So I’ve been using the Pre for about 72 hours now, and after having an incredibly thoughtful drunken iPhone vs. Pre text message debate with a friend last night, I have decided to collect my thoughts in one spot, here. This is going to be fairly straightforward and simple as I haven’t had a ton of time to play around with it yet.
Design
The design of the phone is fairly stunning. As much as I am a fan of Apple’s long legacy of revolutionary industrial design, I think Palm has equaled the iPhone in just general sexiness. Holding it in your hand is an absolute joy. It feels (as Engadget said) like a “polished stone” and fits perfectly into your hand. The weight is just right, not too heavy, not too light. You can tell Palm put a lot of time into making the design just right. Though I had heard and read that the phone feels topheavy with the keyboard out, I haven’t noticed that yet. Even when I was trashed last night I was able to get the keyboard out, type fairly well (considering) and didn’t drop the phone. Having the large lip just below the keyboard really helps give you something to hold on to.
webOS
I have never used iPhone OS regularly, and before the Pre I had been using Palm OS on a Centro for the last year and a half. Before that, I was using flip phones. For this reason, using webOS is like a revolution of sorts for me. Firstly, even for someone who considers themselves very tech-savvy (which I generally do), there is a fairly steep learning curve getting the gestures down and discovering how to do things quickly. But once you figure it out…man. Palm has really made some innovations here regarding how we interact with the mobile device. The gestures let you get things done quickly and efficiently once you’ve figured them out. Swipe right to left to go back, left to right to go forward (in an app), hit the button to get to card view and flip through apps and close them by throwing them up and off the screen. Really intuitive stuff. I haven’t had a single crash of webOS yet, even though my first instinct after turning the phone on was to open as many apps as I could and try to stress the poor TI OMAP 3430 right off the bat. No issues there. On a side note…my first computer (when I was 7 or 8) was a Packard Bell that ran at 200 Mhz and had 72 MB of RAM with a 1 GB hard drive. This tiny little thing I now carry in my pocket has a 600 MHz processor, 256 MB of RAM and 8 GB of storage. Amazing. Oh and the Pre kicks the iPhone 3G’s ass when it comes to flipping the screen. This wasn’t a 3GS I was racing but it was still about a second behind or so.
Syncing contacts to Google went really well. Took little time for my to have all 125 contacts names, emails and phone numbers there in my Pre. I do have one problem with this whole Synergy thing though—it’s just very, very straightforward. For example, once you set up AIM on the phone, it automatically adds all of your AIM buddies into your contacts. I don’t need “bbpink34” in my phone contacts. It did do a great job of linking AIM with most of my friends, since I use their real names as their aliases. For example, Chris Vincent’s AIM alias on my buddy list is…Chris Vincent. And on Gmail, he’s…Chris Vincent. So it took those contacts and put them in one contact on the phone. Cool stuff. However, when you sync to Facebook, it will just add information on every single one of your friends. I don’t need 400 people in my phone, with the majority of them being only a picture and an email address. The ideas here are great, and to some extent it works really well, but with some tweaks by Palm (which I hope they push in a new update), it could be fantastic. I’m patiently waiting on this to happen, because I think it could really change how we communicate.
Speaking of communicating, the phone does make calls, and it works pretty well. Pretty easy dialer. My complaint here is that I can’t start typing someone’s name and just have them show up and hit “call.” I can do this when texting, but not when calling. Pretty annoying. This was one of the best features of Palm OS and I’m puzzled why it’s not here in webOS. Texting is very cool. One thing Synergy did well was this: when my buddy (let’s call him Rick Steves) was added, it found the Google Contact Rick Steves and the AIM contact Rick Steves and put them together. This means when I go to messaging, I can choose to either text Rick, or send him an IM, all in one place. And it puts these conversations together as to create one nice flowing conversation across different mediums. Very cool. The email works very well so far, although admittedly I haven’t used it much yet.
Music…it syncs to iTunes just like an iPod. Plugging the phone into USB gives you these options: Media sync, which lets you sync to iTunes; USB Drive, which makes it show up on your computer as an 8GB flash drive; and Just Charge, which clearly just charges the phone over USB. When you’re in “just charge” mode, you can easily tap a button at the bottom of the screen to enter USB Drive or Media Sync mode. Very easy to use and pretty cool.
