I’ve been reading a lot about the Palm Pre for the past few months. Let me say that a different way: I’ve been reading a lot about the Palm Pre for the past few months. As last week wound to a close, I started dreaming about the Pre, waking up in a sweat because my dreams had me stepping to the counter at the Sprint store after waiting in line for days only to find that they had just run out of stock. It was a terrible bit of business, but that’s all over now.
What’s been bugging me about all of the reviews I’ve read lately is that they have a particular character that I find suspect. There are several types, but most of the reviews I’ve read have a large subset of a particular set of traits.
- They're a gizmo uberblog that cares more about eyeballs on their ads than real reviews.
- They aren't ever going to be users of the device themselves.
- If they are going to use the device themselves, they already think it's the best thing ever invented.
- They already are so attached to some other device, that anything released must be compared to it incessantly, usually as something inferior.
The Inevitable iPhone Comparison
So yeah, I’m tired of the comparisons to the iPhone. The iPhone is cool, and I have an iPod Touch, and all of my friends have one, so I know. But there are things I don’t like about the iPhone to start with: AT&T. The on-screen keyboard. Single-tasking. iTunes.
It you want to compare, uh, apples to apples, you have to take a look at adjusted numbers. For example, Apple is quick to tout the obscene number of iPhone apps that are available. But when the iPhone was released, there weren’t as many. Actually, there were none. So the Pre is already ahead of the iPhone in that respect. Weird, straight-up statistics like that need to be questioned. Anyone who’s just taking them at face value is an irredeemable Apple fanboy. More power to you.
Really, I don’t care whether the Pre is an “iPhone killer”. Each device does good things. I just want the Pre to be satisfying for me.
Plan of Attack
On Saturday morning, I got up at 5:50am to trudge to the mall for my Pre. I had staked out the Sprint store the day before, learning the closest mall entrance and the time the doors opened for the mall walkers. This last bit of info was essential, since although the Sprint store opened at 8am before the mall itself at 10am, the mall always opens its doors at 7am for the mall walkers.
Actually, a little investigation said that it would be open somewhat earlier than that. But since the Sprint folks were telling 7am to anyone who did ask the correct question, my extra information got be the jump on everyone. I was at the mall at 6:45am, and first in line by 15 minutes.
It took an hour to process my sale of two Pres through their computer system. This was due to my strange existing Sprint account (for my air card), the burden on the system from “Pre Day”, and the confusion of the guy running the system. The clerk next to him rung out three people while I waited.
Anyway, I was happy to walk out of the store at 9am with my two boxes.
Comparison Suffering
What you need to understand is that I’ve been using a Windows Mobile device for the past two years. This is perhaps why the comparison to the iPhone isn’t very relevant to me. The Pre compared to my T-Mobile Wing is like getting fed grapes and being fanned with (er) palm fronds versus being whipped while pushing marble blocks to the pyramid.
The only thing actually better about the Wing compared to the Pre is the keyboard, and even then not by much. Heck, the Pre’s keyboard actually has a dollar sign on it, which is nowhere on my Windows Mobile phone. If you’re used to the Treo keys though, (my last phone was a Treo, so I am) then it’s no big deal.
Here’s a killer fact: My Sprint contract for two Pres is less per month than my T-Mobile contract for the two Windows Mobile phones. What’s that all about?
What's Not To Like?
I hate to start this way, because it feels like the other reviewers pan the Pre after having only used it for an hour, but my concerns are more long-term. Rather than complaining about stupid crap like “not as responsive as I’d hoped” (What? You’re crazy!) and “light plastic feel” (oh no, I don’t need to carry a brick in my pocket!), I’m going to talk about a few things that just strike me as a little odd from the point of view of someone who’s actually locked into using this thing for two years.
First, the calendar. The calendar sync is absolutely great. I’ve already used it with Berta to great effect. I add an appointment and it automatically goes to Google. We’re sharing that calendar, so it automatically shows up on her phone. It’s genius and it just works. Er. Most of the time.
Actually, with our shared calendars, it always works. What’s not working for me is my work’s Google calendar. I admit, I have a lot of calendars for work (11), but it just chokes the phone. I’m not sure if it’s because I can’t edit all the calendars or what. When I add my work account to the phone, it stops displaying events in day view altogether. The only remedy is to remove my work account from the phone, then everything goes back to flawless.
Ok, almost flawless. Some of the interface choices are strange. First, there’s no way to see all-day events on the month view. For timed events, it marks off the times of day in the square of that day in the month’s calendar. But the all-day events don’t appear there at all. It makes it really hard to see birthdays, holidays, or days that are marked for an event without a time. They show on the week and day views ok.
Another weird thing is the coloring. I don’t understand why the colors only appear in the month view when you specifically select one from the dropdown. The month view will either show gray reserved times, or gray reserved times for everything but the one color you’ve selected.
Both of these issues are minor and can be corrected in software. It seems to me that an all-day event in month view should maybe have a dark square highlight on the inside edge of the day box. All of the events should be colored all the time, until you select a calendar from the dropdown, and then it should shade them all gray except for that calendar. These seem like minor issues.
