Dismantling a Palm Pre piece by piece has revealed it to be very efficiently designed; so much so that, at points, it appears better put together than the Apple iPhone many see as its role model.

The component teardown by iFixit notes that the smartphone’s thicker shape — necessary to accommodate the slide-out keyboard — gives Palm added design freedom to optimize the design where the iPhone is relatively straitjacketed by its thinner shape.

One of the obvious changes is a removable back panel that lets owners themselves replace the battery rather than take the device into a store. Similarly, the conspicuous speaker on the back of the Pre is louder than the small example on the iPhone, and the space affords room for an inductive (wire-free) charging system through an optional dock. That Palm has fitted a keyboard on its phone but managed to produce a device effectively as large as the iPhone is “very impressive,” iFixit says.

The Apple-like quality isn’t likely to be coincidental. Palm is thought to have scored a coup when it hired Jon Rubinstein as an executive board chairman, supplying it with one of the iPod’s key creators. Aside from steering Palm away from an increasingly formulaic series of PalmOS and Windows Mobile devices, Rubinstein is known to have added or replaced many of Palm’s engineers with former Apple employees, some of whom had worked on the iPhone earlier in its history.