After using the new Palm Pre for one week I thought I would share my impressions of the device so far, which are very good.
HardwareThe Pre is on the small side when it comes to the typical smartphone platforms out there and sometimes this is a good thing. One of my concerns before actually seeing it in person was this size factor and my rather large hands and fingers. After a few minutes with the device those concerns were laid to rest. The Pre fits in my hands just fine and I have no problems navigating the onscreen interfaces with my fingers.
It’s hard to describe how the Pre feels in the hand unless you’ve held it yourself and it offers something of a dichotomy in its look and feel. On one hand it reminds me of a polished stone with it’s rounded edges and almost all black casing. When the screen is turned off it almost looks like a polished black rock. Yet when held in the hand it has a very organic feel to it, which is about as far from a rock as you can get. Clearly the team at Palm that worked on the hardware for the Pre were looking to take this device to the next level in look and feel.
The slide out full-QWERTY keyboard is much easier to use than I was expecting it to be. At this point, after a week of use, I’ve gotten my typing speed up to around 30-40 words per minute which is not half bad for such a device. This makes my third phone with a QWERTY keyboard and it’s not too shabby. The best QWERTY I used had to have been on the Motorola Q9c I used to own and my typing speed is almost up to where it was on that phone. Despite what other people may say I find the keyboard on the Pre to be much better than the Blackberry Curve 8330 that I just sold yesterday. If there is any fault to be found with the keyboard area on the Pre it’s the sharp edges around the keyboard tray that slides out from beneath the screen. I think the sharpness has been overblown by some but it does detract from the otherwise smooth feel of the phone. I do like the spring loaded locking action when opening and closing the keyboard but I’m curious as to how it will hold up after a few more months of use. A couple of handy features are a dedicated @ symbol and period. Nice!
Palm looks to have taken the minimalist approach to physical controls on the case of the phone. There is the dedicated ringer switch at the top of the device located next to the power button that does double duty to lock the device and turn on and off the screen. On the left side are the volume up and down keys and beneath the screen and gestures area is one round home button that looks like a trackball but is not. The only other exceptions to the smoothness of the case are the 3.5mm headphone jack at the top of the phone and the MicroUSB connector on the right side of the phone. In fact it’s the MicroUSB connector cover that is the only blemish to the case and makes me wonder if it was an afterthought. It’s downright flimsy and if anything on the Pre will fail first I think it’s going to be this! Not only that but it’s a royal pain to remove!
The screen is one of the shining points of the Pre! It’s bright, even at the lowest settings and I have no problems reading it in sunlight. This is the first capacitive touch screen I’ve used and at this point after only one week of use I don’t know if I could go back to a resistive touch screen. It’s much more accurate that I was expecting it to be and I’ve not had any calibration problems with it at all. The screen controls actually extend beneath the viewable area into what Palm is calling the Gestures area. This boils down to an extra control surface and it comes in handy and does not take long to get used to.
The Pre is made of a thick, high quality plastic and after my first week of use I’ve not had it scratch anywhere. Of course I’m keeping it in a case but I’ve read of people who have not used a case running into issues. At the moment I’m debating a couple of different protection options including Invisible Shield. Even though it is made of plastic the device just feels solid and I like that. It’s certainly much better than the plastic toy feel of the Blackberry Curve!
The Pre has a 3MP camera with LED flash and it’s one of the better cameras I’ve seen or used on a phone. Once nice thing is just how fast this camera is at taking shots! Think rapid fire and so far the limiting factor seems to be how fast I can click the shutter.
Operating System and SoftwareI used to be a PalmOS fan and have owned two previous Palm PDA’s (Palm Vx and Tungsten E) and found them both to be very capable devices, in their time. However, I think most tech geeks can agree the PalmOS is beyond dated and was in dire need of something else. Enter the new WebOS based on Linux!
You can do a Google search or read various tech blogs to get a more detailed analysis of WebOS and it’s many capabilities. Instead I’ll concentrate on my experiences in using it.
I probably had an unfair advantage over 90% of people who have purchased a Pre in the last week in that I’ve been following this device since it was announced back at CES 2009 in January this year and already knew the basics (okay, I’ll admit I downloaded and read the Pre manual a full five days before the device was released). However, when you first activate the device the Pre walks you through a tutorial on how to interact with WebOS which covers all the basics to get you up and running.
One thing I really like about the Pre is its Synergy feature. Essentially it will combine all your contacts between Gmail, Facebook, Exchange (if you use it), and then combine them all on your phone. I was worried this would make a hodge podge in my contacts but the Pre shows different layers among any duplicate contacts. Combined with the Universal Search features and really all you have to do is pop out the keyboard and start typing a name and the contact you’re looking for comes up. Further, the phone backs up all your information daily to your Palm Profile (you set it up when you activate the phone). Palm includes a download that will allow a one time sync to your desktop PIM of choice for your initial contact import. Several third party software vendors are coming out with syncing platforms for those who prefer the more traditional approach. At first I thought I would end up getting one of these third party solutions but after a week with the Pre I don’t really feel the need. I’m set to sync all my information to both my Gmail contacts and my Palm Profile. Another feature of Synergy I’m using more than I thought I would is the integration with my Google Calendar. It’s just easier to use than Outlook and I like having the information available on my phone or any computer with a web browser.
Email is great on this phone, better than my experiences with the Blackberry Curve and any Windows Mobile device I’ve used. If you use Gmail (like I do) then you get push email support or you can set the device to check for new mail at various intervals. I’m sticking with push email as I just like it. The Pre supports full HTML email and they look great on the phone. I’m guessing part of this has to do with the fact that apps are written for WebOS based on web standards and the same rendering engine of the WebKit based browser is used for email. I can’t say this enough, email is great on the Pre!
