone, it would barely even hurt.

• Apps in the background

The Pre can run several apps at once. I’ve run at least 6 or 7 at the same time. You flip through what’s going on with a similar motion to counting money, and quit an app by flicking the card that represents it up and out of the top of the screen, where it disappears, accompanied by a little swish sound. This is more satisfying than finally losing a tooth, I have caught myself flipping through apps and closing them, even when I should have kept them open. No big deal, I just open them again, but it’s pleasing to fidget with. The productivity gains from this become more obvious the longer you own the phone. You don’t have to depend on the app’s developer to save your place. When messaging starts to get fractured between several contacts and across several media, indicating that you are at least momentarily popular, it’s easy to flip back and forth and preserve your fragile relationships with your unreliable friends and family, many of whom are on drugs.

• The SDK is barely less retarded

Developing apps for the iPhone is a waking nightmare of learning Objective-C (the Sierra Mist of computer languages), dealing with Apple’s lawyers constantly trying to convict you of a crime for doing something they don’t like with something you already bought, and coming to terms with that painful rash on computing you’ve avoided your whole career, figuring you could wait it out: Unix. You could step off the broken-bottle-glass-paved path of XCode and the SDK, but it only raises more questions about your sexuality and which company that was invented twenty minutes ago you should trust with about a month of your time and a good portion of what is left of your will to live.

The Pre SDK’s preferred IDE is Eclipse, which you can download for any operating system, even the ones you can afford like Windows and Linux. I use a Mac so this wasn’t a factor for me, but it would be a pretty huge coincidence if you weren’t one of the 92% of computer users who care. All your programs are written in Javascript, which is a beating, but doable. It’s no Visual Studio, but by now we have learned to deal with OSS’s philosophy of “configuration over convention and over the course of countless hours”. The Hello World apps are easy enough, but if you want a productive build-test-deploy cycle you’re going to have to futz around. You’ll also have to become an expert at Javascript.

• The bad

Palm can’t offer the kind of support for the device that Apple can, the company kinda seems like it’s having a nervous breakdown. You don’t care though because you don’t tie up your self-image into which company makes your phone. Don’t worry that there are only 238 apps in the homebrew scene, most of the apps for iPhone are ridiculous. The phone has enough accessories, including the Touchstone, a charger that works by just resting the phone on it (magic?). If you are the sort of person that creates feelings of community around stuff you bought, you’re not going to be happy with the smaller user base and the desperation stink-lines rising up from Palm headquarters.

Summary

If you are one of Sprint’s dwindling number of victims, this is the best phone for Sprint at the time of this writing. So, really you don’t have a choice at all, but you can print out this blog entry and put it under your snotty “iPhone guy” coworker’s windshield wiper, killing both trees and your chances at a career.

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