[Updated with Strategy Analytics comments] There are so many reviews of the Palm Pre online today that it’s hard to not find one on a major website. The Pre is doing well in the marketplace and I would think that anything anyone wanted to know about the device could be found online for free.

Strategy Analytics is a research firm that offers information on all sorts of markets and product types. Its latest offering is called the Mobile Device User Evaluation: Palm Pre. I’m not sure exactly what sort of info is in the report, because I am not going to shell out the $2,999 that the company is asking for it.

The summary claims that the report is of a user’s experience with the Pre conducted in June 2009 in San Diego. From what I can tell, this is basically a review of the handset and input from other users. I really can’t get what sets this apart from any other free Pre review out there, maybe I am missing something.

[via StrategyAnalytics]

Update July 17th 2009 (Chris Davies):

Strategy Analytics VP of User Experience Practice, Kevin Nolan, has been in touch with MyPre to put their report into better context.  Their “review” is in fact a usability benchmark, intended for business planners in the device and telecoms industry; we imagine they would be quite surprised if any individual attempted to buy their report!

Kevin has given us permission to include an extract from the report, to illustrate its focus.  Interestingly, their findings – from a “representative sample of smartphone buyers” – echo many of our own sentiments in our Palm Pre review, with praise for the ease of use and multi-tasking cards in webOS, while feeling more reserved about the extent to which Synergy includes all social-networking information, rather than a selected subset.  The absence of an on-screen keyboard – something we hope will be added by a third-party developer now that the Mojo SDK is on general release – is also flagged up.

Strategy Analytics’ Mobile User Experience team conducted a usability benchmark of the Palm Pre shortly after its launch in June 2009. This involved having a representative sample of smartphone buyers work through the process of setting up and using the main features of the Pre. By observing and measuring how easily target customers could achieve these actions, Strategy Analytics produced an assessment of how useful, usable and innovative these consumers considered the product to be.

In Strategy Analytics’ test, the Pre achieved an overall usability rating of 92% – ahead of competitor smartphones such as T-Mobile’s G1, Blackberry’s Storm, and Nokia’s E75. Only the latest version of the iPhone has achieved a higher rating in Strategy Analytics’ assessments, with a score of 96%.

The Palm Pre performed well for tasks related to contact management, playing music, camera, calendar, email setup and browsing the web. All of the smartphone buyers who tested the Pre were able to use these features easily and were very satisfied with the way these features of the Pre work.

All of the users loved the Pre’s ‘activity cards’ user interface – they preferred this way of moving between applications over all other smartphones currently available.

But Palm Synergy, the feature that allows Pre owners to combine multiple contact lists and calendars into one integrated feature, got a mixed response.

While the users liked having the option of combining multiple contact lists and calendars into one place, they were concerned that Synergy does not give them the option to choose which data from each type of account to import.

As messaging and social networking accounts become more integrated, Strategy Analytics has found that smartphone owners have concerns over how to identify the small circle of contacts with which they regularly interact via phone or text message from within a unified inbox with hundreds, or even thousands, of social networking connections.

Several of the users also complained about the lack of on-screen virtual keyboard on the Pre. They wanted to be able to enter short strings of text (e.g. a number in a contact card) without having to slide open the phone.