First an overview. The Pre uses a "card" for each actively running program. You can switch between cards at any time by hitting the center button.  When you're looking at the screen, the programs all look like cards, so it's not that much of a stretch to call them that.  The point of these is to easily switch between programs without needing to close any.

Hit the jump for a few thoughts on specific features and for more of my literary witticism.

Keyboard

They changed the layout of the keyboard from the Treo/Centro, and in my opinion it's an improvement. The comma and period are now primary buttons, and there's a [Sym] key that brings up a list of commonly used symbols so you don't have put in a symbol that you think looks like the one you want and then hit the [alt] key to see if you won the prize. If you've used a treo/centro then you know what I mean.  I've seen a few people complain about the size of the keys, but I've gotten used to the Centro ones and are no longer an issue. The thing I don't like about the keyboard though is its thinness. The part that you hold is fairly thin and makes it tough to grip the phone properly, especially in one-handed operation.

5-Way Button/Gestures

Psyche! They killed the 5-way button and they killed it good.  That little button opened up a myriad of directions you could move something, be it the screen or a text cursor.  And by myriad I mean 4.  So of course the Pre improved on this by adding something way cooler, right? Yep, they added a single button to the screen. That doesn't select things. Wow was that anticlimactic. Well, they've brought back the gesture pad from the old Palm V days, if that makes you feel any better. Probably the most useful part of that is the "back" gesture, which takes you back a screen, pretty self-explanatory. The "flick" gesture, in which you push cards off the screen is actually pretty neat, makes me feel like I'm in The Minority Report, but with less creepy kids chained up.It allows you to quickly push cards up and off the screen, effectively closing the program.

I have a theory that that "center" button that doesn't really do anything except bring up all your cards was originally intended to be like the Blackberry Curve's roller ball, but Palm ran out of either time or money. Look for them to do something cool with it in the future. That's a threat, by the way, Palm.

Oh, say you wanted to move your cursor in a text field but didn't want to erase everything you've typed since the spot you needed to edit?  They have a solution for that! Hold down the alt(orange) key and slide your finger on the screen in the direction you want to move it. It now takes 2 hand (or 1 incredibly skilled one) to move the freakin' cursor. Needless to say, the Konami Code just got a lot more hard. Just the way I like it.

UPDATE: Apparently if you type in [upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart] in the launcher it brings up developer mode where you can connect a computer running the Palm SDK and get access to the phone. Huh. Guess I'm psychic after all.

Synergy

The Synergy system of the Pre synchronizes all of your contacts (and calendars) into one place, whether they be from Facebook, Google, Outlook, or your phone. This can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how close you are to your Facebook friends. If you've clicked [accept] to every invitation from slobbering teenagers who think the hot girl in the profile picture is you and not your fiancee (and your name happens to be Dana), you're probably not going to like Synergy much. See, there's currently no way to select which contacts you import into your phone, they're all there. For me this was fine since I had to recreate my Facebook profile after college so all those people who you had classes with but don't talk to anymore don't really apply.

One of the cooler things I've found with Synergy is the ability to have a conversation with a person via SMS, AIM, GoogleTalk, whatever, and it recognizes that person as the same and records it all as one conversation so you don't have to hunt between AIM convos and text messages for the address of the party that you weren't really invited to but are going anyway. That'll show them!

Battery

So far the battery life has been a bit dismal, but that is likely due to the fact that I've stayed signed into AIM, received emails as soon as they came in, watched a few YouTube videos, and had an hour-long conversation, most of it using a bluetooth headset. Oh, I also took a few pictures of my cat. He didn't like them though so I had to delete them.  However, I fully charged it before I left work, and 5 hours later, the battery is at 11%. I'm hoping that after a few battery cycles I'll get a bit more life, but if not, I'll just have to either have a charger at home and one at work or else cut down on the amount of things running at any one time.

More to come later.

*Note: I have blurred the bulk of my contacts names, pictures and information for their privacy.

You can download OutSync from the link above, and installing is quick and painless.  The first time you launch OutSync, it can take a minute or so to even show up.  While you may think you misclicked or perhaps think the app didn't launch, give it a minute or two depending on the speed of your machine before you get too impatient.

Once OutSync is up and running you'll see a window like this prompting you to login with your Facebook credentials:

Once you have logged in OutSync will start pulling your friends list ( this can take a while depending on internet connection speed and number of friends ):

Once that's done you should see something like this:

This window lets you check off contacts that you want to sync and ones that you don't want to.  The only difficulty I had was that contacts in Outlook and in Facebook have to match EXACTLY.  So, if your friend on Facebook displays a middle initial or their entire middle name, you have to have it like that in Outlook for the match to be made.  I'd like to see the ability to "link" a Facebook profile with an Outlook contact as well, without the name having to be a perfect match, but maybe that's a future enhancement.

Once you have selected the contacts that you want to sync you press the "Sync" button and the screen will change to something like:

Followed by:

Once that is done you can open up Outlook and see that the matched contacts do indeed have pictures now:

If you have an iPhone that syncs to Outlook or a Windows Mobile phone where you can use ActiveSync, you can easily then sync your Outlook contacts to your phone.