Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

Christmas came early for us in the form of a new mobile phone with the look and feel of a flat black pebble, or—as it had been hyped following its much-applauded big reveal at a major 2009 electronics show in Las Vegas—a river stone whose rough edges have been smoothed out by running water over the ages.

We are, of course, talking about the Pre, the latest smart phone from the Sunnyvale, California-based Palm Inc. that is, however, unlike anything the venerable tech company has put out, which is saying a lot. After all, it was Palm that redefined the concept of mobile computing with its iconic Palm Pilot personal information manager, and, later, that of wireless communications with its revolutionary Treo smartphone.

With the 3G-packing, WiFi-toting Pre, Palm has chosen to break free from the past, abandoning its super-efficient but noticeably aging operating system to create a new paradigm in the way all the bits of personal information we have in the ethers are effortlessly pulled together, managed and perused by ourselves. The new paradigm is called webOS, a brand-new operating system based on Linux and fueled by a technology called Synergy, both of which drew universal acclaim when the Pre made its debut at CES.

It was a vision of the future that we readily embraced well before the Pre’s availability in the Asia-Pacific region could be announced. In fact, it hasn’t yet, although the popular conjecture among not a few Palm fans and those in the tech media here until recently has been that Palm’s “new-ness” goodness should be arriving in stores just in time for the busy holiday season.

Imagine our increasing anxiety then when in various news reports, Palm underscored its focus on opening and developing markets for the Pre in the Americas and everywhere in Europe, without even a cursory mention of the Asia-Pacific region. Add to that the fact that nobody from among local wireless communications purveyors here would confirm the Pre’s upcoming availability, and we began to seriously consider relocating to the U.S. or Europe to get our Pre fix.

But here we are now, midway into our second week with the Palm Pre, this courtesy of well-traveled gentleman who looked kindly on our mounting despair and acquired for our purchase an open line unit from Germany, and the honeymoon is far from over. Perhaps it never will.

Let us just say outright to Pinoys around these parts who have been tracking the journey of the Palm Pre: the widespread praise it has met in the tech media since its big reveal and US market debut in June, all that is true and not empty blandishments by writers who like to show off their word skills.

Weighing at a mere 135 grams and measuring 0.67 inches at its thickest point, its slider form factor wrapped in a handsome piano black finish, the Palm Pre is gorgeous to hold and behold, its lines kept clean and sleek as Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein and his designers apparently had a resolute eye toward exquisite minimalism. webOS, meanwhile, now at version 1.3.1, is the most visually stunning environment to come to mobile phones, smartphone or otherwise, in recent years, its gorgeous aesthetics rivaled only by the intelligent and sensible choices that were made in designing that particular environment, and by the smart technologies—notably Synergy—hidden underneath the OS’s glossy exterior but chugging along to provide the user an almost seamless experience.

Indeed, one can jump into the Palm Pre and webOS with just a cursory look at the manual and be up and running in about an hour or even less. Largely manipulated via finger gestures on the screen and on the gesture area just below the display, the platform provides all manner of discreet visual cues so that one will never be lost in the webOS environment. Want to go back to a previous application window? Just flick a finger to the left on the gesture area. Need to see more options to a particular application? Just press the header with the tiny arrow and voila! Need to close an application or two from the five you have running on this truly multitasking genius? Just flick the representative “cards”—webOS uses a deck-of-cards paradigm in its multitasking implementation—to the top of the screen and away they go. What’s with the ripple effect with touching an application icon on the launcher page? One quickly discovers that one can rearrange icons as one pleases by simply dragging. With webOS, there is no futzing with arcane configurations, which has been our experience with the Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 platforms.

The more complicated stuff—say, populating your calendar and addressbook with the data you have stored on Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, LinkedIn and Microsoft Exchange—Synergy takes care off with the most minimal fuss (you only need to provide your user name and password). As soon as we keyed in the log-in details to our Google, Facebook and Yahoo accounts, the Pre promptly pulled in all the information from these various sources and collated them in such an incredibly intelligent fashion that it was almost like having a religious experience. Appointments in our Google and Yahoo calendars were entered correctly—and with their corresponding alarms already set. The few contacts with multiple entries that Synergy had missed to, well, synergize, we were able to easily link together. With webOS’s expert handling of your data residing in the so-called cloud, Palm has chosen to eschew desktop sync solution as it leverages cloud computing, including the company’s own Palm Profile cloud solution, in ways no other smartphone does. This way, just in case your beloved Pre gets lost or is stolen, you can simply get another Pre, sync with the cloud straight away and have all of your important data in a flash.