SMS and MMS messaging are threaded and when new messages arrive, whether email, SMS or MMS, or IM, the notification process is nice and unobtrusive. Essentially the bottom of the screen is your notification area and a symbol denoting which kind of message has arrived shows up. None of that whole alert pop-up thing with Windows Mobile interrupting what you may be doing or working on.
The Pre comes with several included apps preloaded and so far I’m impressed with most of the offerings. The PDF viewer is the best I’ve used this side of a traditional computer and wicked fast when it comes to navigating within a document. Sprint TV looks the best I’ve yet to see on any Sprint phones. Any of the location/GPS based apps lock on in what feels like record time to me. The NASCAR app works the best yet on any of the three previous Sprint phones I’ve owned.
Some may make a stink about how few third party apps are available for the Pre right now. To those folks I say, so what? This is a NEW platform and considering it was almost a year before Apple launched their App Store for the iPhone I think it’s fairly safe to say that within a year we’ll see many more for the Pre. So far I’ve downloaded a few apps to my Pre and for the most part they work great. So far just about every day since the Pre launched one or two new apps have shown up in the Palm app store and once they do a more widespread release of the SDK lots more will show up.
The WebKit based web browser is really one of the stars of this phone! It renders the full HTML of every website I’ve thrown at it fast and accurately. Adobe has already stated that within a month or two they will have Flash available for the Pre browser and I’m already looking forward to that little extra bit of capability (hello Hulu.com!!!).
As far as phone calls go the Pre does an outstanding job in that department. Oddly enough I do not use my phone for making many calls so this is not as important as it may be for others. As long as the phone makes the call and does not drop it I’m a happy camper. In this I’ve not been disappointed and for me that’s a win.
It’s not all rivers of honey…I’ve gushed and gushed for a week now about how much I love this new phone and for 95% of my needs/desires/wants in a modern mobile device it has delivered.
However, like any device, especially a new one, there are a few things that I do not like.
First up is battery life. The fact I have been playing with this thing more than I usually do a phone probably has something to do with the rather rapid loss of battery charge during the day. As time goes on I’m sure I won’t be pulling the phone out to just “play” and at that point I’ll have a more accurate gauge of battery life. In the meantime I just make sure that I keep my battery pack portable charger topped up and with me in my backpack. My usual habit has been to leave the Pre in my locker at work connected to the portable battery pack so that it has a full charge for the commute home. I tend to be a bit paranoid about battery life anyway and get nervous if it ever goes below 60% which I do not usually allow to happen.
For example, I’ll usually have the music player going with the headphone plugged in on the way to work in the morning. While riding the bus I usually catch up on a few news websites and blogs with some Twitter posting thrown in for good measure. It typically takes me 90 minutes to get to work from the time I walk out the door and by the time I get to work the Pre is at around 70-80% charge which isn’t too bad. I’ve noticed the battery performance has gotten better over the course of the week so I’ll attribute some of this to battery break in time.
Speaking of music, it’s annoying the crap out of me that to get the Pre to recognize play lists I’m having to use iTunes. Syncing play lists via Windows Media Player only imports the music files and the audio player on the Pre does not show the play lists. I’m planning to try a few different things on this front but if I can’t get play lists to sync via Windows Media Player I’m going to very disappointed.
I like the quality of pictures I take with the Pre and I really like how fast I can take those pictures. However, I would like to see a bit more control as far as settings go. There are no setting except to turn the flash on, off, or auto. Not cool! The lack of video recording doesn’t bother me too much as I tend to not do that much, if ever, and Palm has stated that video recording should be coming soon via a software update.
One thing I find I am missing the most is an ebook reader. I mean really jonseing like a junky! I’m confident that there will be something coming along that will address this shortcoming. Shortcovers is already in the app store but it doesn’t offer the ability to access “local” files, only through their servers. This means I’m stuck up fecal creek in this department for the time being. I’ve got an email into the kind folks at Mobipocket Reader asking about whether they will have something for the Pre anytime soon and my gut is telling me that the Pre just might be near the top of the list for the previously announced Kindle Software for cell phones that Amazon talked about a couple of months ago. It seems to me it would be a natural fit, especially as Amazon already has an app for their MP3 store pre-loaded on the phone. I’d hate to do it but in a worst case scenario I guess I could pony up the $30 for the Classic App and use Mobipocket Reader for PalmOS that way to read my books. This would not make me a happy camper.
Final Thoughts and Conclusion…As the current trends in portable computing have shown we are heading for smaller and smaller platforms that offer the same capabilities found in larger hardware just a few years ago. For example, in 2001 I was using a 500Mhz computer. The Pre has a 600Mhz CPU! The rising popularity of netbooks further shows that people are wanting their tech more portable and the fact that both AT&T and Verizon are now offering netbooks with their particular flavor of mobile 3G broadband at the same sort of subsidized prices of cell phones further strengthen this growing trend. Fewer traditional types of cell phones are being sold this year but at the same time the smartphone market is up by over 20% over last years sales. The growth of Web 2.0 cloud computing is seeing even better growth numbers this year.
The folks at Palm seem to get this and it is showing in the Palm Pre and its WebOS operating system. WebOS relies heavily on the cloud concepts and pulling in your information from various services to provide you with a unified look at all your data. Changes made in one place are then synced throughout the rest of your services and without the typical “syncing experience”. It just happens in the background. Microsoft is trying to get on this bandwagon with their Mobile Me service and of course Apple has it with their .Mac services. However, it just seems to me that Palm is set to take this to the next level.
For me personally so far this is the best mobile platform I’ve used to date, it does most of the things I want it to do and it has the promise of delivering on most of the rest in short order.
Various MediaHere are a few links to some pictures I've posted.
Screen shots from my PreMy Flickr account which has pictures I've taken with the PrePictures of my Pre![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
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