Quick Hand-On with Bell's Palm Pre

So I was strolling through the mall the other day and I walk past the Bell store. There was a white pedastal near the entrance and then WHOAAAAAAAAAA! I realized that they had a Palm Pre out for playing-with, a full three days before it was set to be released.

I didn't get to use it for too-too long, as I was in the middle of an errand, but in the three minutes or so that I did spent with it, comparing it side-by-side to my Nokia N97, I had a few thoughts:

• It had really crappy build quality and it felt like a cheap toy. Mind you, the rubberized Touchstone battery cover would do wonders for this opinion. Maybe.
   
• It feels great in the hand. Also, it wasn't as susceptible to fingerprints as I was led to believe. Nice.
   
• I can't slide the darned thing open. I couldn't believe it. Trying to slide it with one thumb actually pushes the screen-half of the phone into the recessed keyboard area of the bottom half. ............what? I had to use two hands in the end. I hope that this unit came from a bad, early batch.
   
• It has a mirror behind the slid-up screen. As in, after sliding it open. It also has no branding. I was surprised at the lack of branding, actually, as the Sprint one in the U.S. has the Sprint logo in the mirror.
   
• The keyboard keys are perfect...other than the fact that they're sticky. The Treo 650 was my first phone that I actually paid for, and it remains to this day my favourite phone keyboard. The Pre has the same thing, but the material they used here is weird. Feels like someone took a Treo 650 and spilled pop over it. I suppose over time it'll be, uh, un-stickyfied.
   
• It lags. Oh, how it lags. I had two cards/apps open and it struggled to open a third. These are all the built-in ones, duh, and I'm already not impressed. Task switching and closing were fine, but opening apps and watching them stutter while loading sucks. My N97 is slow but even that beats it by a Canadian kilometre.
   
• The camera is awesome. Yes, it has a flash that doesn't wash out half your picture (*cough* N97 *cough*). It's sharp and the colours are vibrant, but in the end 5 megapixels of Carl Zeiss autofocused goodness still wins. Barely. The Pre gets a point here for having a camera app that doesn't take five minutes to load up, oh, after you struggle to slide open a lens cover that actually scratches your lens. Yeah...the N97 needs some help.

All that being said, I'm still happier with my N97! I know that Palm's webOS has a lot of potential, and in the end I'm still a Palm fanboy, but they really need to step up their quality control. That, and polish the software up.

Almost there, Palm!