"A lot of my students are Korean, [and] they all have the latest phones and know devices," she said.

Richard Rosmarin, another longtime Palm user, said he was eager to have a multitasking smartphone like the Pre so that he could read his e-mail while also listening to music from it in the background. "Of course my wife asked me if having this Pre is critical to my life, but I'm getting it anyway," he said.

Rosmarin, a restructuring consultant at Cornerstone Management LLC in Wellesley, Mass., has followed the fates of Palm and Sprint for a long time. "Sprint needs something like the Pre, since they've lost customers recently," he said. "They need a cool device with pizzazz like this."

Anne-Marie Kenney, an assistant dean of student life at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass., said having the Pre would help her sort through e-mail from Google, Yahoo and others more quickly in a common interface.

She smiled as she also bragged to people waiting in line that she could to get access to about 1,000 songs she has there. Even if Apple Inc. decides to turn off that sync capability soon, she said, she will sync them as soon as she can to have all the songs available on her Pre.