Palm Pre "Review"

Disclaimer: The following is my own biased opinion and I have no formal qualifications as a reviewer...then again, people who get paid to review things have no formal qualifications either, and they are probably on the take by companies making products, and I pay for these products...so maybe I'm more qualified :)

I arrived at the Sprint store in Rochester at 7:45am on a rainy Saturday morning, and there was about 15 people there - so no mad rush. Buddy and IBM colleague Karen was there too, and graciously shared her umbrella! Armed with a full tank of coffee, and given it was only 15 minutes until the store opened, a little rain wasn't so bad, and made us die-hards who were there feel like we were earning something.

(If you want to know about the phone itself, skip to the "The Phone" section - the first section is about my upgrade experience in general)

The Purchase

The sign-up experience was about as good as it could be - the store was well prepared for the number of people, had a full staff, and a person coordinating the line. She was telling us about the phone's features, which was nice, but all of us in line probably already knew all of this by heart and could have sold the phones ourselves. It took me about an hour total to get to a representative - 15 minutes before the store opened and another 45 in line waiting. So not too bad.

I commend Sprint and Palm for planning ahead on this one on setup - for geeks like me, we'll spend the hours and hours it takes to get everything perfectly anyway, but the setup wizard on this phone is fantastic. You create a Palm "profile", which is an automatic backup of everything on your phone "in the cloud" - so if you have to replace the phone, or (presumably) get a new phone later, returning to the state you were in is a few touches away. This is how it's SUPPOSED to be. Every new phone I've gotten has been like pulling teeth to get it all syncing and back to the way I had the old one (and this includes the seven Treo 600 replacements I went through because they kept going out). I know that we didn't have the internet connectivity horsepower to accomplish this before, but this is a major step forward.

The guy who was helping me was very friendly and knowledgeable, but again, probably all wasted on me given that I will figure out every detail myself anyway and read all sorts of online forums. He was helpful with choosing a new plan - and yes that is one gotcha on this, that you do have to be on a "everything" plan (iPhone users should be used to this one!) For me this wasn't a big leap because I was almost on one of those plans anyway, and for a few more dollars this just simplifies it and lets Erin now have full internet access. We have basically unlimited everything now, so the price is the price. Some people I talked to in line were on "granfathered" plans, and were upset to find out they had to switch. I think this is just reality now if you're going to be on the latest stuff - price of admission.

We got everything set up, I paid the bill - $329 after taxes, but there is a $100 rebate so it was only $229 and a new 2-year contact - given past expriences with new models, this was cheap/reasonable to me - and I get to keep or sell my "old" phone (which isn't very old!), so all in all this won't turn out to be too expensive. They tried to sell me a case and the Palm "touchstone" which is a magnetic charger that you just set the phone on and it charges. Admittedly it looks quite cool, but at $70 the cord also looks cool :) The two cases they had were not at all impressive to me - I'll probably get another InvisiShield coating like I did for the last phone, as it has worked wonderfuly.

The Setup

I will qualify all of this with saying that I haven't actually had a ton of time to try everything out yet - but I've done enough to give my inital take.

Again, the setup wizard is fantastic and seamless. After setting up your Palm profile, it asks you where you'd like to sync things to. I already knew I wanted to use Google as my primary synchronization agent, and from the looks of the phone and documentation, it was designed to work well with Google. I'm sure it also works well with Exchange, but I probably won't ever use that.

Right away, I found something I spent about 3 days looking for when I got my Treo 800w (Windows Mobile). Palm provides a free application which transfers everything from either Palm Desktop or Outlook to your new phone over USB. And not any flaky application either, this one actually works. (When I went from the Treo 650 to 800w, I suffered through 3 days of trying to get some flaky Outlook conduit thing to work before finally giving up and paying $25 for a third party program that did it, and even then I spent a lot of time cleaning stuff up afterwards. So kudos to Palm on this one - the program just works.

After the program is done (< style="font-weight: bold;">The Phone

People coming from an iPhone or another similar point/swipe based operating system will probably have no problem getting used to this one. Me coming from a long proud line of Treo phones, well, the touch screen is different, there is no stylus, there's these things called "motions", and most of all, no 4-direction nav key. I was missing this terribly at the beginning - I kept trying to move the center button by reflex, and of course it did nothing. But, I decided this is the future and I wanted to really give it a try different is not always bad!