Of course, there will be users who will want a desktop sync solution as well, and third-party vendors have been stepping up the plate.

Another excellent webOS feature is how it treats messaging with similar cohesion, allowing us to communicate with friends, family and peers in a seamless single interface through various platforms (SMS, instant messaging, email) so that we can focus on the conversation and not jumping through a variety of applications to make ourselves heard. By the way, if you’re a huge fan of Google’s free email service, you would be pleased to know that the webOS does Gmail as good or, from where we sit, even better than Android, Google’s very own mobile device platform.

The three-megapixel camera with LED flash and extended depth of field, for one, yields surprisingly good results for a camera phone, with no lag between the second you press the soft button to capture an image and that image is captured by the lens and displayed on the screen—and you even get the option to easily upload your snap, which should be typically usable even when taken in less than optimal lighting conditions, directly to Facebook, another one of webOS’s niceties.

But while the photo viewer benefits from the webOS’s built-in, smooth-as-butter accelerometer, allowing you to view images in either a portrait or horizontal orientation with just a flick of the wrist, the camera doesn’t capture video, although a future OS update is expected to enable that feature.

Meanwhile, both the music player, the video player on the Palm Pre also provide a similarly pleasurable multimedia experience, with the music player featuring support for album art and playlists, and the video playback defaulting to landscape mode to take advantage of the Pre’s gorgeously bright and vibrant 3.1 multitouch screen.

Yes, unlike most Android and Windows Mobile smartphones, and quite like that from a little tech company based in Cupertino, California, the Palm Pre features multitouch goodness, allowing you to zoom in and out of web pages (the webOS’s WebKit-based browser rivals the best of mobile browsers), photos and documents with a quick pinch or spread of those digits.

So, what’s the big catch—because, you will say, there’s always a catch or three, even with the distastefully dubbed “Jesus Phone”, right? And, yes, you would right, and with the Palm Pre there are a couple, although you would be wrong to think it is the QWERTY keyboard, which a few reviewers offshore have cited as being too cramped and too small. Sure, it may not be up to the standards of Palm’s venerable Treo smartphones, whose excellent keyboard set the benchmark for one-handed usability in smartphones, but the Pre’s is nonetheless perfectly usable.

You would be wrong, as well, to think it’s the lack of third-party applications, which iPhone fanboys like to crow about. While the iPhone went for a year without even a fart app in sight, there are already close to a thousand apps and games available to the webOS a mere six months after it was released, and the numbers can only increase as the Pre and the new Palm Pixi come into more carriers and, consequently, more users everywhere in the world.

No, the two issues that linger about the Palm Pre, from where we sit, are its slider form factor and the battery life. As with what some tech bloggers and users have reported in blogs and other online fora, the slider of our Pre feels a smite loose resulting in an ever-so-slight wobble that may or may not get a bit more loose down the road.

With regards to the Pre’s battery life—unlike with the Palm Treo 680, the smartphone that continue to serve us well some four years after our acquisition and which continues to power our mobile-oriented lifestyle for more than a full day of typical-to-heavy usage, we find ourselves having to charge the Pre by late afternoon to ensure that it would serve us through the night.

So, do these twin issues detract from our Pre experience?

Not in the least. Sure, with the wobble in mind, we are indeed a bit more careful in our handling of this gorgeous piece of technology, but ultimately the slight give is a flaw inherent in designs featuring moving parts.

As for the battery life, that is the tradeoff to having a smart operating system that routinely goes online to aggregate the various bits of your personal and professional life into a perfectly usable whole. It is also a sad reflection that even as technology has moved forward at a rapid pace, the batteries that power all kinds of technology have not kept apace.