You can judge a smartphone these days by looking at how much attention has been paid in designing a tip-calculator for it. Luckily for the Palm Pre, the developers of Tip ‘em! have built a tasteful and well-designed tip-calculator that does everything you need from such an app and bit more. The app presents fixed fields that you can modify by tapping on them and entering your check amount, the percentage tip that you want to add and how many people you want to split the tab with. You can even exclude the tax and other charges by entering them in a separate exclusion field. You can tip between 0% and 30% with this app, which should suffice for most situations. The design is in the form of an old-fashioned note-card placed on a checked tablecloth – very reminiscent of a small country diner. 

The app accepts a maximum check amount of four digits, which should hold up fine unless inflation goes through the roof, in which case tipping accurately will be the least of our worries. However, that means Pre users who travel to parts of the world with higher denomination currencies will find this app a little difficult to use (you could divide and multiply by hundred to accommodate things). You can split the tab by up to ten people. I tried to push the app a little by excluding more than the check amount, and it manages just fine without running into trouble with negative numbers and such. Overall, this Palm Pre app is visually delightful and easy-to-use. If you dine out frequently with quite a few people, it will save you a lot of headache.