The most impressive thing right off the bat is the screen. WOW - the clarity and resolution is just amazing. Probably better than my first LCD monitor. The second most impressive thing has got to be the size - this makes me feel like I'm actually in the world of cell phones and not undersized PCs like the Treos were (they got much better over the years - I laugh at the size of the first Treo 300 I had! Where the 800w was actually pretty slim).

The slide-out keyboard - I was a little worried about the keyboard, because the reviews were mixed on this one. This makes or breaks a Palm phone for me - and when I first tried out the Centro, the keyboard was square and the keys were tiny, and I chose not to get one. The slightly curved keyboard layout they've evolved to over the years is good too. I'm glad to say this one is pretty good - the keys are slightly "sticky" which actually makes them easier to find/push, they are big enough, and curved. Down sides for me - I wish the keyboard slid out just a little bit further because the top row is a little hard to get to with my big thumbs, and they moved three "key" keys around (pardon the pun!) - the period, the comma, and the "at" @ symbol. Now they did these moves for the greater good, because before the comma and @ sign were shifted keys, and now they're not - so in the long run I'll be glad they did this - but just takes a bit of getting used to.

Button-wise, they've gone to the "minimalist" approach Apple seems to take with buttons. This is fine with me, because they kept the one that I think is the absolute most important - the one that switches between vibrate and ring modes. I NEVER want to have to dig through 3 menus to turn off the ringer. I don't know why every phone in existence doesn't have one of these switches! They have the standard two side volume buttons, power button of course, and the new "center" navigation button, which really doesn't do much but lights up and is pretty. Absent is the 4-way nav key which I'm admittedly still missing, but not as much as I was 2 days ago (more on that in a minute).

One other small external annoyance is that the charger/USB port is covered by one of those pull-out plastic covers, and it's impossible to get off easily. OK, so maybe covering the port helps to protect it, but I personally think this was done to make us buy the $70 touchstone charger. The little plastic cover may end up "falling off" accidentally by me :) Good news is that they're sticking with micro USB like all new phones are moving to - hooray for a real standard finally!

Oh...almost forgot one of the best external features - a real, live quarter-inch headphone jack! Not one of those goofy cell phone sized ones or some USB plug with a headphone converter. WHY it has taken this long to get these into smart phones (and car stereos for that matter) is beyond me - it probably costs next to nothing to put them in, they're compatible with everything...but I digress.

The OS/Apps/Software

I'm not totally sure they should really be calling this "Palm", and I'm glad they didn't call it a "Treo" because it is nothing like anything Palm has ever done before. This is a real smart phone internet-based operating system - not something adapted and evolved from electronic organizers, and not a stripped down version of Windows with a few extra phone features. This looks to be designed from the ground up to be made for smart phones.

The first "newest thing" on this phone is what they call "Universal Search". This means that on the main screen, you just start typing something and it will look for it in all your application data. If it doesn't find anything (or even if it does), you're given the option to go do a web search. So, really you can get away with just typing stuff for a lot of things without going to a specific application.

Besides the basics that any smart phone comes with (contacts, tasks, memos, calendar, messaging, and of course the phone app), it also comes pre-packaged with a google maps made for WebOS, and a web browser also custom made for this OS from the looks of it. There are some other pre-packaged apps, mostly on there to try and sell you things, and there are more apps you can download and try/buy if you want. I'm not big on apps, more on data management and communcation, so didn't dig much into those.

The customizable "settings" are actually quite minimal as well - something I haven't decided yet whether I like or not. Windows Mobile had a setting for EVERYTHING (and *gasp* even a registry). This is just the basics. Each app also has a small set of customizable settings, specific to the app. So far I haven't hit anything major that I couldn't change or do, but haven't dug in yet.

Contacts - nothing too exciting here, although it will let you "link" a contact to multiple places - so, for example, if you have John Doe in your address book, you can link that entry to your contacts on Google, Facebook, an Exchange Server account, and probably others. I really have no idea what that means though, because things like Facebook are more/less read only when it comes to address book I think. Maybe not..who knows. A couple of things I didn't see - my WinMo contacts had fields for kids and anniversaries, doesn't look like this one does. Still looking at how the linking works though.

