commentary Mobile World Congress is such a terrible, terrible tease. Every year we see those shiny new handsets in the hands of the lucky few who get to attend the show in Barcelona, and then we're forced to wait six months before we have them in our eager hands.

This year promises a few tasty treats, like Samsung's Omnia HD and the Sony Ericsson Idou, but in terms of sheer potential, none compare to the Palm Pre. US company Palm is dragging itself out of the grave with this release and from what we've seen so far, the Pre is not only the phone Palm needed to make, but it's also the phone we've been waiting for.

The head-to-head comparisons with Apple's iPhone are too obvious to ignore, particularly the unique touchscreen interfaces used in each of these smartphones. A quick caveat before we toss these fierce competitors in the ring: the specs listed for the Pre are not final, and the specs listed for the iPhone may change considerably with the release of a rumoured successor mid-year. Be sure, we'll update this table as soon as any new information comes to light.

Platform: OSX vs. webOS
OSX is the at once the great strength and weakness of the iPhone. On the one hand you have a super stable platform that provides an excellent user experience, plus it's apparently very easy to write software for the iPhone (as 31 iFart applications will attest to). At the same time, this stable and speedy performance is due in part to the iPhone not being capable of multitasking or having applications running in the background.

Palm's Card system is the exact antithesis of this, not only running several applications in the background, but showing them in an active state on the deck-of-cards style home screen. This way you can have messages sent from IM services or social networking sites sent to your phone while you type emails, surf the web or take a phone call.

Another fascinating software implementation is what Palm is calling Synergy, referring to the way webOS deals with the various different communication methods we use to converse with the one person. Firstly, a contact's information listing contains all their addresses and numbers; phone, email, IM addresses, social networking aliases (like Facebook). While the iPhone and Windows Mobile phones may thread consecutive SMS messages together into a conversation, the Pre will be able to thread cross-platform communication together. For example, you'll be able to reply to a Gmail message with an SMS or an IM over Windows Live.

For all these ingenious advancements, the iPhone will still have the Pre beat in the sheer number of third-party applications available on the Apple App Store. Palm has announced its intention to launch a similar one-stop-shop for downloading apps to the Pre, but at launch it should still be a long way behind the 15,000+ apps available for iPhone.

	Apple iPhone	Palm Pre
Operating system	Mac OS X	Palm webOS
3G	Yes	Yes
Camera resolution	2 megapixels	3 megapixels
Camera flash	No	LED photo light
Browser	Safari	Proprietary
E-mail	POP3/IMAP; HTML; push email via Exchange	POP3/IMAP; HTML; push email via Exchange
Media player	iTunes	Proprietary
A-GPS	Yes	Yes
Pre-installed maps	Google Maps	Google Maps, carrier specified maps
Touchscreen	Capacitive (multi-touch capable)	Capacitive (multi-touch capable)
Alternate Input	None	QWERTY keypad, gesture panel
Screen	3.5-inch (320x480 pixels)	3.1-inch (320x480 pixels)
Weight	136g	135g
Processor speed	620MHz	Unknown
Memory	8GB/16GB	8GB
Expansion slot	None	Unknown
Replaceable battery	No	Yes
MMS (for sending pictures and video)	No	Yes
IM (instant messaging)	Yes - AIM	Yes - various
Video calling	No	Unknown
Video capture	No	Yes
3G internet sharing (tethering)	No	Yes
USB mass storage	No	Yes
User installable 3rd-party apps	Yes	Yes
Accelerometer changes screen orientation when rotated	Yes, only in certain apps	Yes, in all screens
Proximity sensor (turns screen off when put up to your ear)	Yes	Yes
Threaded SMS	Yes	Yes, threaded merged communication
Supports stereo Bluetooth (A2DP)	No	Yes

Perhaps it's the allure of the new and shiny, but Palm's Pre is our new tech crush, and it leaves the iPhone looking like an old maid. The hands-on videos we've seen show an interface as responsive, if not more responsive, than the iPhone's and the combination of the Cards and Synergy system far outshines the linear tree-structure of input into Apple's phone. It really looks like the iPhone but better.

That said, there are so many variables and unknowns that could quickly shift our opinion of the Pre. Battery life and the way it plays with other devices, like PCs, are two concerns that immediately spring to mind. Part of the strength of the iPhone is the ease with which it syncs files from your computer to the phone, but something tells us Palm won't overlook this.