I've done a lot of research on the new everything phones - and it came down to the iPhone and the Palm Pre for me.  I love Apple products, and the iPhone is no exception, unfortunately, they're shacked with a rather unsavory carrier (Aside from Veronica's phone, we have no association with AT&T any longer).  There will be an iPhone in the house ~ Veronica's getting one, but it wasn't the choice for me.

  I've spend the morning getting familiar with my new toy and personalizing it. One of the features I wanted to try was the pseudo-ipod:itunes syncing.  Unfortunately I had upgraded to iTunes 8.2.1 - which is the latest in the ongoing war between Apple and Palm.  So I snagged an old 8.1 version and removed my current version.  Of course, it didn't care much for my 8.2.1 modified library - but not to worry: simply making a copy of both xml and lib Itunes Library files, deleting them so new blank ones could be created and then importing the copies as a playlist gave me back my library in it's full glory.  Granted, I can't listen to any previously purchased music without jumping through hoops, but that probably only accounts for 8 albums total - so in the future I just spend an extra 30¢ to get iTunes Plus tracks.  Worth it to me.

Since I have about 10 Gig of music, and the Pre only has 8GB, I've limited my selection to a few play lists - I still have an iPod Video clocking in at 30GB for long road trips and the like, but to listen to music on purpose, the Pre will do nicely.

I'd used the headphones that came with it initially, but decided to see how well it worked with my Oticon streamer: and it works beautifully.  The Oticon Dual doesn't transmit in stereo - but it's a nice way to quietly listen to music without being tethered while working.  I may yet still be going with Phonak Audeo, since overall they had a cleaner crisper sound, and have been a bit more comfortable (not to mention bluetooth stereo) - although the demo set I had had horrendous problems with the iCom which made it mostly unusable.

I was able to set up my google hosted email with my forwarding account with little trouble - the trick is when setting up an account, whatever you put in the first email address field is what your email will send as - so putting my mail.com forwarding address in that field,  but setting up my imap with gmail and using mail.com's smtp, everything worked perfectly.

I haven't played with the phone part much, just sent out my new number this morning, but what I've used of it, it works well.

Battery life seems pretty phenomenal - been using it for about 3 hours straight with wi-fe, almost 2 of those whilst playing music, and the battery is just over half way down. 

Though I don't have an extensive library of movies, the ones I have pull right out of iTunes and play nicely - the speakerphone is pretty good for listening to the movies in a fairly quiet and isolated environment, otherwise, I'll be using the headphones, both for quality and for courtesy.

Overall, I've very pleased with the Palm Pre and highly recommend it to any ex-palm user or power user, not sure that the average user would get the most of this phone, but to each their own. :)