The achilles heel of the Palm Pre is likely the lack of expansion memory via MicroSD. For most people the 8GB of onboard memory will be fine, but for many others it simply won’t do. So why did they leave MicroSD out? Purely for aesthetics.

On Facebook, Palm’s Matt Crowley (Product Manager) is taking a week (1/21 to 1/28) to answer questions about the Palm Pre and among the most interesting of tidbits is Palm’s reason to exlude MicroSD – the look and feel of the Pre had to be perfect and adding anything else would have compromised this ultimate priority:

‘Design’ was the highest goal on the Palm Pre project. The phone has to look and function great in the hand and up against the face on a call. The decision to include or not include expandable storage is an easy one when design is the highest priority. The physical size of the device would have been compromised if we added another physical component to Pre. Just a millimeter can seriously impact the curvature of the design in a way that minimizes the design intent. We wanted to maintain a slick curved slider design without building out too much thickness. When you look at the two parts of the product and see how thin they really are, you may be amazed that we were able to fit everything in. And yes, all the stuff does fit.

The other advantage of embedded memory is that you have a large amount of storage out of the box for media and files. Including 8GBs of storage on the phone is a large amount of storage for many people, but not all. Yes, not all. We know that not everyone will be happy, but that is one of many decisions that needs to be made and the product goals help define these decisions.

The last point I will make on storage is to think about how you currently use remote storage. For example, I have my Google Calendar for family events and I have my corporate EAS Outlook calendar. These calendars are pulled down from remote storage (Internet) to my device. If my device is new, all I need to do is log into my account(s) and the content gets pulled to my device over the air. This is true for Contacts as well. We call this “Synergy”. This is something that is just straight out cool. Contacts are now pulled down from the web to my device. So if you update your Facebook contact information, and I am friends with you, your contact information will be updated on my Palm Pre address book. Think about that for a second. I no longer need to cable my device to my computer to make an update to my contacts. I get the updates over the air. Now my contact information is more up to date and if my device is replaced or new, I just enter my account information and I get it over the air to the device. This puts a whole new thought on external storage. The Internet is a BIG microSD card.

So there you have it. On the one side of the spectrum you have the Android G1 which shoots for practicality at the expense of design. On the other side of the spectrum you have the iPhone which shoots for design at the expense of practicality. Palm probably would have fared well to shoot in the middle of those two… but instead it looks like they’re shooting for Apple and the iPhone.

However, we’ll probably see more WebOS devices released this year which DO have a MicroSD card. Remember, the Palm Pre is just one phone on a fully capable platform.