Today, HP announced the first WebOS phone to emerge since the company bought Palm. It’s the Pre 2, shipping this week in France and at an unspecified future date in the US. It looks like–well, like the Pre only better, with more modern specs (such as a 1-GHz CPU) and a meaty-sounding software update in WebOS 2.0. If it’s all it’s cracked up to be, it sounds like a phone that Palm Pre lovers will love even more.

Except…

It seems obvious that HP’s challenge with the WebOS platform isn’t keeping existing customers happy; it’s building phones that large numbers of people want to buy instead of iPhones, Androids, BlackBerries, Windows Phone 7 handsets, and other choices. I like the Pre’s smalllish case and slide-out keyboard personally, but I wonder if the market hasn’t already voted decisively against that basic design. (Palm tried hard to market the Pre to women, but daintiness seems not to have been a sufficient selling point.) With phone screens getting bigger and bigger–hello, Droid X–I’d think that HP would want to give WebOS a try on a hardware design that’s in tune with industry trends. I imagine it’ll do so, and the only question is when.

When I heard about the Palm Pre announcement, my impulsive reaction was “Darn, I guess this means no radically new Palm phone for the holidays.” Then it dawned on me: There’s no reason why HP couldn’t do both the Pre 2 and a more significantly new phone at more or less the same time. And here’s a Pollyannish thought: Maybe the fact that HP is sneaking the Pre 2 out with a press release means that it’s saving up its promotional firepower for a smartphone unveiling that’s a bigger deal in the not-too-distant future. I hope so.

As the name suggests, the Palm Pre 2 doesn’t deviate much from the original. Instead, it modernizes the hardware — there’s a 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM and an unspecified bump in battery life — and refines the design, with a flatter screen and what looks like a matted finish to reduce cracks in the plastic. And of course, WebOS 2.0 will be on board. Think of it as the Droid 2 to Motorola’s original Droid.

It’s tempting to look at the leaked Palm Pre 2 evidence and wonder what HP and Palm are thinking. When HP announced its plan to acquire Palm, it seemed giddy about getting WebOS, but didn’t mention the Pre at all. All signs pointed to some kind of smartphone reboot, not a rehash of the same hardware models that bombed commercially.

But updating the Palm Pre to reach parity with other smartphones doesn’t preclude HP and Palm from being more ambitious at the same time. A slab-like phone codenamed “Mansion” is reportedly in the works, and we know nothing about HP and Palm’s strategies for pricing, marketing and wireless carrier deals.

Certainly, HP is in a deep hole with Palm phones. The App Catalog is tiny and brand awareness is lousy. Maybe the solution lies in releasing a lot of solid smartphones to a lot of carriers, and the Pre 2 is just the beginning. We’ll see.

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.

Maybe the best news about these models: They’re on Verizon Wireless. Exclusively, Palm says–starting January 25th.

With the original iPhone, Apple addressed the shortcomings that most devices in the category had with fresh, innovative ideas. Initially, there were many second rate imitators, but now, products including the Palm Pre and Nexus One match if not surpass the iPhone in numerous ways.

I love my iPhone, and couldn’t imagine life without my apps. However, there are great alternatives for people who have not yet upgraded to a smartphone or want to save on their monthly service fees.

Case in point: A few months back, a friend and I were sitting in an East Village bar waiting for a bossa nova show to begin. We both whipped out our phones (his was a Pre) and had the proverbial “size contest.” I couldn’t knock the Pre, and he is very happy with it.

Moreover, AT&T’s decision to carry five Android phones is prescient–Android has no place to go but up. While it’s still not fully mature, Android is a great operating system for device manufacturers that do not have their own OS, and that is somewhat reminiscent of the early days of Microsoft Windows.

What is Apple to do? It will do very well due to the strength of its brand, and dedicated users like myself, but those strengths will eventually decline into inertia. Even a phone that leaves the Pre and Nexus One in its dust will not be good enough–Apple must bring back the “wow” factor in order to maintain its leadership of the market (or cede and focus on another groundbreaking product).

I’m confident that Cupertino has enough tricks up its sleeve that it could leave the rest of the industry chasing the iPhone again. There is room to play as the smartphone category grows, but anything less than a revolutionary product simply isn’t good enough for Apple.

I’m shocked. Shocked. Once again, Apple has updated iTunes, and once again, the update disables the ability of Palm’s Pre to sync directly with iTunes via the Pre’s Media Sync feature. If I’m keeping track correctly, this is the third time Apple has blocked the Pre.