The camera is one of the better ones I’ve used on a mobile device. 3MP and it has a built-in LED flash that works really well. My favorite thing is that (unlike every other mobile camera I’ve ever used), this is actually very snappy when taking multiple pics. When you hit the button, it takes the pic and less than a second later it’s ready to take another one. My old Palm would take upwards of 10 seconds at times to take a second pic. Here’s a sample pic I just ran outside and took of one of my trees:
Apps
While the App Catalog in no way even begins to compare to the thousands available in the Apple App Store, there are several very good apps available, which is to say nothing of the included ones. I’ll break down some of them that interested me:
Calendar—Pretty cool. It snycs with your Google Calendar, which I already use. Pretty basic – add events, remove events and within a minute or so it’ll sync that to Google. So far I’ve been using the Phone to make events, which then sends them to Google, and from there my friends can view them through calendar sharing on Google, and then I sync back to my iMac with iCal. Unfortunately iCal can’t sync back for some reason, I need to figure that out. But, it’s cool that I can update my calendar in several places and it’ll automatically be updated everywhere. This is the Cloud at its best.
Web—Very good browser. In an informal test against my roommate’s iPhone 3G (not S), I kicked his ass in loading pages over wireless-g, and especially over the Sprint/ATT networks, because ATT hasn’t installed 3G here yet. It’s pretty sexy overall, very intuitive and loads pages really well. Flipping the phone and reading in widescreen makes for large, easily readable text. I was able to follow the Royals to defeat in stunning clarity last night.
GPS Stuff—Included with the phone is Google Maps and Sprint Navigation. Google Maps is pretty much the same as it is everwhere: awesome. Sprint Navigation is basically simple turn-by-turn GPS, which is really cool because it’s actually free from Sprint. Most carriers (cough VERIZON cough) will make you pay extra for turn-by-turn and it’s pretty cool that Sprint is letting users actually USE their GPS instead of just trying to milk more money out of them. Maybe this is part of why Sprint lost $30B last year, but I digress.
Pandora—This app is an out of the park home run. I love it. The layout is very basic, the load times are low and it seems to have no trouble streaming over the Manhattan, KS, Sprint network (or my WiFi at home, or the WiFi at several bars in Aggieville). When it’s running in the background, it appears at the bottom of the screen in the alerts area. From there you can skip songs, pause and hit the like/unlike buttons, all without leaving your open application, while Pandora runs in the background. Great stuff, and a really well done app.
YouTube—Basic YouTube app a lot like the iPhone. Videos play in widescreen by default. It works, not a lot to say here.
Fandango—I’ve never used Fandango but it is pretty cool. It uses GPS to figure out where you are and the closest theater, then lists movies and showtimes along with widescreen previews, then lets you buy tickets using your credit card. Once you do buy them, it adds an event to your calendar.
The Sprint Nascar App—Look Sprint, I understand that you sponsor the big Sprint Cup and all that, and that’s awesome, but I don’t do NASCAR, and I don’t need an included NASCAR app on my Palm Pre, and I don’t need it to ask me who my favorite driver is, or anything like that. I just want to delete it…but unfortunately, I haven’t been able to. Yet.
PDF View/DOC View—They work as you’d think they would. Phone does a good job of loading PDFs quickly.
AccuWeather—Similar to the iPhone’s. Gives you weekly and hourly forecasts and local radar, using GPS to figure out where you are.
Connect 4—I downloaded this last night. It’s as amazing as you’d think it would be. Unfortunately it’s a demo, and very addicting, which means I might eventually pay money for fucking Connect 4. colzie-INT
mCraig—Cool little beta app for browsing through CraigsList. By God, if I want a hooker, I can get one wherever I happen to be. Thanks, Palm!
Final Thoughts
This is a really well-done phone by a company with a long history of innovation. After they became stagnant a few years ago, I was worried that Palm would be dead and we’d all end up using iPhones. That would be cool and all, but a little healthy competition is good for everyone. It’s great to see Palm push out something like this, and I think it’s going to save their company and definitely help Sprint out in the process. As ths and I agreed last night, the Pre is probably equal to the iPhone 3GS at this point. It will definitely be exciting to see what both of these companies have in store for us as updates for both webOS and iPhone OS 3 get pushed out, and the Palm App Catalog grows.
Sounds like you’ve got yourself a pretty decent phone there. Competition is good. Apple, your response?
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