Lots of people are eagerly awaiting the release of the Palm Pre. Many people are going to ditch their iPhones and Blackberry’s for the elegant Pre. A reivew on CNET about how the Palm Pre can multitask better than the iPhone is a must read for Blackberry/iPhone users who are thinking of getting the new Palm Pre. Some notable quotes from the article:

“Palm has generated buzz for the Pre unlike any other phone released since Apple’s iPhone arrived in June 2007… The two phones will be forever compared — not just because of their consumer-oriented styles and emphasis on gesture-based user interfaces, but because of the very real enmity between the proud team that worked on Apple’s historic iPhone breakthrough and the ex-Apple executives and engineers attempting to rebuild Palm.

While the iPhone has set the standard for future smartphones, Palm’s WebOS delivers two important improvements that the iPhone can’t yet match: true multitasking between applications, and a subtle notifications system that doesn’t interrupt your train of thought.

the subject of multitasking… has been a major criticism of the iPhone… outside of a few core applications, such as the phone and iPod player, an iPhone user must completely exit out of one application in order to use another.

Apple has said these limitations are necessary to prevent battery life from dropping off a cliff and to ensure application stability.

When a Pre user receives an e-mail or text message, that alert will pop up on the lower part of the Pre’s screen as a horizontal bar… but the alert won’t interrupt the application, and if the user chooses simply to ignore that alert, it will soon retreat to the lower edge of the screen

Apple’s approach lets you dismiss the alert and continue what you were doing but forces you to remember that you received notifications from a specific application, such as the ESPN Alerts application demonstrated at the iPhone 3.0 event“