Palm Pre Notes
Justin Blanton says pretty much everything I had intended to say about the Pre. All that’s left for me to do is riff on a few points.
Keyboard
I’m happy with either a hardware or on-screen keyboard. I’ve gotten pretty fast at typing on the iPhone, slowed down only when it predicts incorrectly. The Pre’s keyboard is small — feels smaller even than the old Treos. I’ve found I can type on the Pre with two thumbs, but you have to take it on faith from muscle memory that you’re centered over the right key, because you will be mashing down an area of about 4 keys. I actually find it harder to type one-handed on the Pre than the iPhone because, with the slider raised, it becomes a bit top-heavy, and it’s difficult to support the back while typing with your thumb. Making matters worse is the Pre’s lack of auto-correction or prediction.
Other Hardware
I haven’t really stress tested the battery life yet. Anecdotally, it seemed a bit short, but new handsets always do in the first few days as you painstakingly try out every new feature. The Pre also got noticeably warm after using the net for a while.
The screen and overall design of the handset are gorgeous. Sadly, the slider tends to stick at the halfway point if you try to slide it open one-handed. I have not noticed any problems with the “omg razor sharp” bottom edge of the keyboard. The slider mechanism has already developed a bit of wiggle when closed, which is a bit ominous. I had a hard time opening the USB port cover for a few days until I realized it’s a hundred times easier if you open the slider first.
The “gesture area” (part of the touchscreen that extends below the screen) is natural once you learn it, but is not discoverable at all. This is presumably why you are guided through a tutorial on how to use it when you first boot the phone. The “back” gesture (a right-to-left swipe below the screen) is particularly opaque for a first-time user, but does ultimately spare you from having to dedicate screen space to a back button.
Synergy
The way the Pre aggregates contact information from multiple sources (Gmail, Facebook, AIM) is novel and kind of useful. But it is not without flaws. A specific example: a bunch of my AIM contacts came up as entries with only a screen name. I was able to merge those with the actual contact record on Gmail using the profile linking feature. But the only way to do this is to tap-tap-tap your way through each contact that needs linking. It was very tedious, even for a small handful for people. Furthermore, if you were to delete and re-add that AIM account at some later point, those links all get broken and need to be re-made.
Apps
I didn’t realize how much I’d come to depend on third-party iPhone apps until they weren’t there. There’s a Twitter app for the Pre but, you know, just one at the moment, so hopefully you like it. I don’t think there are any games to be found yet (and there is an unresolved question about what the performance of games will be like if they are required to be HTML/CSS based). My bus schedule tracker app was gone. But some stalwarts are there, like Pandora. A (somewhat unnervingly buggy) version of EverNote recently appeared.
Mac Integration
Naturally there is no love for Address Book and iCal here on the Pre. This is a bit of a bummer because that’s what I’m using. I only have contacts on Gmail because I imported them once at some point in the past. I have nothing on Gcal. If I intended to switch to the Pre, I’d also have to be prepared to commit to switching to the Google services, which is an idea I’m not crazy about.
The Pre does indeed show up as an iPod in iTunes 8.2, and I put some music on it without issue. Apple is already making noises that this may not last. It’ll be interesting to see whether Apple really does aggressively pursue this cat and mouse game, as it seems like Palm could turn the situation into a credible anti-competitive lawsuit.
The Little Details
The Pre is missing some little bits of finesse that the iPhone has. One example is the alphabet tabs for quickly jumping through a long address book or song playlist. Not on the Pre — get ready to scroll a lot. Another example is the lack of a toolbar button for moving an email to another folder. On the Pre, you have to open a menu to get at this command, which requires an extra tap. Of course these are all software nits, and one hopes that Palm will refine things over time.
Overall, the UI of the Pre is beautiful and quite functional, although I have my doubts about the wisdom of keeping the vestigial menu bar from classic Palm OS, which is both cumbersome to use and a very small fingertip target to open.
I much prefer the way the Pre (and Android, for that matter) handle out-of-band notifications, such as new email arrival, compared to the iPhone.
Bottom Line
It is absolutely mind-blowing that Palm pulled this off as well as they did. This is like the Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X transition for Palm — a massive rethink of the entire platform that must succeed for the company to survive. And, on a technical level at least, they have done admirably. Whether they can compete against the marketing juggernaut that is the iPhone remains to be seen. WebOS would need to mature a bit before I personally could replace the iPhone with the Pre as my primary device. But for a 1.0, they’ve performed a minor miracle. It is a highly respectable competitor to the iPhone and other smartphones. I would rank it above Android, and miles above Windows Mobile.
