Some additional Pre findings

This is probably more for people who have a Pre or are thinking about getting one, some issues I've found and how to fix them.

Yesterday I brought my phone in to work and set it on my desk like I have always done. While I don't get good signal in this metal-and-wire surrounded building, I've always been able to get "enough" for a minimal data connection, text messages, and at least knowing I got a phone call (talking didn't work so well until I got closer to a window). But it never ran the battery down. Yesterday, with a full charge at 9am, the battery started dropping drastically through the morning until 1pm when I saw a big dead battery graphic on the screen. Additionally, the phone itself was quite warm, almost hot to the touch.

Some online searching of forums found that MANY people were experiencing the same issue. Lots of speculation as to what the cause was - bad batches of batteries? Signal quality (several people were at work like me)? But the majority seemed to think it was related to all the onling syncing that the "Synergy" WebOS does. In addition, I saw several posts saying there was a 1.0.2 phone update that seemed to help (and indeed there was - 67MB and you had to force it to download). I took the phone home, plugged it in, forced the download, and after about 20 minutes it was all updated. In addition, several posts had warned of the email sync features causing problems, so I removed my Yahoo accounts (which are secondary for me), left on Gmail because it's my primary. Between those two things, the phone is now cool and the battery life is what I was expecting - this morning I've been at work 2 hours and it's still at 95%.

I think this update also had some stability fixes for the syncing applications - the calendar was being really flaky yesterday, and I read some posts saying that after the udpate people had removed their google calendar account and re-added it, and then things worked ok. I get really nervous when I start doing things like removing/adding because older sync applications sometimes handled that really badly, so I did a complete export of all my google calendars first (fortunately a very easy thing to do) before I started. Turns out it all worked fine - and quite fast - removing and re-adding took less than 7 minutes.

I also found out that exporting your contacts from Outlook first and importing into Google Contacts works MUCH better than importing into the phone first - I'm now not getting any duplicates. Sadly, I'm also not getting the "extras" fields like birthday, anniversary, spouse, and children to the phone - they are in google, just not in the phone. Hopefully Palm will fix that at some point.

I also discovered that you can group tasks and order them the way you want - so the tasks app is now looking a bit better :) Wish that would sync with Google Tasks - probably will eventually.

Finally, I discovered that not all of my memos actually transferred over from Outlook. I don't use memos all that much, but kind of annoying that they didn't get copied over. I'm looking into what "document" support is on this phone, because many of my memos are really more suited to documents.

Don't miss the nav key as much now, but I find I'm missing the stylus a lot - particularly for cutting and pasting - my big fingers can't pinpoint spots on the screen and I don't know how to select stuff.

To be continued I'm sure...