CES 2009 brought us a new player in the smartphone upper-echelon. Let’s drill down and see how the Palm Pre compares with the iPhone and Android’s G1.

• Multitouch touchscreen/gesture control:

All three are capacitive, only the Pre and iPhone have multitouch. The Pre’s glowy little “gesture area” has dropped the touchable real estate all the way down tto the bottom of the phone, which is great for being able to navigate with one hand and not interfere with the screen at all. The wavey dock you bring up from the bottom looks awesome, but can you use it out of the box without a second thought or page through the manual? That’s my question.

Advantage: iPhone/Pre tossup.

• Multitasking:

One of the beefiest of our beefs with the iPhone SDK is its insistence on Apps running one at a time. The G1′s notifications drawer was definitely a step in the right direction, but the Pre’s interface is the first smartphone OS that was built with multitasking as a core design element. Resembling the Xbox’s old Blades, or a less-jarring OS X Expose even, the Pre’s “Cards” interface always places you in the context of every app running for fast switching, and notifications from other apps don’t pull you away completely from the task at hand. Multitasking is hugely important on a phone, and it’s a good sign that Palm recognizes.

Advantage: Pre

• Physical keyboard:

It’s preference, but one held by a large swathe of the gadget buying public: physical QWERTY keypads are still the mainstream input of choice. Touch is getting better all the time, but a lot of people still want physical keyboards. But better yet is the ability to choose; unfortunately, the Pre doesn’t have a soft onscreen keyboard, and its slide-out is the same meh QWERTY from the Treo Pro.

Advantage: It’s preference, but on me, the iPhone’s soft keyboard can’t be beat.

• Camera:

The Pre has an LED Flash for its 3MP camera, something both the iPhone and G1 lack. Flash cellphone photos are ugly, but for a lot of people, they’re good enough. So credit for throwing it in.

Advantage: Pre

• Battery:

Apple’s still an outlier with their non-removable battery; like the G1′s, the Pre’s comes out for a spare swap too. We’ve heard Apple’s reasons for this a million times, we know the drill, but removable batteries will never stop being handy.

Advantage: Pre

• Copy & Paste:

Yep, Pre’s got it. iPhone still doesn’t.

Advantage: Pre/G1

• Browser:

All three use a browser based on WebKit, which has become the standard for the mobile web. We couldn’t put it through our Mobile Browser Battlemodo ringer obviously, but what we saw looked great, and it’s the only other mobile browser besides the iPhone that supports multitouch zooming.

Advantage: iPhone/Pre

Overall: i think palm pre ROCKS!!