Nice to meet you, Pre: A 3-day weekend with the Palm Pre
I’ve had 3 days to get acquainted with my Pre. While not enough to live with the device in-depth, it’s an ample amount of time to be both wow’d and disappointed by the Pre. I’m going to assume the reader knows the basic Pre facts, so let’s get right to it, bad news first.
The Downside…
There are a few things right off the bat that made me question if I made the right decision…
- Reception. My first phone call–in my house no less–was a choppy, frustrating mess. Not a good start. The signal strength of the Pre compared to the other Sprint phone I have access to (a Sanyo Katana II) is weak. It seems to consistently be 1-2 bars less than the Katana, and switches to digital roaming quite a bit. According to Sprint’s site, our house is in a “BEST” coverage zone. Hrmph. After doing a network update it seems a little better, but thankfully we’re moving in a month, so I’m hoping the next place has better coverage. The iPhone struggled with this problem early in its life and was improved through a software update, so I’m hoping Palm can do the same. The signal searching & digital roaming lead into issue #2…
- Battery life. The Pre is no juice miser. I learned from day 3 of my trial that it’s partially Sprint, partially Pre. Flipping between digital roaming and good signal drains the battery like nothing else. My first day of use I had to recharge by lunch time. Granted that was with pretty heavy use, but I learned later that it’s much better on the battery if you can stay within solid EV-DO range. The 2nd day I used it, I made it til the afternoon w/ some lighter use. Finally on the 3rd day, in my office with full bars of EV-DO signal, I made it through an entire work day, including 30 minutes of 3G music streaming, tweeting, and other use, until finally around 8pm I had <20% battery left. Another wishlist item, perhaps Palm can work on battery usage schemes in WebOS and issue an update. The alternative is to replace the 1150 mAh battery w/ a 1350, 1400, or higher mAh unit. My Nokia e71 shipped with a similarly sized 1500mAh battery, so it’s do-able. Some more juice should come standard for the money though.
- Customization. There are no use profiles. There is also no way to (easily) customize the SMS alert tone. The first is a nice-to-have, but the second issue is a serious problem for me as an IT professional since I rely on text messaging to wake me up while on-call. The default “ding-dong” is hardly loud or annoying enough. Fortunately this is an easy fix with a software update, and I’m sure that will be enabled. I’ve since found a workaround involving dropping to a Linux prompt on the phone and doing some sound file tomfoolery, but that’s hardly a “solution” for your average user.
The Upside…
Don’t get too down, the best is yet to come… After using this phone for 3 days, I don’t even care about those big 3 issues anymore, mainly because of:
- Synergy. I love this feature. Having synced my Nokia e71 with Google, transferring contacts to the Pre was a no-brainer. In fact I have not had to transfer or type a single piece of contact info. ZERO. Just entered my Gmail address and Facebook account and shazaam, all of my contacts w/ avatar photos, phone numbers, and email addresses are in my contact list. Perfect.
- Universal Search. This feature is a killer. It forces you to adjust your thinking from what to who. Just type who you want to contact and up comes all matching contacts. Want to Google something? Start typing it…you can choose to search Google, Gmaps, or Twitter. Nice.
- Notifications. Love the notifications. When you get a new text, email, voicemail, missed call, 1-line of text and an icon appear on the last line of the screen. It doesn’t interrupt what you’re doing, it just shrinks the app by 1 line and unobtrusively displays the notification. Similar to a TV crawl actually. You can swipe the notifications away to remove them. Slick.
- Multi-tasking. Yeah this is the big marketing feature…and for good reason. It works. I was just trying to Twitpic something in the Tweed Twitter client, but didn’t know my Twitpic email. Tweed popped up my browser, I checked it, shuffled back to my Tweed card, and picked up right where I left off. What a time saver. This stuff works, and works WELL.
- Usability. I’ve used an iPhone, Symbian S60, and a wee bit of Blackberry, but the Pre takes the cake. It fits so well in hand, the UI is very snappy, and the screen is just gorgeous. It is just a pleasure to use and feels really tight. Sure it is missing some features, but I got used to the WebOS gestures within a day or two and now it just feels like second nature.
- Camera. It’s only 3 MP, but this camera is reeeeeeally sharp. I’ve used a few other 2 and 3 MP cameras, this is probably the best I’ve seen. After looking at some Pre galleries on Flickr, this was actually a big selling point for me.
The 3-day Rule
Is there one of these for a mobile phone? Well there should be… 3 days has been sufficient for me to really give the Pre an initial workout. I’ve come away even more excited than I was before I ordered it. Yep there are some definitely growing pains in the device, but what Palm got right–REALLY right–just pushes those into the background. The Pre should outgrow them soon anyway. For a 1.0 device, the Pre is a keeper and a solid, solid phone.
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Nice Pre review. The camera is indeed sharp but has some other issues such as color balance. As such, I’ve been managing that by postprocessing most of my pictures and they seem to come out decently.Re: battery life, check the precentral.net forums, there are some patches floating around that help somewhat with battery life.