Since the Pre's unveiling at CES 2009, the tech press has been caught up in the Rocky-like narrative of a former champ, now fallen on lean times, who tries to recapture his former glory by stepping in the ring with a make-or-break, high-profile exhibition fight against the reigning titleholder. But there's a serious problem with how this narrative has been presented, and specifically with the mobile device that has been cast in the part of the young, strutting, seemingly invincible heavyweight titleholder. See, the Palm Pre isn't out to KO the iPhone, but rather it's swinging at the real reigning champ: RIM's BlackBerry.

I've been using a Pre since late last week, and in this first installment of a multipart review I'll make the case that Palm is readying an eventual BlackBerry killer and discuss its messaging capabilities.?

But before I can make the case that the Pre is intended as a BlackBerry killer, with any harm to the iPhone being just collateral damage, some background is in order.

Why the iPhone and BlackBerry work

The key to the success of both the iPhone and the BlackBerry is that both of these devices do one thing spectacularly well, and they also do a few other things passably enough to get by. For the iPhone, that one thing is media playback and digital commerce (via the iTunes store); for BlackBerry, the focus is on e-mail (though calendering is a close second).

Palm is definitely competing directly with the iPhone in the area of packaging, at least.

Sure, RIM just jumped on the increasingly crowded App Store bandwagon, but as a platform the BlackBerry is really just a fantastic mobile e-mail client with a killer combination of enterprise messaging support (including remote wipe), battery life, calendering, and usability. Given this focus, it's no coincidence that the keyboard takes up half of the interface of a typical BlackBerry—this is a device that's tailor-made for constant two-way communication.

The iPhone, in contrast, is just a large screen, the main purpose of which is to show you things—pictures, video, webpages, maps. And its multitouch-based input scheme is less about two-way communication than it is about enabling you to manipulate and navigate the things that the screen is showing you.

Interfaces alone tell only part of the story, though. The iPhone works because it is seamlessly integrated into a unified media and e-commerce ecosystem that can quickly and easily deliver TV shows, movies, and music to a constellation of Apple devices, from a set-top box to a media player to a laptop. Even if the majority of iPhone users don't live the Mac life, Apple's phone still gives them access to that larger ecosystem by virtue of the fact that the device itself is an expression of it.

The BlackBerry, too, is part of a larger ecosystem—the world of enterprise messaging. The virtue of this system for business is that it plugs right into Exchange or Domino, so that you can use your existing infrastructure (plus RIM's server-side package) to enable and centrally manage messaging and calendaring for a mobile workforce.