The iPad 1 is $299 (yes, that's "refurbished," but many people believe that's just Apple's strategy for price discrimination since Apple "refurbished" products are indistinguishable from new).

That's the real competitor for the Kindle Fire, and with over twice the screen real estate, twice the memory, and an infinitely better selection of apps than are available in the Amazon Appstore, for most people the iPad is likely to be the better purchase.

You do realize that iOS and Android devices all have NPR tuner apps that let you listen to essentially any NPR station in the country, right?

ClickToFlash for Safari (similar to the FlashBlock plugin for Firefox) already does this, letting you load the H.264 video with QuickTime inline where the Flash video would normally go

Fundamentally the Pre and webOS have always been brilliant, second only to the iPhone in many ways and superior in a few (brilliant multitasking interface, brilliant unobtrusive notifications interface, gesture area below screen, keyboard, universal SMS/chat threads, TeleNav navigation included with plan, etc.). It also has a development platform with, for most developers, the shortest learning curve (using HTML/JavaScript for all the local apps).

The only things that have ever been an issue with the Pre were a few bugs (not show-stopping, mostly related to bluetooth and the like), almost all of which they've fixed by webOS 1.2; and the battery life, which seems to also have been somewhat mitigated by newer OS versions. The Pre as it stands now is a rock-solid platform, with very arguably better messaging capabilities than either the iPhone or the Storm for anyone who doesn't explicitly need Blackberry Enterprise Server compatibility (Pre works flawlessly with Exchange).

BB Storm on the other hand is glued to an antiquated OS that has had successive layers of cruft grafted onto it to modernize it (evidenced nowhere more than the fact that a touchscreen phone still essentially has an on-screen pointer, with the click action being separate from the touch action). Worse, it's much more of a bear from a developer standpoint.