My friend Gary asked me for some advice on buying a new “smartphone”, specifically wanting to know which way he should go between a Blackberry and an iPhone. In thinking about answering him, I decided to make it a three way comparison, adding in the new Palm Pre, the other “do it all” phone that is getting good buzz these days.

I’ve limited the discussion to those three, because in my mind they are the best implementation of a true “smartphone”, meaning a phone that is equally capable of voice calls, email, internet surfing, and multi-media entertainment. There are other good phones out there, and I’ve looked hard at all of them, but I just don’t find any other models that rate with this trio. (Sorry, Windows Mobile phone fans.)

Let’s start with the Blackberry. Actually Blackberry is a whole family of phones, built on the oldest and probably most “bullet-proof” smartphone platform. There are a bunch of different models, but right now the two most popular Blackberry units going are the 8300 series known as the “Curve” which sports an actual small QWERTY-style keyboard and the 9500 series, the all touch screen Blackberry Storm.

The Curve is available on all of the major cellular carriers, while the Storm is only on Verizon at this writing. While both phones use the Blackberry operating system, they are quite different in how they look and function, given the Storm’s attempt to be “iPhone-like” with its touch screen interface. Simply put, I tried the Storm (twice actually) but just didn’t find it intuitive, and was underwhelmed by it’s touch and sometimes touch and press-to-click interface. If you can get past that hurdle, the Storm does a good job with all of its functions, including the best looking pictures and video of any phone out there.

The Curve might be seen as more pedestrian, but its’ form is light and modern enough to not be as completely buttoned up for business as most other Blackberry models. The latest Curve model on the Sprint network also includes the Nextel 2-Way “walkie talkie” capability, which makes it even more of a first-class business tool for many.

The Curve will be improved upon this summer by Blackberry maker Research-In-Motion’s latest model, the Blackberry Tour. The Tour will be Verizon and Sprint’s counterpart for the Blackberry Bold, which is available from AT&T and T-Mobile. Both the Tour and the Bold are larger than the Curve, but feature a bigger, higher resolution screen with an operating system more in line with the Storm–with that actual keyboard.

No matter what Blackberry we are talking about, the number one thing to know is that all Blackberry phones are built around their number one strength, which is email. If you are buying a smartphone just for making calls and sending/receiving email, you can stop reading the rest of this and just go buy whatever Blackberry model that you like. Blackberry does industrial-strength email, so much so, that many companies have a Blackberry specific server to their email system.

So why then would someone buy anything else? Well, the answer my friends, is everything else. Because that is what the iPhone has been about since being introduced two years ago. The iPhone is of course, what happens when you take the idea of merging a phone, an email device and that entertainment phenomenon known as the iPod. And because it was put together by Apple, it has redefined the design of cell phones ever since.

My position is that many people missed what the real key to the iPhone’s success would be, much like they missed why the iPod would be the most successful music player made since the Sony Walkman redefined the concept of high quality portable music in the early 80s. Apple created an infrastructure to allow for the on demand delivery (via the internet) of music, then movies and TV shows.

So it would make sense that when Apple added a phone and email functionality to the iPod, it would be capable of playing the music, movies and TV shows. And most companies would have thought that was enough. But where other companies see just a high powered cell phone, Apple saw a small form computing platform, and so added the ability for third parties to write small software programs to run on the iPhone, and created the ability to distribute these programs on the same iTunes distribution platform. The applications store.

And thus the word “app” entered the language.

So why is it so important, as Apple has shown us through so many television commercials, to be able to say: “Yeah, there’s an app for that.” Because it means that the iPhone is not only able to make phone calls, send/receive email, play music, movies and TV shows–but it can also do about 50 thousand other things–from being a E6B flight computer (a kind of specialized calculator that pilots rely on) to making simulated fart sounds at the press of a button. There are some 50 thousand “apps” in the app store, and they make the iPhone capable of doing so many other things. So many that there have been over a Billion apps downloaded to date.

Speaking of dates, the third generation of the iPhone was released today, the 3Gs. After spending about 12 hours with one, I can say that it does so much, so very well–that the only real criticism of the phone will still be from the naysayers who will bemoan the lack of a physical keyboard. (The majority of the rest of the criticisms revolve around the shortcomings of AT&T–the exclusive cell phone carrier of the iPhone since its debut and, if we believe the company’s executives, for the foreseeable future.)

And that lack of a keyboard would be where the new Palm Pre comes into the battle. Palm invented the idea of carrying around an electronic gizmo with a touch screen that would organize your life. The Palm Pilot created the PDA (personal digital assistant) category in 1996, and then a company called Handspring added the functions of a cell phone to the Palm software, ultimately creating the first practical and affordable “smartphone” with it’s Treo device in 2002. Palm eventually bought out Handspring and while it lead the category for years to come, in recent years Palm has fallen behind Blackberry and more recently the iPhone.

So Palm brought on board a team of former Apple gurus, including Jon Rubenstein who was instrumental in the creation of the iPod itself. And after two years of development, the Palm Pre was launched on June 6th, and for a first generation product shows some of the best elements of both the Blackberry and the iPhone, rolled into one stylish device that features both an iPhone inspired touchscreen married to a slide-out Blackberry inspired keyboard.

But as you might suspect, the Palm Pre is targeted at both Blackberry users with a very strong emphasis on email, along with other text messaging and social networking features–and iPhone users with a small, but growing assortment of “apps”. The Pre’s WebOS software is, as the name suggests, very integrated into using the web and appears to best the iPhone by being somewhat more facile in running multiple programs at one time, and by having a replaceable battery pack (the iPhone’s battery is sealed inside the unit.) So far, the Pre is also locked into one cell phone carrier, Sprint.

So what to tell Gary? He’s a busy executive who relies on email, so a Blackberry would be a great choice. But he also travels a bunch, so carrying an iPhone would also be a solid choice to give him so much functionality–and dare I say it–fun things to do while on the road. Finally, the Palm Pre isn’t just a good compromise between the two–it actually is defining some new standards of its own.

Each of these phones will run between 200 and 300 bucks to purchase along with a new 2 year contract, though Apple has repositioned its iPhone 3G–the model introduced just last year with just a few less features and a slightly slower batch of electronics inside–for about a hundred dollars.

My best advice on which to get is to first make the determination of which cell phone carrier gives you the best service where you need it. Then spending some time playing with each of the phones available on your service is a must. (Or borrow each from a friend who already owns one.) What one person loves, is of course another person’s most annoying feature.

Of these three, I find my love, particularly in it’s latest incarnation, is Apple’s iPhone. Still the sleekest form, but now more powerful in the 3Gs model than the prior two generations. The App Store seems to always have “an app for that”, no matter what it is I want to do. And now with a version that stores a massive 32 gigabytes of whatever you want to put into it, the iPhone really is the electronic Swiss Army Knife of both road warriors and regular folks, alike.

Simply put, I agree with reviewer Jason Chen of the website Gizmodo, who writes the iPhone 3Gs is “the best all around smartphone available.”