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The more I think about it the more I believe that Apple may have dealth a death blow to Palm on Monday.

Don’t ge me wrong, I think the Palm Pre is a terrific phone. I enjoyed my week with my test handset. If there were no iPhones the Palm Pre would rule.

I proudly showed it to attendees at this past weekend’s super charity Auction Napa Valley in California. Everyone wanted to touch it and seemed quite impressed.

I also let a young, rabid iPhone fan try the Pre. After just a few minutes, Ian Christopher Kirk was mighty impressed:

“The first moment I held the Pre I fell in love with its slick look and feel and its super easy to use touch capabilities.
The one thing I dislike is the flip keyboard. Once you push the keyboard out it completely changes the feel of the phone. It goes from slick to very abnormal.
The keyboard itself is too small. I have relatively average size fingers and it is very hard to type. I would recommend the Pre to anyone – but the keyboard might be a hassle…”

But Palm may be too late. They now have to contend with the iPhone 3G-S. Among its many new features, Apple’s third generation smarphone has double the operating memory and double the speed of the last iPhone.

There’s also twice as much storage memory (16 GB) which is twice as much memory as inside the older 3G – and twice as much as in the Palm Pre. Don’t forget – they’re the same price – $200 with 2-year contracts (but without Sprint’s deal-killing $100 rebate scheme).

I won’t even dwell on the fact that there’s also a new 32 GB iPhone 3G-S which will sell for $300.

On top of all that is the real killer — Apple’s genius plan to continue marketing last year’s 8 GB iPhone 3G while lowering the price to 100 bucks. By doing that they literally cut the feet out from under the Palm/Sprint possibly killing the new Pre as well as those two companies in the process.

Palm and Sprint don’t have the luxury to wait until the Pre builds-up sales steam and market share. They don’t have the luxury of waiting until there are enough new Pre apps to make WebOS a financially viable contender. And they don’t have the luxury of waiting to release a GSM version of the Pre for nearly every other cell phone market on the planet.

Game. Set. Match.

It will be interesting to see if anyone can ever catch Apple.