I would have guessed that Palm would have given up by now. And I think it should give up–even if you’re okay with the Pre piggybacking on Apple’s software by using USB in a way that the people in charge of USB apparently object to, a feature that’s destined to break over and over isn’t really a feature. It’s an unreliable kludge. And Palm could implement non-kludgy iTunes sync if it chose to. The way some of its competitors have.

And here’s an interesting twist. On Palm’s site, the feature list for the Pre still touts Media Sync as a major benefit:

And as usual, a footnote explains that Media Sync only works with a certain version of iTunes, and that it’s, um, conceivable that Apple could update iTunes in a way that renders Media Sync inoperable:

Palm is also promoting the Pixi, its new $99 WebOS phone which doesn’t arrive until November 15th. The company has a very similar blurb on that phone’s media features that talks about iTunes transfers–but this one doesn’t mention Media Sync:

And this time, the footnote doesn’t offer any disclaimers about syncing only working with certain versions of iTunes:

Unless Palm has come up with a superkludge that it’s positive Apple can never foil–which it hasn’t–I can think of only three explanations for the changes in its explanation of iTunes sync:

(A) It’s still planning/hoping to use the kludge or a variant thereof, but has decided it doesn’t need to offer any disclaimers;

(B) It’s still planning/hoping to use the kludge or a variant thereof, and its marketing copy has gotten unimaginably sloppy;

(C) The Pixi will use the same sort of utility that the rest of the industry uses to sync with iTunes libraries externally rather than directly through iTunes.

Scenarios (A) and (B) both seem unlikely, so I’m guessing that the Pixi will offer a more traditional, less controversial approach to iTunes sync. And if the Pixi does, the Pre surely will as well. I guess we’ll know in a little more than two weeks, if not sooner.

(Okay, here’s another scenario: Palm and Apple have struck a deal to let the Pixi sync with iTunes, no kludge required. Whaddaya think the chances are of that happening?)

RIM’s share fell 1 percent to 40 percent, while Palm’s share remained unchanged at 7 percent. It’s clear from these figures that the Pre has done little to fix the company’s woes, adding weight to the calls of “failure” from some industry watchers.

(It could also be due to the fact that the lady on those commercials is just creepy looking, but I do digress.)

The news gets even better for Apple: Over the next 90 days, 36 percent of those surveyed said they plan to purchase an iPhone in that period, compared with 27 percent for RIM and 8 percent for Palm. In other words, the iPhone’s share isn’t done growing yet.

Part of this success may also have a lot to do with customer satisfaction: Apple completely kills the competition here. 74 percent report being satisfied with their devices, with the next closest, RIM, coming in at 43 percent. You have to go to sixth spot to find Palm, with only a third satisfied — behind competiors LG, Sanyo, and HTC.

What is Palm up to? With its new WebOS 1.21 update, it’s once again re-enabled the Palm Pre’s ability to sync unprotected music and videos, photos, and now photo albums with iTunes, no extra software required. The move comes after the USB Implements Forum took Apple’s side in the tiff over Palm’s spoofing of iTunes into thinking that the Pre is an iPod. If I recall correctly, Apple has released two iTunes updates that blocked earlier versions of WebOS from syncing, and chances are presumably sky-high that it’ll block this one the next time that it pushes out a new version of iTunes.

I keep declaring this clash of wills between the two smartphone companies to be over, but I’m officially giving up on making any guesses. Whatever will happen will happen, and Palm, at least, isn’t behaving in the nice, predictable way that you expect of large companies. I dunno how the USB-IF will respond to Palm ignoring its stance that the Pre shouldn’t masquerade as an Apple product via USB connection, but it seems to be clear that Palm is willing to burn bridges behind it.

The company is unquestionably bursting at the seams with smart, talented folks; the Pre remains the iPhone’s most formidable competitor by far from the standpoint of user-interface sophistication. But I’m mystified by what it’s up to here. Palm continues to tout iTunes compatibility as a major feature of the phone. But the convenience that the feature offers when it’s working is completely negated by the periods when it’s in limbo, not to mention the general uncertainty of the whole idea. Whether you take Apple’s side or Palm’s or (like me) aren’t completely thrilled with either company’s behavior, it would be silly to think of the WebOS’s Media Sync feature as an argument in favor of buying a Pre.

Mac and iPhone developer Craig Hunter has a cogent post up on all this that beats up Palm pretty good. He wonders the same thing that I’ve been curious about for months: Why doesn’t Palm, like numerous other companies, write a standalone app to do the syncing? It would work well, and there’s no evidence that Apple would try to foil it.  Just how many Pre owners would vote for continuing to play chicken with Apple when there’s a boring but effective alternative route to nearly the same end result?