Palm surprised everyone at CES with its Palm Pre. Even if I was skeptical at the beginning, it’s actutally one of the only iPhone competitor which is not a complete clone — Palm might actually have something.

Palm choose a different approach for the UXP on it’s phone. Compared to the iPhone, the Palm feels more “live.” Probably inspired by the page browsing in Safari Mobile, your applications floats on top on your screen, always running and ready to be used.

The Palm Pre feels also more responsive; especially went it comes to communicating with people. The IM and mail integration looks just great.

That said, Palm will have to convince people to buy it and build a strong community of developers. The thing is, I’m not buying the HTML5, CSS, Javascript model for mobile development.

When Apple first told developers that Safari would be the only SDK, the reaction was more than mitigated. Developers wants a native SDK, period — Palm used to do that on its first PDA and it was one of the success factor.

And who knows what Apple will do for the next iPhone OS. The WebOS UXP concepts could be implemented on the iPhone.

Also, watch this 5 part interview of Peter Skillman (VP of design for Palm) demonstrating the Pre to Mark Spoonauer; and read this article from Fred Cavazza (FR).