You’ve seen that movie, right? The one where a pair of lovable sad-sack losers team up to defeat the smug athletic golden boy?

If not, you’re about to. It’s called “Palm Pre vs. iPhone.”

The star of this summer blockbuster is Palm. Over the years, this once-great company lost its talent for everything but making business blunders. Pundits were predicting Palm’s passing  but then the new Palm Pre appeared.

The Pre, which goes on sale Saturday, is an elegant, joyous, multitouch smartphone; it’s the iPhone remixed. That’s no surprise, really; its primary mastermind was Jon Rubinstein, who joined Palm after working with Steve Jobs of Apple, on and off, for 16 years. Once at Palm, he hired 250 engineers from Apple and elsewhere, and challenged them to out-iPhone the iPhone.

That the Pre even comes close to succeeding is astonishing. As so many awful “iPhone killers” have demonstrated, most efforts to replicate the iPhone result in hideous designed-by-committee messes.