Palm Pre

I have a phone with a little apple on it next to this one, which do I grab most often? The pre. I like the look of this operating system and I think for the most part it's pretty easy to use. I think for the new user who hasn't used a smart phone you better read some forum how to's first. Now here's what I want to see in the future...
-Virtual keyboard included in the OS
-Searching in mail made easier
-A button to delete contacts instead of sliding them.
-Faster start up time.

Otherwise the phone has been excellent for me. I got the extended battery and I have had no issues with my phone since I got it 6 months ago. This OS is getting updated often so be sure to check for updates. The app store is finally on track, near 1000 apps now. I hope to see midomi's music app, a upgraded sprint nav and the browser getting upgrades often.

Pros:Great sound, Stylish, the operating system is nice., it is easy to setup email, IM.
Cons:no virtual keyboard included, some functionality deleting things should

Have had my Pre now for about 2 weeks- and although there are a few things that could be better, I really love this phone. It is great to be able to multitask. The screen shows pages beautifully, the phone is fast, and very easy to use. I love how it integrates all of my contacts into 1 simple "address book". I also like how my email accounts can all be checked at/synched into 1 viewing section. The look and feel of the phone is great- it does feel a little "plasticy" but so far no hardware issues. The battery life could definately be longer- but I have managed to deal with that by just having more chargers around- 1 touchstone at home, 1 car charger , and one wall unit at work. That pretty much took care of any battery issues I might have. I LOVE the touchstone- great idea. My husband has an iphone that I have played around on and I prefer my PRE no doubt. Now-we just need some apps to get up and going to really compete.
All in all- love it, love it, love it.

I HATE HATE HATE THE BATTERY, AS WELL AS OTHER MINOR THING BUT OTHER THAN THAT, I LOVE LOVE LOVE MY PRE. THE KEYBOARD WAS EASY TO GET USED TO, AS WELL AS THE TOUCH INTERFACE. IT COULD USE A TON MORE APPS, HOPEFULLY THE CATALOG IS VASTLY EXTENDED IN THE NEAR NEAR FUTURE.

Preface: I'm familiar with a lot of devices. I'm going to spare you the list, because I'm a phone-whore. Most of us here are. I only wish to provide my experience with WebOS and the Pre.

I finally got a Pre. It's got a beautiful UI and multitasking works like butter. I can hammer out messages quickly on the keyboard, and most of my basic requires are met by the device in its current state. That said, I feel Pre-fanboys have certainly misled people a bit about the flawless nature of this phone. Before I continue, I *know* there is no perfect phone. This is really more of a list of things people would miss coming from the iPhone.

*With as much crap as people gave the iPhone for not having copy and paste, the functionality is virtually non-existent on the Pre outside of forms providing immediate text entry. For now, I can capture screenshots like I did back in the iPhone 2.0 days. Not a big deal, but Palm really can do better than this. Even after the iPhone got copy and paste, people still criticized it without using it. It works pretty damned well. I can copy/paste text from emails, sms, safari (w/ graphics) and dump them where supported.

*You can't leave an application page while it's downloading. If you do, the program doesn't install. The iTunes App Store really spoils me there.

*There's no tabbed browsing, nor is there any way to spawn new cards from links or even SAVE IMAGES from the web.

*Why can't I scrub through tracks? If my favorite part of a 5 minute song is at 3:10, I have no choice but to listen the whole way through. Even the Instinct does this.

*The build quality isn't stellar. I won't take any arguments on this one. It's even worse than the damned Touch Pro, and that's saying a lot. Putting the Pre in one hand and the Instinct in the other, I have to scratch my head for a moment. The Instinct feels like the more expensive device. I'm glad I have TEP, because it feels as though the slider mechanism on this phone is cheap and *will* break with normal use.

*What's up with AJAX in the web browser? I really assumed too much when I heard the Pre's browser was webkit-based. Accessing things like dynamic menus is a chore, with the browser flashing the menu for a moment, then reloading the page. I hope this get's better. :/

*Email looks fine on this phone, but lack of a swipe gesture to move between messages is weird, in the same way it's weird the iPhone doesn't have it either. It seems more intuitive to me than hitting an arrow to advance. The Instinct does it, as does the Touch Pro. I'll take what I can get though. It's a hell of a lot better than Pocket Outlook's moldy "tap to view images.... tap to scroll right" nonsense.

*I feel like Palm left out a lot of missing basic features. Most of these can be found in the first section of the condensed tips and tricks PDF floating about the internet. That thing is full of typos, btw.

*When the phone goes off in my pocket and I don't hear the noise, there's no visual confirmation that I've missed any events. The Instinct really spoiled me here. The iPhone sucks just as badly for this, though, so I'll leave the Pre alone.

