Dwight “The Houston Tiger” Silverman, like so many tech dudes, likes the Palm Pre and Pixi and, in a way, doesn’t understand why Palm is on the rocks. However, he got an email from a reader who described her Verizon experience as sub-par at best. It began poorly:

My original salesperson, upon hearing me say I was there for the Palm Pre, immediately mentioned that they were running a special on the Droid. I said terrific but I’m here for the Pre. The salesman finally got one out for me but no one at Verizon had any idea how it worked, how to set it up, or even how the screen functioned. It took Verizon over 3 hours just to the Pre “set up”, apparently because “the guy” who knew about the Pre was not there. I lovingly took my Pre home.

And got worse. Generally, it feels like Verizon and, to a degree, Sprint, have lumped WebOS in with the rest of the feature phones OSes. It’s not flashy enough to be an iPhone killer nor is it popular enough to beat Android in the mindshare game. It’s a floater, friends, and we all know where those eventually go.