Calendar - well, this might be the biggest advance. None of the previous Palm phones or organizers supported multiple calendars. This one not only does, it supports multiple calendars from multiple different places. So, you can have all your Google account calendars (multiple of your own, plus any others in your "subscribed" list), Exchange calendars for work, etc. all in one view - and then only view the ones you want. All in different colors. For me, I love this because I have two of my own Google calendars (one "public" and one "private" which is more of a journal/log for myself), Erin has a Google calendar, and I'm subscribed to some other calendars like one for US Holidays. Now I sync them all at once and can see them all layered together. No idea if I can do this with my work calendar yet, but if I could it would be cool.

Tasks - actually this looks to be a bit of a step back, although I don't use this a lot. On WinMo you could have the "state" of your tasks show on the Today screen so you'd know how many you have, overdue ones, high priority, etc. On here, nothing - the tasks app isn't even one of the default 4, so to get there you'd have go to the apps screen and select it. I'm really hoping they'll get a little more creative on this one and add a few features, or someone will write a nice app to front it.

Memos - oddly, it seems like every phone I've had has gotten WORSE on memos. Palm OS had a very nicely organized memos app - sorted and by category - making it easy to get to anything. WinMo just had them all listed as files, and if you wanted to organize them you had to create folders in the OS (which wasn't totally bad but still kinda dumb when Outlook DID categorize them nicely). This app doesn't even sort them. - it literally looks like a bulletin board with thumb backs and notes scattered all over it. Once I understood how it ties into universal search though (see above) it looked a little better - if I want to get to the memo that has all my account userids in it, I just start typing "userid" and it brings up anything on the phone with that in it. So, you might need to do some judicious naming (don't name a memo with "lunch" in it and search on that because you'll get a gazillion matching calendar entries too) but overall it will probably work just fine - I may not ever even go into the memo app itself.

Pictures - the first phone camera I've ever seen with a flash and it does seem to work well - I was in dim lounge lighting at happy hour on our trip to the cities and the pictures turned out pretty good. Not as good as my real camera yet, but better than my last phone. Nothing that can take video though, which my last 2 phones had. Honestly never really used that much, but still surprising since it probably isn't any special hardware anymore. Easy to send the pictures via SMS or e-mail, and also equally easy to get them off of the camera back into Picasa on my computer, when you plug in the phone to the USB connection it just looks like a USB storage device, and Picasa instantly sees that and finds the pictures - that's quite an advance from the other phones I've had - on the Palm OS, you had to use their special sync program add-on which was horrible, and WinMo wasn't much better (although it did at least just copy the pictures to a folder). This is seamless.

Music/Video - I haven't tried the music yet but with a regular quarter-inch headphone jack it will probably work well for this. I DID notice (and also read about) the rogue code in there that makes it look like an iPhone - something Apple is apparently VERY upset about. I don't know why Apple would care - sure, it might detract from iPod sales, and possibly iPhone sales (although with two separate carriers the odds are less likely) but it keeps people buying stuff from the iTunes store, which is their ultimate goal, right???? Video is fantastic - you could really watch stuff on here. There's a YouTube app built in, but even watching from a web page looks and sounds great. The built-in speaker is even very good! Turning to landscape mode is almost instantaneous too - I probably won't use that a ton but for video it works quite well.

Battery Life - this may be one of the things that gets it - each phone I had got progressively better on this, and although I'm still experimenting with turning on/off settings, so far it has not been great. I think turning off GPS completely might help, and don't even bother turning on Wi-Fi unless absolutely necessary (and why would you with a 3G connection?) I doubt I'll use Bluetooth either except with my headset, since syncing is all over the air now, but Bluetooth never really was a power hog to begin with. The jury's still out. It does seem to charge fairly fast, and all my previous chargers work since it's all micro USB now.

Overall - I think the jury is still out for me. So far I've liked it more every day, and the more I learn, the more it seems I'll end up liking it as much or more as the Treo line. I also know this is the bleeding edge here, and there will be some bugs. But I also think this is the direction things are going on - iPhone, Palm Pre, and all the other smaller variants that are out there.