Earlier I posted about the top ten Palm Pre features for business, starting with the first five. Here’s the final five:

5.  Palm Synergy
You can't appreciate Palm Synergy until you've experienced it.  If you are an IT administrator or just someone that needs to manage multiple MS Exchange e-mail accounts, then Synergy is a real sanity savor.

Let's say you have your typical work e-mail account like your.name@palm.com, but you also need to manage another account like support@palm.com. Sure, you can manage those multiple accounts on your single tasking iPhone by switching back and forth in your accounts menu, but with Synergy you can view both those accounts in the same view.  Even more cool is that when you respond to an e-mail, it automatically responds using the correct account...no extra thinking on your part!

Decide you want to send from one of your other accounts?  No problem, just tap the From field and select which account to send the e-mail from.  Of course, Synergy also works with calendar and contacts in the same way, so ya, you are finally getting your life together.

4.  Touchstone
Ever try to figure out which way to plug in your phone when you are in the middle of a phone call and your battery is almost dead?  Well, my friend, those days are over with the Palm Touchstone.

Touchstone uses a powerful magnet to hold your Pre at a viewable screen angle while it charges.  This takes the charging cradle to a whole new level and means no stress charging.  As you might expect from the Palm geniuses, they've also made it so that if you are in a phone call and place Pre on the Touchstone it automatically switches to speakerphone (and back when you remove it!).  That magnet is powerful enough to hold Pre in place while you continue using the touchscreen or even the physical keyboard.  Take that you other charging cradles!

3.  Notifications
You unlucky iPhone users have experienced it...you are in the middle of an e-mail, struggling to use your screen consuming virtual keyboard, when a calendar event reminder pops up right smack dab in the middle of the screen, screaming like a nagging spouse, "I don't care what you were doing, stop and look at me!"  Because webOS can do more than one thing at a time, it can also let you do more than one thing at a time.

Instead of popping up in the middle of the screen, notifications are displayed in a notification area at the bottom of the screen, quietly waiting for you decide what you would like to do.  You can keep on typing away at your e-mail, view the event, snooze the reminder, or dismiss it all together.  Running late, no worries.  There's actually one more thing you can do with an event notification, automatically contact meeting attendees.

Just by tapping this option in the notification, webOS opens an e-mail addressed to all of the meeting attendees and pre-populates it with "Running late...".  Not enough goodness for you?  How about this?  If you move into an area with poor coverage, like an elevator, and your call is dropped, webOS automatically prompts you asking if you would like to redial the dropped call.  Good idea or totally great idea?

2. Multi-tasking
Wow, this really is a great business feature and you probably don't even know you need it!  We've gotten so used to mobile devices telling us how we should work and when we should answer the phone and other notifications that we've forgotten that these are supposed to be productivity enhancing devices that remove barriers to productivity, not erect new barriers.
Beside just being a lot of fun to move in card view (think deck of cards with each card being a window into the running application) from e-mail to IM to multiple web pages with just a quick swipe of your finger, I like to keep my calendar and e-mail applications open in card view so that I can check my calendar for open times when I'm writing an e-mail to set an appointment with a client.
Multi-tasking means freedom of choice.

1.  Future proof
Since the release of Pre, Palm has already updated their OS three times and promises regular updates going forward.  The traditional model is to tell users to just wait until the next OS release before they can get updates and then they have to download the firmware while tethered to a PC.  Waiting typically means waiting for years, in the case of iPhone or WinMo, before users get any new software features for their mobile device.  With automatic over the air updates, Palm can respond quickly to the ever changing needs of users and future proof their investment, ensuring that webOS will never feel tired and worn-out and neither will you.

Let me know if you have other favorite features and stay tuned for upcoming blogs about the Palm Pre.

For more information on the Pre, visit this site: