From time to time, I’ve called Palm’s Pre the Most Interesting Smartphone That Isn’t the iPhone. It’s now been almost nine months since the Pre debuted on Sprint, and a bunch of other formidable handsets have since appeared, such as the Verizon Droid and Google Nexus One. But thanks to its exceptionally inventive WebOS software and distinctive form factor, the Pre still holds its own.

Now the Sprint Pre has been joined by the Pre Plus, which runs on Verizon Wireless and began shipping in January. After I recently said I was flirting with abandoning my AT&T iPhone, Palm offered to loan me a Plus for review. Here’s my take, following up on the story I did on the original Sprint Pre back in June. Executive summary: the Pre Plus isn’t a radically different phone from its predecessor, but it’s still a really good one–and while the WebOS third-party application situation pales in comparison to the iPhone, it’s better than I expected judged on the number of available apps alone.

(Note: Over the weekend, Palm pushed out WebOS 1.4, an OS upgrade that enables video capture and which supports Adobe’s Flash Player. However, it’s n0t yet available for Verizon’s WebOS phones, the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus, and I haven’t tried it.)

The Hardware

Most next-generation smartphones are decidedly iPhone-esque–they look like the iPhone with a slide-out keyboard, or like the iPhone with a trackball. Or they just look like the iPhone, period. Physically, the Pre Plus  is a near-twin of the Pre, and it continues to offer a choice, not an echo. At 2.3″ by 3.9″ by .67″, it’s strikingly smaller and more phonelike than the slablike iPhone. It fits well in the hand–it’s a great one-handed phone which you can navigate entirely with your thumb if you choose–and slips easily into pockets.

A smaller phone means a smaller screen: The Pre Plus retains the Pre’s 3.1″ display, vs. the iPhone’s much more expansive 3.5″ one. But at 320 by 480, the more petite screen has the same resolution as the iPhone, giving it the same pixel density as the higher-resolution Verizon Droid. Photos and type look gorgeous.

In general, both the built-in Palm apps and third-party ones do a good job of scaling their interfaces to the Pre’s undersized display; it rarely feels cramped. The only time I pined for something larger was when I was read blogs, news stories, and other wordy Web pages. For those, I opted for the Plus’s landscape mode. And I don’t think I’d want to use the phone for truly heavy-duty consumption of text, such as reading e-books–which is one reason why I’m not grief-stricken that there’s no Kindle app for WebOS.

The Plus’s physical changes compared to the first Pre are all minor: The home button on the phone’s front has been replaced by a glowing virtual slit, the keyboard has been tweaked (with a firmer feel and new monochrome look), and the sliding mechanism, which some criticized as flimsy, is more solid. The phone also comes with a back that’s compatible with Palm’s nifty Touchstone charging station as standard equipment; with the original Pre, it was an extra-cost option.

Its keyboard is…okay. Using it still feels a bit like jabbing at Jelly Bellies, and the phone’s narrow width makes two-thumbed typing slower going than with a BlackBerry. I’m not going to argue that it’s inherently superior to the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard. But I like it much better than the Verizon Droid’s wider, flatter keyboard. And I still think that one unappreciated virtue of physical keyboards is the way they free up all of a phone’s pixels for other stuff. When you compose an e-mail on an iPhone, the on-screen keyboard leaves a tiny window for your text; on the Pre Plus, the whole display is available.

Inside the phone, Palm has doubled the RAM (to 512MB) and the storage memory (to 16GB). I found that the Plus’s performance felt similar to that of the first Pre: pretty zippy overall except when loading a program into memory, which is surprisingly slow at several seconds per app. The increased RAM should help the Plus multitask more apps without bogging down; the more generous storage is a plus if you plan to load the phone up with music, movies, and/or podcasts.

I didn’t attempt to measure the Pre Plus’s battery life, but I did notice that I had to use it somewhat cautiously to get through a full day on one charge. Palm quotes the talk time as up to 5.5 hours and standby as 350 minutes (both the original Pre and the iPhone 3GS claim up to 5 hours of talk time and 300 minutes of standby).

The Software

Palm’s operating system, WebOS, is still pretty much the same one that the company unveiled in January of 2009. Which is a compliment, not a criticism: In terms of ingenuity, elegance, and efficiency, it remains the only mobile operating system that truly rivals Apple’s iPhone OS.

Actually, in multiple ways WebOS feels like a hybrid of the most appealing aspects of iPhone OS and Google’s Android, without their downsides. Like the iPhone, it looks beautiful, offers full multi-touch support, and lets you navigate around mostly through intuitive gestures. (Most Android devices still don’t do multi-touch, and the OS is burdened with too many buttons, menus, and inconsistent ways of accomplishing tasks.) Like Android, it multitasks–but with the ingenious Card interface that makes it a snap to bop between apps:

WebOS’s Synergy feature, which melds contact and calendar information from Outlook, Google, Facebook, and other sources, isn’t quite as unique as it once was–Android 2.0 has cribbed some aspects of it, such as integration of Facebook friends into its contact database. But it’s still the richest expression of the idea. (For instance, Android’s version lacks Synergy’s LinkedIn integration.) And it helps to make the Pre Plus especially appealing if you’re buying a phone primarily as a tool to help you whip through busy workdays as efficiently as possible. So does WebOS’s to-do list–for some reason, iPhone OS and Android still don’t come with task management as a standard feature.

The one major new feature in the Pre Plus that really is a new feature rather than a tweak or hardware upgrade is Mobile Hotspot. It’s a twist on tethering that turns the Pre Plus into a pocketable Wi-Fi router, much like Novatel’s MiFi. The feature costs an extra $40 a month for 5GB of data–twenty bucks less than you’d pay for access via a MiFi or USB modem–and is a cakewalk to use. Once you’ve set a password, you just turn Mobile Hotspot on, then connect to it from your laptop as you would to any Wi-Fi hotspot. (It supports connections from up to five simultaneous devices.)

Mobile Hotspot isn’t going to replace a separate EVDO modem for everybody. In my tests, it was slower than a USB-stick Verizon modem, giving me a connection that ran at slightly under 400-kbps vs. 500-kbps for the stick. Verizon’s CDMA network won’t let you use the hotspot and talk on the phone at the same time: If you take a call, the Internet connection cuts out until you’re done. And the feature guzzles battery power (a Palm representative suggested to me that it makes sense to keep the Pre Plus connected to a laptop via USB cable during hotspot sessions).

If AT&T ever gets its act together and lets iPhone owners simultaneous talk and tether their laptops, Mobile Hotspot may seem limited by comparison. For now, though, it’s a reason for iPhone types to be (mildly) jealous of Pre Plus owners.

One area where no iPhone user will envy Pre Plus owners is entertainment features. WebOS still offers a basic music player and video player, plus on-device access to Amazon’s MP3 store. But this is still a phone that focuses on productivity with a dash of fun, not a media-centric device like the iPhone. And now that Palm’s quixotic attempt to make WebOS devices sync directly with iTunes seems to be over, the OS could also use a media-syncing app for Windows and OS X. (I used the free DoubleTwist to transfer music, video, and podcasts; it worked just fine.)

Oh, and for what it’s worth: The Pre Plus performed well as a phone in my tests. Voice quality was consistently very good, and I didn’t experience any dropped calls.

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