Test Drive the Palm Pre from Spr

(Credit: SoftSailer.com)

What I Look Forward to Most

As I have said and implied in many of my posts, I love my Pre. I have had mostly positive (mostly very positive, actually,) experiences with the phone since I got it. It works with me seamlessly for the most part and has allowed me to stay in contact with the world in ways I either could not or could not enjoy with my Blackberry Pearl. I am thrilled to be a Pre user now, and I expect many positive future Pre experiences.

Like any good consumer of technology, however, I am always looking forward to the next fun technology-mediated experience. So, in that spirit, I would like to note a few, as yet un-had, experiences I am looking forward to with my Pre:

External Notification Light

The feature I think I would most like to experience on the Pre in future is being able to tell that I have a message without having to wake up the phone to check over and over again. Ideally, the home button might light differently for different kinds of notifications--for example, blue for voicemail, red for SMS, and green for email--but I would be thrilled if it lit up at all to indicate there was a notification I needed to review.

Visual Voicemail

I hope this is in the works 'cause this would be a great feature on the Pre--one I have have only heard about as a cell user and never experienced except for my limited experiments with Google Voice. The Pre is a phone that already excels at messaging and notifications in many ways, but without visual voicemail and (another missing feature I mention below), there are limits to how excellent the phone can be for messaging.

Forwarding SMS/MMS Messages

As it is, I do a lot of SMS and MMSing and I love doing both of these on my Pre, but I really look forward to being able to forward SMS/MMS messages.

Copying and Pasting More Easily

Yes, there is a way to copy/paste currently. But it doesn't work in all fields (received SMS's, for example) and it's kind of a pain to have to hold two keys down and drag. I don't do it very often because it's a bit too complicated, but I would do it a lot if it was made more easy. WebOS 1.1 has apparently got an easier method enabled in Memos--a way that involves some tapping for whole word and paragraph selection. This is the kind of thing that qualifies as "more easily" for me.

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(Credit: Sprint)

So, in the spirit of moving forward with the Palm Pre, I have collected the following ideas based on happy Pre user experiences. Some of these are pretty great.

Maybe Sprint/Palm should have another contest for the best Pre marketing idea?

PreCentral member "Meriweather" describes one possible TV commercial:

Have a series of ads that play on the use of cards and multi-tasking--an arena where Palm has an advantage over the iPhone. For example, an ad with a street magician saying, "pick a card, any card" to a throng, and you pan in, and he flips through a series of apps on the Pre, showing calendar, Pandora, email, photos, TV, whatever you want to show off. People in the crowd are oohing and aahing, and shouting out, "we want pandora", "play a video" "check email", etc. Then the magician says, "no problem we can do all of them. All at the same time." The crowd cheers, except one guy with slumped shoulders, who slinks away.

"Ronlongo" describes his idea:

How about an ad where they show all of life's things going on all over the place (meetings, tasks lists, emails, etc.) like a jumbled chaos maybe as separate (but live) images moving around at random on the screen and the actor going crazy trying to manage and remember it all.

Then swap to another actor. Suddenly all the activities resolve into a deck of playing cards again with live pictures on them. For example, one depicting a meeting at work going on, another showing Little Pete's baseball game, etc. the actor shuffles through the cards with ease managing them with complete ease. The meeting card depicts the meeting come to an end and the actor discards the card.

Finally the actor pulls all the cards together into a stack. Touches the top of the stack (where the Pre's power button is) and the stack resolves into a Palm Pre.

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(Credit: Sprint)

My post earlier today about the crazy Palm Pre lady commercial led me to read a bit more deeply about Sprint and Palm ads, and during this search, I decided to try to visit Sprint's Now Network "vanity" site (live since May, I think) on my Pre.

If you haven't yet seen the "Now" site, it's definitely worth a look and a listen. However, don't expect to experience it "live" on your Pre. The closest Pre users can come to viewing it on their phones is looking at this screen shot. I thought it was kind of funny that the "Now" phone on the "Now" network couldn't access the "Now" experience on their vanity site, so I had to share that.

Now, since users can't have the full experience of the site via the Pre, let me explain what that experience is like...

When you navigate to the site, a woman's voice (which, somewhat ironically, sounds as if it is from the future) welcomes you to now and announces the current time. What you see is a rapidly changing, flipping, fluttering version of the screen shot above with what sounds to me like a plane flying in the background.

The page is essentially a live mosaic of constantly updating stats about random things: how many people are getting a spray tan right now, how much milk vs. soda is being consumed, how many planes are in the air, the number of texts being sent on Sprint phones, how many workers are out sick right now, etc. Periodically, the futuristic female voice reports a "Now" stat and makes other announcements like, for example, "All content is rated 'N' for..." What else? "Now!"

It is actually pretty cool, so check it out on a desk/laptop sometime.

Note: I would like to acknowledge that it's not Sprint's fault that the Pre won't play with their "Now" site. The Pre just isn't there yet (I'm not a programmer, but I'm guessing it's a Flash thing).

I had an interesting evening one night last week. I was with a friend who has the Blackberry Storm and we were comparing phones so I asked him to go to a web-site and see if the Blackberry Storm could play the video. Well, when we reached the web-site we clicked on the video. Then, the Palm Pre, with the circle going round and round on the screen, started opening up the video while the Blackberry Storm was trying to open the video but a box popped up and ask to save the file. A few seconds later the Palm Pre threw up the play/pause bar and next came the video, playing right on the Palm Pre. No saving the file to look for later and then opening it up. The Palm Pre pulled through hands down!!!! A BIG HIGH FIVE TO YOU, PRE.

