As usual, the vast majority of the goods on display at CES were evolutionary and rather humdrum. Polaroid had a new digital camera on display that can print photos instantly. (Didn't a company called Polaroid invent that decades ago?) Dell, HP and Sony all took the wraps off more "netbook" computers — those miniature laptops with keyboards just small enough it's difficult to type. And, of course, Microsoft released the first public beta of Windows 7, otherwise known as "what Vista should have been two years ago."

One company, though, announced a product so great I sat through an hour-long video replay of the announcement event. That product, is, of course, Palm's new smartphone, the Pre. I would be surprised if the engineers down in Cupertino aren't working overtime this afternoon to catch up. The team at Palm has packed the Pre with a host of brilliant, incredibly well-engineered features that make my iPhone look clunky.

The Pre's hardware is nothing to write home about. Palm's industrial design team did a nice job on the device, though the Pre's design is inferior to that of the iPhone. The capacitive touchscreen looks more or less the same as the one found in the HTC G1, the iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm. Granted, it appears Palm has done much more work than either Google or RIM on the software side, so that the touchscreen on the new Pre supports the kind of wonderful multi-touch gesturing that makes the iPhone such a fantastic product.

Palm did, however, make one interesting and decidedly brilliant hardware design choice. Unlike any other smartphone I know of, the Pre features a touch-sensitive "gesture area" underneath the screen. From what I saw in Palm's launch presentation, this gives the device a slew of extra capabilities.

For instance, reading long web articles, from the New York Times or Wikipedia, can be a chore on the iPhone. Of course, I have to keep flicking the page down as I read. Unfortunately that means I must move my finger onto the screen, estimate the correct amount of "scroll" I need to advance just enough to read the next paragraph, but not so much that I miss some of the article, and I have no choice but to obscure a quarter of the screen with my thumb, making what's on the screen difficult to discern.

Not a problem with the gesture area on the Pre. One simply swipes a finger downwards or upwards in the gesture area — leaving the display uncluttered by an extra thumb — and the device automatically scrolls the page one screen-length up or down. Genius.

On the software side, Palm has come up with myriad ingenious software innovations. Its Synergy technology automatically and — more importantly — intelligently aggregates data from all corners of the Cloud and presents it in a useful way. Rather than feature umpteen messaging applications — one for AIM, one for SMS, one for MMS, etc. — the Pre's software just lumps all the messages between you and a given contact, regardless of what service or protocol they came from, into one long thread. The Synergy software enables the Address Book application to pull data, not just from a single sync source, but from Exchange, Google, Facebook and many other repositories of personal data. So, no need to worry whether you copied someone's phone number from Facebook into your iPhone or Google account. If it's out there, the Pre will find it.

The new Palm WebOS, which powers the Pre, also deals with notifications far more elegantly than on any other device I've used. Whereas a run-of-the-mill Nokia, or even the iPhone stops everything and displays an intrusive box when an alarm goes off or a text message arrives, the Pre simply slides a small notification onto the bottom of the display, leaving the open application completely unaffected.

I could go on and on about how much I like of what I've seen of the Palm Pre. Jon Rubenstein — who, by the by, helped Apple develop the original iPod — and his team have done a fantastic job. I doubt I will give up my iPhone the moment the Pre goes on sale. The iPhone is pretty great. But I will not hesitate to recommend the Pre to anyone in the market for a smartphone. And I sincerely hope Apple has something spectacular in hand for the next version of the iPhone. The competition has finally arrived.