That's about it for rants. There's a LOT to love about this device, but this post is getting too lengthy. Features I love over any other phone right now:

*Universal Search. OMG. It's like quicksilver for my phone. I can launch applications rapidly with the push of a button followed by a tiny bit of typing. It's bliss, literally. iPhone has spotlight, but synergy let's me google search which is simply lovely to have. I can push out of any card and start typing to rapidly get into something else. I wish it let me search for media content on my phone like the iPhone does. OM NOM NOM good job Palm.

*I can't praise the multitasking and notifications system enough. It can't be beat. It makes me smile every time I'm listening to pandora, browsing, and receive an email or text. If i don't want it, I can swipe it away. If I do, it opens a new card and shows me what I need to see. One button press and a swipe later, I'm back in whatever I was doing. It's really too amazing for words.

*QUICK access to bluetooth and wifi modules in status menu. Tears of joy. On the iPhone I have to leave what I'm doing, tap once to go to first home page, then click settings, then click wifi and slide it off. It's worse for killing 3G or bluetooth. Apple does some retarded crap.

*The camera. The shutter is wicked fast. I wish there was an auto-focus, but I'll live. Fatty-sniping is no contest.

Thanks for reading my post. I know it'll anger some of the big fans and possibly echo some opinions already expressed.

Overall, I enjoy the phone.

After having a Treo for a couple of years, I was really excited to find out that Palm was going to put out a phone with a true touch screen. I did not realize how great a touch screen was until I purchased a Ipod touch a couple of months ago. That really made me want to get this phone. But, we had been with Verizon for a very long time and my husband was convinced that we didn't need this kind of phone so I forgot about it.
We were visiting a Best Buy to get me a new computer and he wandered over to the cell phone section and while I was buying the computer, he came trotting back to me saying "you HAVE to see the new Palm phone". Needless to say we purchased two Pres on the spot and later we went back and bought one for my son.
We did not realize everything that this type of phone can do. We never text-ed, or went on the internet because Verizon's data plan is so expensive,but with the data plan from Sprint we can do everything. We are very happy with these phones and look forward to new apps which I am sure will come in time. Keep up the good work, Palm.

I really can! Searously though, I am leaglly blind and up until now my smart phone's web browser & e-mail have been last ditch options. But with the ability to just expand the screen I can actually read it. I really can only think of one improvement, the ability to do the same with other apps. Maybe that might be incorperated into a future upgrade.

The hardware is excellent. A wonderful mix of a Blackberry like keyboard and a wonderful touchscreen experience.

The webOS is great have not had a single problem with it.

The applications that were preloaded and the few on the app store are quality apps. I know that over time developers will build a very nice collection of apps and the store will fill up very quickly.

The Palm Pre is the ultimate phone for business and pleasure.

