My Palm Pre experience
First post.
Had to register so I could share my experience.
I am an IT Manager, and wireless provisioning and management is one of the responsibilities my department handles.
I got a couple of Pres on release date to test drive and see if it would be a good fit for us (you can test them for 30 days and return if not satisfied).
One of them for a long time Palm Treo user, and since Palm OS is being replaced by WebOS, we thought this would be a good fit. The other Pre was for myself, since I was using a Blackberry Storm and I was about to go Bananas if I kept using it (it is a POS, but that's a topic for a different thread)
Form Factor:
The phone has a nice shape and feels good in the hand, although it's just a tad too small, specially the screen. Don't get me wrong, the screen is beautiful. It's super sharp and with vibrant graphics (same resolution as the iPhone, but in a smaller package).
Needless to say, the phone felt perfect when sliding the keyboard out, so I think that Palm should have made it bigger, to accommodate a bigger screen, and also a tad slimmer, since it's a little on the chunky side, (which they could have done if the phone was a little longer).
Build Quality:
Seems pretty solid, the physical keyboard is nice to have, but nowhere near close to being as good as a Blackberry Curve or the Treo, since keys are really close together and the top row of buttons is really close to the bottom part of the phone when slid open, so typing is not as easy as it seems.
Coupled that with not having auto-correct capability or custom dictionary (again, like many phones have had for years, and you start to get frustrated pretty quickly), but even with this nuances, it's still way better than my previous BB Storm...
Speakerphone:
The speakerphone is in the back, and not pretty loud. When on calls, it's not as loud or clear as I would like (making people on the other end sound like they were in a tunnel).
Battery life:
This is where the Pre falls apart.
Battery life is not great. With moderate use you can get by to the end of the day, but that's if you're using WiFi or have great EVDO signal. If the signal is weak or you use the phone to listen to send email, make calls, and surf the web (isn't that the reason we have smart phones?) then the battery life will be dead after lunch.
Now on to the software.
WebOS:
Beautiful interface (again, keep in mind that my other touchscreen frame of reference is the BB Storm, which I've already pointed out is a POS).
Interface is responsive and beautifully designed, but being a 1.0 release, it is not ready for prime time IMO.
Speed:
Clicking on apps takes anywhere from 2-3 seconds to open. Not bad, but not instant like the iPhone 3Gs.
Navigating around the interface is pretty easy, the phone has a "gesture" area at the bottom of the screen, which you can use to back up a step when inside an app or "card", and it can be customized to swipe between cards.
Universal search is very nice, until you realize that it doesn't search emails, calendar or memos, so it's not so universal after all...
Flick scrolling works, but is not always smooth, sometimes it hiccups and then keeps scrolling, like it's attempting to refresh the screen. Again, a 1.0 product that I think will be fixed in future software releases.
Camera:
The camera takes pretty good pictures, but it's bare bones, with no advanced adjustment or video capabilities (yet).
Calendar
I give the calendar a mixed review.
It has the accordion feature that shows you a full day of appointments without the need to scroll, and it does a great job integrating my Exchange and Google calendars with different color schemes (but only in day/weekly view, monthly is monochrome
) so I can separate my business and personal life, but... when you are in Month view it falls apart.
There is a bug (I was hoping they would fix this soon) in monthly view that doesn't show you any "all day" events, so if you want to see a particular day as being blocked out, you would have to set the event to perhaps 8AM - 8PM instead of an all day event, otherwise you will see that day as "open" and double book, which is unacceptable in a business setting.
Notifications:
Intrusive. Pretty nifty at first, but when you realize that every time you get an email, missed call, sms message, or calendar reminder (from both Google and Exchange
), then you see the problem with this approach.
It would be nice if they just showed a bubble on the corresponding service icon like iPhone/Blackberry, so I can check it when when is convenient for me, instead of having them plastered on the bottom of my screen.
Email/SMS:
Email is alright but not great. Every time you reply/forward a message, it opens a new window instead of forwarding the message on the screen. Also, navigating between messages is not that intuitive, and you can't just scroll between opened messages doing by flicking your finger from side to side (my Storm did this, I assume the iPhone does too but I am not certain).
Another feature that it lacks is landscape view, so if I have a PDF or word document emailed to me as an attachment, I have to view them in portrait mode. With a screen as small as this device has, you quickly realize that not having this capability will have you scrolling all over the screen, and another nail in the Pre's coffin has been hammered.
SMS:
There is no forwarding of SMS messages on the Pre, so if you want to forward one, you have to copy and paste (which is also a chore compared to the iPhone) so as you can see, if feels as if SMS was just an afterthought.
While discussing this, there is no consistency in the apps. Email messages are arranged from newest to oldest (newest on top), where SMS shows the newest message on at the bottom
Call screen:
The call screen is straight forward. It has dedicated icons for dialing VM and viewing the call log. You can also set dedicated speed dial digits from 2-9.
The problem is figuring out how to answer calls. If a call comes in and the phone is locked, you have to first unlock the phone before you can answer it (or slide the keyboard open) but... if the phone is unlocked, sliding the keyboard open does NOTHING, so you think you are talking to someone when you are really not, so your call goes to VM. Frustrating until you figure it out.
WiFi/Bluetooth:
Wifi and BT are straight forward and easy to configure, no gripes here.
Browser:
Browser is very nice. Super fast on both EVDO and WiFi. Pinch and tap zoom works very well, and pages render lightning fast. I just wish the screen was BIGGER. Other than that, I am very pleased with the performance of the browser. Did I mention that the screen is small?
Apps:
There's about 30-40 apps right now on the app store, and since the SDK will not be released for another couple of months, it will be so until then.
Oh, and since I mentioned that we thought we would be able to use the Treo apps with a "classic" Palm emulator, that turned out to be wrong.
You can do this, but the emulator does not have sync capabilities, so it's a moot point to even have this app loaded if your calendar, contacts, and memos cannot be synced with anything. Also, had this worked, it should have been bundled with the OS, not force loyal Palm users to buy a third party app.
Sprint Network:
Have not had any problems in town (Houston Metro). Voice quality is crystal clear. EVDO speeds are amazing.
$99 everything plan works for us. I am not a hardcore voice user, but I rely on SMS to get alerts on my network infrastructure (anywhere from 200-500 msgs. per month), and I'm a heavy email user for the same reasons.
Veredict
One of my employees upgraded his iPhone 3G to the 3Gs and let me play with it. That's all it took. I have ordered two 16GB 3Gs on Monday, and returned the two Pres yesterday.
While a nice device with lots of potential, they will need to tweak the form factor and polish the interface, work out the bugs, and get tons of developers on board to develop some nice apps.
In its current form, using the Pre was at times very, very frustrating.
The best thing going for Palm is the Sprint network in my humble opinion.
Don't have a lot of experience with AT&T yet, but coming from Verizon with the BB Storm, I can tell you that while the voice quality was superb, their data network sucked big time (slow as heck).
If Palm implements a bigger screen and and fixes their bugs, this could be a nice smart phone that will work for a lot of people. Notice that I did not call it an "iPhone Killer"... It's just another option, and competition is good for everyone.
I can't wait to get our iPhones so we can start a new chapter.
Sorry for the long post and I hope it was informative. Let me know if you have any Pre related questions while it's fresh in my mind. I am pretty sure my memory will be wiped clean as soon as I start using the 3Gs...
Neurobit