I remember reading one of the other bloggers messages which express concern about not having smiley faces to insert into text messages and e-mails. Well, they're there now. I was sending a text so I hit the "sym" key to see what it had to offer and down near the bottom were a couple of smiley faces. See the pictures below:

The picture on the right shows the "sym box", as you can well see and the picture on the left shows what the smiley face looks like before (a black and white stick figure smiley face) and after you send the message (a small yellow face w/a smile). Maybe it was there all the time and I didn't know it, but I've found the smiley faces and am really happy about it.

(Credit: palmprereviews.net)

This got me thinking: I can count the times I've used my Pre in landscape mode on one hand. And most of those times happened only because I was just playing around, not really using the phone/trying to do anything.

So...why don't I use the Pre in landscape mode more often?

Aside from the fact that you have to hack to get email to re-orient in landscape mode, the main reason I don't use the phone that way more often (at all, really) is that the only way to interact with the phone in landscape mode is really to tap the screen or turn up the volume. If you are doing anything that requires more than just watching video, viewing images, or following links (any web-based searching or form filling, for example), it is simply impractical to use landscape orientation.

I do really like having a hard keyboard that doesn't eat up valuable screen real estate, but a soft keyboard for text entry in landscape mode sure would make the phone a lot better for interacting with web pages. And for a phone that distinguishes itself as a dynamic, multi-tasking web and communications platform (as opposed to, say, the iPhone which distinguishes itself as a media and applications launcher), the absence of this landscape mode functionality is a pretty big loss.

I'm not sure how far in the future Palm plans to bring this feature to the phone (if at all), but I'm fairly certain it would make a lot of users very happy if they brought it sooner rather than later.

I'd heard people say you could upload photos to Facebook right from the Palm Pre. I'd seen the button to do it, but I hadn't tried it till today. I decided to try it this afternoon while my little boy was eating a Popsicle. I snapped a picture, expanded to view it, then I told it to upload to Facebook. In seconds it was on my Facebook wall, just as if I'd uploaded it from my laptop to Facebook.

I find this feature very interesting since there is no real Facebook app for the Pre. It seems they were thinking ahead by incorporating photo uploads and contact syncing with one of the most popular social networking sites of our time.

Here is the photo, in full size, as uploaded to Facebook. The quality is outstanding for a cell phone!

In an earlier post, I discussed my experience of the camera on the Pre and included a few pics (two of which I also include in this post). This post, however, focuses not on my user experience of the camera but my impression of the pictures taken with my Pre. The images I include in this post are made large to expose as much as possible about the quality of the images.

Let me start by saying that I am not a professional photographer and so my opinions about the quality of the photos taken with my Palm Pre definitely fall in the "amateur impressions" category. Caveat out of the way, my opinion of the quality of pics taken with my Palm Pre is very positive: The Pre takes a great daytime and a very good night time photo.

On my travels in the last month, I have taken quite a few pics and have been impressed with most. Here are a few taken outside under decent conditions.

Photo #1: Outdoor Pic under Bright But Cloudy Skies

This shows a photo taken in the early afternoon under bright but hazy/partly cloudy skies. Under decent picture-taking conditions, what impresses me about this photo (other than the obvious stunning good looks of my puppy, Ruby) is the way the Pre responds to the challenges imposed by the subjects of this particular photo: the incredible detail and color variation captured both near (Ruby) and far (the National Cathedral in Washington, DC).

(Credit: Catherine Gouge)

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I think it's about time I write my comparison post. I've had the Pre a while now and I've officially said goodbye to the Instinct. I could call it a bunch of bad names now and not have to worry about it throwing a fit and refusing to work...

Not that it ever needed any encouragement.

The past year of my life has been filled with ups and downs in our relationship. For the first month or two I loved the Instinct. Coming from a flip-phone that had very basic capabilities, I felt empowered with the Instinct. I could surf the web (somewhat) and take halfway decent photos. I also thought the media player would be a big deal, but soon realized it was a pain to get music on the phone and wasn't worth the trouble.

The lack of JavaScript abilities as well as flash made for a very poor web experience. Often I couldn't use login forms for email accounts and I'd get frustrated. While I continued to love the camera the rest of my grand hopes were quickly crushed.

Within months the Instinct began to lock up, mid task. Typing away on a text message, and BAM! lock-up. I'd have to sit and wait around 20 seconds for it to allow me to type another letter. This got to be very annoying...

I also found myself missing a real keyboard. The Instinct's onscreen keyboard is fairly accurate but that "fairly accurate" goes for everything relating to the touch screen. Clicking on links proved frustrating.

After a month with the Pre I'm still satisfied. I have no plans to ditch it after this review! In fact, I'm addicted to it and am finding new things to love every day.

The Palm Pre takes great photos, has an amazingly accurate touch screen, and hasn't locked up even once. I'm getting to be really fast on the keyboard and will soon have carpel tunnel in my thumbs... (hopefully not! haha)

A big difference for me is size. The Instinct was a little thinner, but much longer and a bit heavier. I could not put it in a front pocket of my jeans, and was forced to put it in the back, meaning there were times I accidentally sat on it. The Pre is small enough to, and with it's rounded stone-like shape to help it slide in, fit right in my front pocket. No more worrying about sitting on my life-line.

Ah yes, and that good-for-nothing Instinct (why'd they call it that anyway?) didn't have apps!!!!