11th
Palm Pre Review
I’ve had a Palm Pre for 2 days now trying to decide if this is the next phone for me, or if I will follow the crowd and go w/ an iPhone. I am a 6+ year AT&T customer and on my 3rd generation Treo, so I am somewhat of a Palm devotee, but I am also a Mac user, so my allegiances are torn. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
+ Form Factor, Form Factor, Form Factor. The device form factor is, to my hand and eyes, nearly perfect. One handed operation for key functions like dailing, calendar lookup, mail opening are all possible. It goes in your pocket oh so nicely. The only shortcoming is now expansion memory slot.
+ Multi-tasking - The ability to have multiple applications open at one time and move back and forth is slick. It very gracefully takes you from a link in an email to the web page, and then with two gestures you can be back in that email message. This is probably one of the nicest features of the user experience. Only once have I had it tell me “No memory left” and that was when I had about 9 things open.
+ Camera - Takes really nice pictures. + Cut and Paste - Works nicely. Although iPhone now has it
+ Keyboard - Some are complaining that the keys are too small. I’ve been a treo user for 5 years now so I’m used to the treo keyboards and this one only feels a bit more cramped. But the rubbery feel of the keys and the positive feedback you get from the physical keyboard are great. I have “medium” sized hands. So far, I’ve been able to type out some 1-2 paragraph emails about as fast as I would have on my old treo, so to me, it’s just fine. I think the physical keyboard at a slightly smaller size is about equal to the larger virtual keyboard of the iPhone. For me the keyboard is fine and I can type just as fast as I could on the Treo 680. Blackberry powertypers may have issues though.
+ iTunes Sync - I was shocked how well it pulled in my music. It represents itself as an iPod, so you simply tell it what playlist(s) you want it to sync, and the songs show up. It only plays non DRM’s music, but that’s OK. I use Amazon for MP3s anyway.
+ Messaging application - The messaging app autmatically integrates witn AIM and GoogleTalk for IM so you have ready to go IM access right next to your SMS. Pre groups all IM’s and SMS’s with a particular contact in one thread. Nice presentation.
+ Sprint Service and Plan. On AT&T for my Treo i was paying about $90 per month for 450 minutes + unlimited data + 200 messages. On sprint i’m paying about $74 for 450 minutes + unlimted data + unlimited messages + Sprint Navigator ($10 on AT&T), Sprint TV and some other premium services. Sprint would appear to be about $25 dollars (or more) cheaper. Plus the CDMA coverage is acceptable at my house, whereas AT&T is non-existent.
+ Email Sync - Palm’s Synergy services seems robust enough for my needs. Emails will sometimes hit my phone before they hit my wifi connected laptop. Not quite GoodLink, but more than acceptable.
Now for the minuses:
- No Call Forwarding : Most people wont miss this, but I will. I travel to some out of the way places w/ no Sprint coverage, as well as to Europe. I need to be able to forward my calls to another line when my mobile is unaccessible. Seems like a pretty simple call control function that got overlooked?
- Syncing to a desktop/laptop : (Caveat : this may be a macophile problem. If you use MS Exchange I think your may have a head start here ) Palm’s new Synergy services syncs the palm contacts and calendar to the cloud and they support a couple of cloud services including google. So if you use Google Calendar and GMail/contacts exclusively, syncing to them is a breeze. (And is really good!) But my problem is keeping my laptop in sync with the cloud. There is no apparent background syncing between the Mac Address book and Gmail. The device syncs nicely with Google Contacts (and google calendar), but my main address book is Mac’s address book, so that has to be in the equation as well. I use a third party product (busySync) to keep the iCal in sync with Google Calendar so the Pre Calendar is three way synced Pre < > Google Calendar < > iCal, but no such luck with Contacts. Mac Address book claims to support Gmail Contacts syncing, and there are some third party solutions out or on their way, so I think there is a solution. It just wasn’t out of the box by any means. More work to do on this.
- Application selection - The selection in the app store is slim - some news apps, one Twitter client, LInked in, a couple games. It’s got a long way to go. But what is there is good quality, and good usability. I knew the app ecosystem was going to be thin at the launch, and I have great faith in the Palm Developer community that they will jump on the opportunity to build some great apps for the Pre. I really want Yelp and some other Twitter clients.
- Video Recording : OK, only half a minus. I’m not a big video creator. Maybe if I had one i’d create more. But I don’t miss not having it. It will be a nice software upgrade in 6-12 months.
- Battery life : Charged to 100%. Mobile for about 4 hours with WiFi on the entire time, checking email, using some applications and doing about 30 minute of phone calls and the battery is down to 32%. Looks like, just like iPhone WiFi is a battery killer. But having a hot swap battery isn’t a big deal in my book.
- SMS - There’s no character counter so you don’t know how close you are to 160 characters. Dumb oversight. There’s a very logical spot for it in the UI.
- UI Speed : There is occasionally a 4-5 second lag when launching some applications or when waking up the device after it’s gone dark. Not paralyzing, but aggravating for those with a short attention span
Overall, I’m really impressed. I’m going to give it a good 2-3 week trial. If anything pushes me to the iPhone it will be the contact synchronization problem. If my address book isn’t in sync, the phone’s dead to me. I think I can live w/out the 10K applications of the Apple App Store. There are probably only 6-8 I would really use anyway, and I think given some time some good apps will emerge for the Pre and the new WebOS.
