Palm's new Pre phone isn't perfect.

But it's good enough that I might buy one.

Up till now, as I count the days until my cellphone contract expires, I'd been planning to buy Apple's ubiquitous iPhone.

Sprint and Palm, though, have given me and many other smart-phone shoppers something to think about with the Pre, which goes on sale today.

The first thing you notice about the Pre ($199 after $100 mail-in rebate and with a Sprint data contract) is that it's smaller and rounder than an iPhone.

It sits comfortably in your hand like a smooth stone, and it nestles in your pocket without jutting out like a rectangular tumor.

The first time you fire up the Pre, you'll be blown away by the sharp, bright screen.

It's the same 320x480 resolution found on the iPhone, but the Pre's 3.1-inch screen is smaller than the iPhone's 3.5-inch screen.

Palm has come up with a number of innovations to the touch-screen interface.

For example, in Palm's new webOS operating system, you can have multiple programs running at once, unlike the one-at-a-time iPhone.

When you have more than one application open at a time on the Pre, they line up like cards in a row.

You can flick your finger left or right to scroll through your cards and tap to zoom in.

To close a program, just drag the card off the top of the screen.

Using the Pre's built-in programs is also easy.

Syncing with your existing e-mail accounts is a breeze; I was up and running through Microsoft Exchange in just a few minutes. If you want to compose messages, type a Web address or do any other kind of text entry, you slide out a physical keyboard from the bottom of the Pre.

It's the Pre's main weakness, but it's not the deal-breaker that other reviewers have claimed.

The keys are small – it's a phone, after all – but usable.

And while the base of the keyboard does have a bit of a sharp edge, it's not painful.

Browsing the Web is seamless, and Palm has borrowed Apple's popular pinch-and-stretch finger motion for zooming in and out of photos and Web sites.

The Pre also comes with several other useful programs, such as a GPS navigator and YouTube viewer.

But the real test of the Pre is going to be whether outside software developers cotton to the device the way they did the iPhone.

As of Friday, there were only a handful of apps available for download, nothing close to the gigantic "There's an app for that" menu on Apple's machine.

Hopefully the Pre will be successful enough to attract those developers, because that's what it's going to take to turn the Pre from a nifty phone into a blockbuster.

Research firm iSuppli estimates that Palm could ship 1.1 million Pre devices in 2009, whereas Apple sold nearly 14 million iPhones in 2008.

Even so, this is such a nice device that I'd be willing to take the gamble and buy a Pre right now if I thought Apple wasn't ready to respond.

Apple is widely expected to unveil the next version of the iPhone on Monday, though, and impatient potential Pre buyers should at least wait until then.

But Apple is going to have to make a big splash to keep me from buying a Pre.