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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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.

I mentioned in my Centro comparison post that I wish the hardware designers had worked a way into the Pre to better facilitate moving the cursor around. It did turn out that there was a supposed keyboard shortcut to do this, holding down the orange button would turn the touchscreen into more of a 4-way touch wheel.

Now, as a hack, that works out okay, but it comes across as far inferior to a good native solution designed around the intended functionality. For one, the cursor still jumps around too much for my tastes. I am most often using it to correct a typo in a text message and thus I am able to touch the cursor to the general area in normal mode and then I would like the touch wheel mode to be used to get into the precise spot. Therefore, I would prefer it to be a bit more slow to move.

Another touch screen keyboard hack has to do with the highlighting of text, nominally for use with the cut, copy and paste actions. You highlight text by pressing the shift key and then scrolling with your finger, much like with moving the cursor above. However, again it comes across a little wonky with the highlighted selection dropping sometimes and it can have some trouble handling multiple lines of text at times.

Both of these are somewhat minor complaints, again, but hey, it is boring to write about how awesome the 95% of what the phone gets right is.

Messaging Inbox

(Credit: Palm)

One of the features I did like about my old Instinct was threaded messaging. With Sprint's service being very unpredictable in our area there are days when texts and calls seem to get lost, only to show up hours after they've been sent. When you're sitting on your porch and you get a text from a friend that says "What aisle are you in now?" it's nice to have it show up right under the text you sent them two hours earlier that reads "Cool! I'm in Walmart too!"

The Palm Pre takes threaded messaging a step further and pulls not only texts but Instant Messaging into the thread. My husband can text me something while he's out, then send an IM from his laptop in the office, then send me another text on his way home and they're all listed in chronological order, right there on my Pre.

And, like anything else on the Pre, any conversation can easily be deleted by flicking it off the right of the screen. I especially like this because I enjoy keeping my threads uncluttered. I clean out my messages daily, keeping only those conversations that contain important information I may need to view later on.

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!!!!

(Credit: PreCentral)

What's New?

The Palm official list can be found here. The compiled list of the "tons of undocumented features" can be found over at my home away from home, Pre Central.

From the looks of it, there are lots of little fixes (for example, you can view items in 'sent mail' for gmail and yahoo separately now), improvements (photo app, sound for notifications, animated drop down menus, and Javascript interpreter performance upgrades), and added features (emailing memos and a bunch of EAS-related stuff).

Highlights So Far?

I haven't had long to play around, but so far, here are a few things that excite me:

1. Links on the web browser select easier and faster.
2. The UI seems snappier in general (likely due to the JS performance upgrades).
3. Okay, shallow, I know, but I love the emoticons in text messages. It's a fun detail.
4. iTunes sync is back! This doesn't greatly affect me, but it's kind of fun in a "Ooo, no you didn't" kind of way.

What's Not New?

It appears as though there are no big new improvements for the average, non-corporate user--improvements that many were hoping for. Namely, there is no video recording, no improved calendar functions (like, being able to add contacts to events), no message forwarding, and no improved cut/paste functionality.

More than anything else on a phone, the messaging service is what I make the most use of, at least up to this point though the Pre's excellent web functionality has it gaining in market share of my mobile time use. For the most part, messaging works unobtrusively on the Pre, but as always, I am here to offer a few suggestions on how it could be better in my opinion.

Along with text messaging there is built in support for instant messaging platforms as well, but only AIM and GChat. My first suggestion is obvious, add more platforms. Yahoo, MSN, Facebook et cetera. Another minor issue is the integration of text and instant messaging does not always work smoothly and I would prefer to leave the default application to text messaging only.

Perhaps a third party application like Digsby could come in and really provide a killer solution because having a third party application to let me handle chat accounts would be ideal. Hopefully, much like desktop applications, it would also be able to deal with the various platforms independently so that you could, for example, mark yourself as away on GChat but available on AIM.

My last suggestion is probably a bit more difficult to achieve but is something I would really enjoy seeing and that is to really embrace the card nature of the webOS and take a lesson from Firefox 3.5 and implement a detachable card for text messaging conversations. I feel it would lend a more efficient system for those who deal with a lot of texts from a lot of different people simultaneously. I find it easier to switch between cards than to back swipe to the home screen in the messaging client and then tap on the next conversation to comment in.

Quick post today to comment on the Pre's system of notifications. Generally speaking, I love it. It's clear, accurate, and subtle without being coy--if that makes any sense.

The Good

(Credit: berbs.us)

Each "layer" of notifications has a small "bubble" (not sure what Palm calls them) to the left and a larger, wider one to the right. Tapping on the larger bubble, takes you right into that message. Tapping on the smaller bubble (which is also overlaid with a small # representing the number of that kind of message you have), will take you to a list view of all messages you have of that type.

The Bad

Not a lot bad about notifications on the Pre, but what is bad is kind of annoying: Though there is a hack to change this (there always is), the current version of WebOS does not allow users to modify the sound made for different kinds of messages. So, if you have or plan to buy a Palm Pre and are even mildly popular, I hope you like the sound of "ba da da DING!"

The Pretty

Each tap on a notification "bubble" brings up its own card. And, of course, you can have multiples open at once and swipe between them like you are waving your hand in the wind (or something). Seriously, it's very nice.

Also very "pretty" is the way that you can simply swipe right to get rid of a notification bubble if you feel sufficiently notified and do not feel like viewing the message at that time. It's easy. And if you are just a bit OCD and actually like to put things away after you're done playing with them, it can even be fun. No, really.