Services
Of course, the problem with making a phone that intrinsically connects to other services for data is that there are always more services that you don’t connect to. A prime example is that because we’re all Windows users at home, we started using Microsoft’s Live for calendaring. It integrates well with some other stuff, and really, I like its interface better than Google Calendar. But the Pre doesn’t support that.
Another thing the Pre doesn’t support is Flickr. That’s a killer for me. I don’t use Facebook or Photobucket (??) for photo storage, so those aren’t ideal. But I do use Flickr, and so it would be great to send photos there when I take them with the phone. Yeah, I can send it to Flickr by email, but a direct button like the other services would be slick.
Did I mention that the camera on the Pre kicks butt? And the flash, although small and insignificant-looking, actually does improve the photo. You wouldn’t think so. On most other phones I’ve seen with a flash, the flash is almost the brightness of a squashed firefly. The Pre’s actually lights some stuff up.
Battery and USB
The battery life of the Pre is notoriously not good. Everyone’s been saying so. As they say, it’s a lousy 5 hours of talk time. Wait. Five hours? I hardly ever talk on my cell. 5 hours is plenty. But the problem is that the Pre is always online, and that’s a battery drain.
I’ve read a few things that tell you some things you can do to improve your battery life. Turning off the IM service seems like a good idea. I don’t need to be always available via IM. Still, these are once again things that can improve via software. So they don’t bother me as much as something that isn’t going to change about the hardware – like the USB port.
The USB port on the Pre makes me really sad. It’s some kind of “micro USB” port. It doesn’t look like any other USB connector I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to fit into the Pre, too, because the cover is very form-fitting. I can’t wait to get the Touchstone I ordered to have some inductive charging, but moving files between the Pre and the PC is always going to be tough if I have to do it via that USB connection.
Hopefully, an app comes out that lets me move files to and from a Pre over my wireless network. That seems like a simple software solution. SMB file access would be awesome, and would let me get to all of my music and video on the network, avoiding USB completely.
Other Junk
I was showing Nana the phone the other day, trying to explain what’s so cool about it. I showed her the Google Maps application, and we looked at our house from space. Then I pulled up the turn-by-turn directions to get from our house to hers, and it started giving us voice directions. She liked that. And considering my previous phone didn’t have real GPS, I did too.
In the background, I was streaming music from my Ok Go channel on Pandora. (A last.fm app would be awesome!)
The notification system is amazing. It’s hard to convey “wow factor”, but whenever an event happens in the system - a new SMS or email message, music playback, new twitter reply, whatever - the area at the bottom of the screen slides up a bit and the message appears. After a few seconds, it shrinks back down into a little icon. You can tap the notice to go directly to the application that generated the event, or the icon to pop up the notification. If you swipe the notification off the screen, it just clears it. It doesn’t delete your message, it just dismisses the notice. Also, you can completely ignore the notices and continue whatever you were doing without interruption. This is really cool.
One thing I’m still not clear on is how to adjust the volume of things. There is a rocker on the side of the Pre, and I can use that to change the playback audio volume of the device, but I’m not sure if that will also control the ringer or what. I did notice that there is an easy-access “silence mode” switch on the top of the Pre, which is useful for quiet places.
Closing applications is a little odd. First you have to switch to card view, then you have to fling the app’s card off the screen. I think I would like a gesture that lets me fling an app off the screen directly. Also, I don’t know what the little button in the gesture area of the Pre is for. Rather, I don’t know why it’s there. I avoid using it, instead dragging up shortly from the center of the gesture area to the screen to see the card view.
I like the little things. I noticed today that the screen turns off when you’re talking on the phone. Then when you lower the phone away from your head, it turns back on. I’m guessing this also disables the touch screen so your face doesn’t push any buttons. Seems obvious, but this nicety doesn’t happen on the Wing.
Sure, the app catalog is small today, but the old Palm OS had plenty of applications that made it a good productivity phone. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate the occasional game, just that my phone isn’t my primary game system, so I’ll mostly be happy with what I get. Super Monkey Ball was neat when I first played it, and then I never touched it. The games that I like most on the Touch are stupid little one-offs that are almost more easily done in HTML, javascript, and canvas – this is something that the Pre should handle easily.
And if the Pre gets Flash, it’s a whole different ballgame…
What other applications I’d really like to see sooner rather than later is this small list:
- SlingPlayer
- EverNote
- last.fm
- Some synergy-connected to-do/project tracking app (that's not RTM)
- Some kind of tower defense game
In Conclusion
So what if the 8GB iPhone is $99. Who wouldn’t have a little buyer’s remorse at that news, right?
Nonetheless, I don’t feel the need to defend my choice. The Pre is a nice solid product, with some admitted glitches out of the gate. I’m confident that these software issues will be addressed as people start using the phone and providing feedback to Palm and Sprint on their usage of this cool little device.
