Warning, fanboy deconstruction ahead.
The real problem with the Pre (and I think this is Sprint's failing) is that you can't use the phone and the Internet at the same time!
That's a CDMA problem, Verizon smartphones are unable to do that as well. If you were to criticise that aspect of the Pré, then criticise their choice of carrier.
To not be able to get an important email because I'm on the phone would really be a problem. To not be able to look up directions, or movie times, or the phone number of a restaurant, without hanging up? That would drive me crazy! I guess I'm fortunate that AT&T has good 3G coverage where I live.
I have the lowest minutes AT&T will offer me at 450 and even then I average at about half of that. Not being able to surf the web or check email while on the phone is a moot point for my uses as I can count the time I had to do that on one hand. Your milage may vary.
Absolutely no surprises, for sure...they're just stating the obvious. Whoever gets the iPhone is hooked; even the staunchiest of my PC-using colleagues have succumbed to the sheer superiority of Apple's PERFECT integration of hardware and software.
Blah blah blah.
Considering 1/3 of Pres get returned, is anyone shocked?
More like 2-3%.
http://www.precentral.net/palm-pre-return-rate-now-pegged-2-3-dueling-analysts
lets not forget the most important statistic from this article:
99% of 3GS owners are satisfied.
87% of Pre owners said they were.
that is just wow. especially with the larger sampling size of the 3GS owners.
link
Finally, SOMEONE mentioned the larger sampling size. The iPhone survey had 200 people. The Pré had 40. In laymans terms that means that an extremely dissatisfied Pré user could skew the results more than the equivalent iPhone one.
One other thing the Macrumors article didn't mention that every other article on it was how it compared to other surveys from other manufacturers.
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/08/14/iphone-vs-pre-satisfaction-bakeoff/
Of note the Pré was ranked higher than any other Palm device every previously released and was only bested by RIM devices and Apple. When put in to the perspective it changes things a bit. It still doesn't match the iPhone in satisfaction rates but its certainly a lot closer than most other devices out there.
And the iPhone does have multitasking--and better, in some ways, than the Pre's. (Not in all ways--the Pre has some good points too.)
The iPhone has wonderful multitasking. 3rd party devs are simply unable to take advantage of it.
The iPhone multitasks the browser, the email app, downloads, the music player, the phone (of course), the voice recorder, calendar alerts, incoming instant messages (push) and more. (In other words, the most common functions of a smartphone.)
Your mileage may vary (again). The iPhone's OS has memory protection, so if another app is taking up too much memory it will close an idle one running in the background and Safari is usually the culprit. I don't know about you but almost every time I go back to Safari it has to reload the page it was previously on and then I have to wait for it. Multitasking indeed.
There's no notification system for email besides the badge on the icon. How am I supposed to know if its one worth stopping whatever I'm doing to read? With no multitasking except on native apps, waiting for stuff to (re)load hampers my productivity.
Sure the iPhone has multitasking, but often it is not the multitasking I would actually
use. I use Twitter, IRC, Facbook, Flickr, Foursquare and Nextbus apps more then I ever use my phone app. I'd use other apps like Pandora more if I could run them in the ****ing background.
And all the apps that "do not multitask" will still multitask with those that do. Meanwhile, you don't have to manage memory and system resources manually, the way you have to on a Pre.
What?
I'd rather be able to manage my apps manually than let Apple tell me what I can run in the background or not. I'm fully aware that more apps utilising the cellular internet will start to severely limit battery life. The iPhone and other "smartphones" are becoming more like handheld computers that also happen to make phone calls. They should start acting like them.
Android handles multitasking a bit differently, while the Pré has apps you open running in the background all the time, many Android apps will run a daemon in the background vs the entire app. It has the same limitations of battery life if these apps are using the internet though. When I'm doing heavy browsing or other internet related tasks on my iPhone I start to see battery suffer as well. I am fully aware of what I'm doing however.
Best of all, push lets ALL apps be "multitasking" at the same time, for notifications at least, without using up RAM and CPU time. It's a great solution. So the iPhone's multitasking doesn't do everything the Pre's can do, but it DOES do a lot of very common things better.
Push is such a hack. It is better than nothing but when you see the notification systems of the two major competing platforms you start to wonder what the **** Apple was thinking. It falls under the philosophy of only being able to do one thing on the iPhone by taking up the entire screen and preventing you from doing anything else besides read it or dismiss it. Overall that's a notification problem and something that's prevalent in the OS itself, push just happens to utilise it.
In any case it is poor excuse for multitasking. Real life scenario, I was in the Facebook app one day and I get a push notification that someone mentioned my name in IRC. So I have to close Facebook, wait for IRC to open so I can talk to that person, get a notification that another mention was made in Facebook chat and then switch back. Frustration ensues.
Push is not real multitasking, not by a long shot. All push does is tell you when you should close your existing app since there's another one waiting for you. It only half fixes the problem.
"Hunk of junk" is too strong. Most people might prefer an iPhone, but we iPhone USERS will be the ones who win if the Pre gets better and better.
Pré users will win when the Pré gets better and better too.
And to be fair, they HAD to cut corners: they were way behind and had to come up with something great out of nowhere, and fast. They managed to come up with something pretty good, given that.
It is clearly a 1.0 product and I think people should start putting that into perspective. Pré 1.0 is good, though I think more people are waiting to see what 2.0 is going to be like if it revitalises Palm like they're hoping it will.
As for the app selection... yes, that's one of the things that makes the Pre unacceptable to me for now. Most of what I do on my iPhone every day can't be done on a Pre. But over time, unlikely though it may seem, that might change and the Pre could have a selection to match the iPhone's. (The other things that kill the Pre for me: smaller screen, bulk and moving parts caused by the keyboard, lack of Internet and voice at the same time on Sprint, and poor performance--making gaming impractical.)
What Palm is doing with their app store is very interesting, they're playing it very slow and are seemingly doing to to avoid Apple's massive blunder with their own App Store. I've been watching it very closely as I have been with the Android Market to see how they plan on succeeding where the App Store has failed. 6 months from now will be very interesting.
