Now that Jamie Zawinsky’s gone iPhone, the angst over the Palm Pre has somewhat reignited.

I’m in the market for a smartphone. I still haven’t bought one. And I’m still considering the Palm Pre.

But the Pre isn’t without its problems. As has come up several times in the comments on Zawinsky’s post, the actual issues he’s experiencing aren’t global. I can attest to that just from playing with display models: Out of four display models at two Sprint stores, one had exactly the problems he experienced while the other three were perfect. That single ornery phone eventually quit responding to taps in the Calendar at all—you could swipe day to day (with a significant delay), but switching calendar modes or adding events was a no-go. And I killed another phone by attempting to install the Yelp app from the market.

It’s clear Palm wants to knock this one out of the park. It’s also clear they were rushed in getting to market. There are some absolutely baffling decisions if you look under the hood of the device, the developer documentation is inaccurate, and there’s way too much device-to-device variation for one software stack running on one hardware device.

The big question is whether Palm’s “refine and release” strategy can outpace customer and developer expectations. So far Palm’s proven to be both receptive and responsive to their community, but when it comes down to it, it’s not the device today that some customers (like jwz) needed or expected.

Certainly when I can freeze a demo phone within 5 minutes and run into another that won’t work, it gives me pause.

But after over a decade of mobile phone use, there’s one fact I’ve come to accept: Every phone is a piece of shit.

The question isn’t which phone is least shitty, but which shitty phone you hate the least. After all, some people use Windows Mobile phones by choice.