Let me preface this by saying that I am a long time Blackberry user. Indeed as I type this I have 2 of them sitting on the desk in front of me (a Pearl for work and a Storm for personal). I have ALWAYS been a fan of the phones and the service, and Verizon as a carrier. But since I bought my Storm I've been very unhappy with the product and have had my eyes open for alternatives.
Because I have a work phone that serves me well, I was looking for a more consumer oriented device for my personal phone. Email and messaging are important, media functionality is nice for traveling, and location based services are a must (so GPS is a must have). That's why I originally bought the Storm.
But the Storm was a complete disappointment.
I'm willing to put up with a few bugs in new products (I work in product development myself), but the Storm has been a disaster for me as long as I've owned it. Every beta OS I installed (wipe or no wipe) simply traded one set of bugs for another. "Oh hey, the keyboard is great now but the lock is broken and I have a savage memory leak!" I kept waiting for things to get better. But I personally find it INSANE that I have to set MeterBerry to reboot the Storm every night while I'm sleeping or else the device runs like **** the next day. The final blow was when Verizon announced that .148 was the next official OS in the same week that "Storm2" was made more or less official with pics and carrier info. I would have been willing to put up with that if I had been AT ALL happy with the Storm, but it's been the second worst phone I've ever owned (first place is my short lived RAZR).
In the last few months I've been looking closely at the different offerings from various carriers. There really hasn't been anything approaching iPhone quality for a long time, but I'm not a big fan of AT&T. Still, I was certainly considering the iPhone. Some of the new WinMo phones are starting to get interesting, but I found all the interfaces really clunky.
Last Monday (the Monday after it's release), I went into a Sprint store to check out the Pre and get an opinion. I spent about an hour playing with one, and was impressed with what I found. That Tuedsay, I spent another hour in the same store testing for things I had read about on various forums (especially concerning build quality). Everything seemed fine, so I pulled the trigger and bought the phone. I had already verified that Sprint coverage in my area was good, so I had no problems making that decision (my Pearl is on TMo, can't be any worse than them).
Activating the phone was a breeze, and after spending about 10 min putting in some information in the email, calendar, and messaging configs I walked out of the store with my phone instantly usable. All of my friends were in the address book, complete with email, phone, IM nicks, pics, etc, and my calendar was synchronized.
My overall impression so far is that it's a night and day different experience than I had with the Storm. The messaging is better than I've seen on any mobile device, and the interface is extremely intuitive. Unlike BB or WinMo, it's very clear when a program is running in the background, and when it's closed. Everything is snappy and responsive. Text editing is light years ahead of the Storm, and I can type faster on the keyboard than I ever did on the Storm and about on par with the Pearl (I have big fingers). The browser easily smokes anything that's ever been on a Blackberry device.
The first full day, the Pre went through the battery pretty quickly (thank you Touchstone). But I got a tip that the battery life actually gets better if you keep wifi on and use it primarily, which ended up being true in my case. I associated to both the APs at work and home and battery usage is now easily on par with what I was getting on my Storm (but the Pearl smokes them both). Because it's so easy to charge the Pre, this is not a big deal for me even if it's never addressed. As long as I can get a full day out of it I'm happy.
Yes, the App store is sparse right now, but I'm not worried about that. The Palm programming community has been prolific in the past, and the WebOS platform is demonstrating that it's extremely easy to develop towards. Really though, the only apps I'm waiting on are Skype and a VNC solution. Given the speed at which the Pre is being researched, I'm expecting a slew of homebrew apps to be available before the end of the month (I won't consider Classic as an app solution until it becomes more robust).
So overall, I find the Pre a much more useful and enjoyable phone than the Storm has ever been for me.
(TLDR - Pre rocks, Storm blows)
I made the switch...Storm to Pre 
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