Hardware: There are the usual dead/stuck pixels but a new one is white circles in the bottom of the screen that looks like there's excessive pressure coming from the back of the screen. Temperature seems to make it worse. My phone actually turns off and couldn’t boot up because I left it in the car and it got hot in the glove box. Fortunately my phone didn't have any LCD related issues. There seems to be enough complains about it that makes the hardware quality seem bad… along with other things. The slider twists in the close position and seems to be loose. Even mine is doing it and it's getting worse the more I use it, and I got mine the day it came out so the problem comes up pretty quick. Some people have been able to get it exchanged but it seems to be a known defect by Palm. Palm forum has indicated that they know the problem and the second batch of Palm have fixed this problem. There's also seemed to be an indication that there is a tool that can fix this problem that Sprint stores will have to fix the existing problem. There are also few people that have problems with the phone restarting when you slide it out due to bad wire connections. I think there's generally something wrong with their quality control. The phone smudges very easily so it's highly recommended you buy a case protector. If you have butter fingers like me then you should also buy a hard rubber case that helps you grip the phone. I dropped it once already (without case) but nothing broke. The keyboard could be bigger as it is a tiny bit smaller than a Treo’s; it looks like it has room to be bigger. The keys are very sticky and look like they could've raised it a bit higher with an actual tactile 'click' like the old Treo phones, but it's not. I also find typing on it makes the phone flap around a bit which, when I am aware, is annoying. It was very expected that the first people to get it will run into problems like these but later problems like the LCD and the loose slider will go away. The keyboard style won’t though. Other than these transient problems, the phone and its sliding action feel very solid.
WebOS: OS bootup takes a long time, around 2-3 minutes, but you would never normally restart the phone except for update so it isn’t a problem. The response of your command is quick. The gestures that you control the phone with are solid and well thought out. Multitasking works as said but the amount of programs you can have running at the same time depends on what they are. If you’re running the Sprint Navigator then you can’t run as many other programs. But most programs don’t take much memory so you can easily run five or more at the same time without slow down. It will tell you it ran out of memory and ask you to turn off apps. Wifi and Bluetooth can be turned on and off using the top right icons and it’s effortless.
Applications: The one that comes with the phone are solid except minor bugs. The Music app crashed/restart on me once when I was messing around with syncing playlist but that stopped when I figured out how to do it correctly with winamp. The sprint navigator contact list is supposed to be from your contact list but it doesn’t show any contacts even if you have them on your contact list. You also can’t rename favorite places after making them. I also encounter a problem with zooming with two fingers after I have the route in place. When I zoom in far enough it starts jumping all over the place and I have to zoom back out and try again, very annoying. The Email app mindlessly syncs all your gmail contacts to your contact list. ALL contacts, even people that aren’t in your phone’s contact list. This goes the same with Facebook. It will sync everyone. Unless you actively talk to everyone on your gmail and Facebook, don’t bother syncing for now. Hopefully they will fix this problem. Or you can make a gmail account just with information of people on your phone, but that’s a crappy workaround. Ignore how other people say there are no good apps in the App Catalog, which will change in time. Apps for WebOS will grow.
Multimedia: Youtube app is fantastic. Videos of HD quality will run butter smooth on the phone. It wowed me and my friends. Taking pictures is easy and fast. The picture quality is grainy even in full light, but that’s to be expected. Sound is fine and even better if you have a Bluetooth headset. No problem with voice quality on phone calls. Speaker phone is also good.
Internet: When it’s fast, it’s fast. When it’s slow it can just stop loading all together. But that hasn’t so much with the phone but has to do with where you are. When it’s fast, the pages load quickly and panning and zooming is smooth. I haven’t found a way to open links in new cards but all software concerns can be changed. Buyers should be more concern with things that can’t be changed. There is a huge and growing community that is just for developing the webOS and apps. Within a month there is already a fledging community that produced tweaks and hacks such as camera delay and tip calculator WITHOUT the official WebOS SDK. WebOS will be the reason you will want this phone above all else.
Usability: Type anything on the main screen and it will pull anything on your phone that relates to it. Whether it is a name in contact or an app or a URL. Battery life seems to get better as you use it. But you should charge it at every night. Using sprint navigator on the road seems to drain my battery very fast, so I might need a car charger in the future. Battery is not a problem unless you use Bluetooth, wifi, and GPS all at the same time.
Ending remarks: While there are issues with the hardware, it is getting fixed and they will go away. They seem to have concentrated on the software more than the hardware. WebOS is fantastic and easy to use. If you are going to buy the phone, be sure to pick up a rubber protector and scratch proof skin. Open source of the WebOS will invite a lot of developer to this phone and it will have healthy community looking after it. That is mainly why I bought this phone.

Ok, I'll try not to be a fanboi here, but I am loving this little phone. Granted it is my first smart phone, but it is really amazing. I purchased it since I am in the hospital and it helps me to stay connected with all of my friends and family, so it suits my purposes very well.

After the initial loading of my contacts from gmail, I am pretty happy with the fact that I now have this valuable info with me at all times. I was reading an article on Ars Technica about the differences between this and the iPhone and find that this phone suits me much better than that phone would ever have.

One thing I am not really happy with is the keyboard, since it is so small. However, I have come to use a single digit for data entry and so am getting used to that.

Another thing is the lack of applications out there currently. Palm really dropped the ball by not getting the SDK into the hands of developers BEFORE the launch. They've got a long row to hoe before they can catch up to the competition in that category. On that note, I have downloaded Pandora, Where, and Tweed and they are great little apps that cost nothing, yet provide some good entertainment and utility for the device. I also like the Sprint TV on-demand video app that is pre-loaded. It would be nice to be able to uninstall some of the default apps like NASCAR (I'm not a fan) or ESPN to reclaim some space, but I guess I can live with them for now.

Another oops is the lack of detailed documentation. Mine included two little pamphlets that really didn't tell me that much of some of the finer details. It would have been much nicer to have a more exhaustive resource included with the device. Thanks for sites like this on the internet, though.

On the plus side, the screen is gorgeous and the touch sensitivity seems well tuned. The design is also very nice and I love that I can do most tasks on it one-handed. The OS is fairly snappy and the gesture support is implemented fairly well. Call clarity is great and the speakerphone is pretty decent too. I do wish there were some sort of equalizer built in so that I could more finely tune the sound when I am listening to internet radio.

Overall I am quite happy with my purchase and with the service from sprint. If you are thinking of getting one, I'd recommend at least going to play with one at a sprint store, and then thinking on it for a bit to make sure it fits with what you want to do and expect out of a phone.

Thanks Palm for such a nice litle piece of tech--my friends are so jealous. :)

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