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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There are a pair of twitter applications in the App Catalog already for the Palm Pre. Tweed is the more popular of the two with 81,431 download and a four star rating at the time of writing. Spaz is the other with 25,314 downloads and a three star rating. In an effort to compare the two and also to investigate the overall ability of the Pre to integrate with Twitter, I took both for a test drive.

Up first is Tweed. The default page shows a standard Twitter-style home page. You then have the option to change to trending topics, favorites, direct messages, replies, just your own tweets, bookmarks or the public time line. It is a bevy of options and should provide all that your heart could desire in terms of selection criteria of tweets.

For uploading photos, you have a choice of TweetPhoto, TwitPic or yFrog. You can even pass on your current location as a tinyurl via the Pre's GPS capability. Pretty nifty.

(Credit: d0lph1nK1ng)

It looks like I'm going to have to stop being so lazy and find access to Mac OS 10.5+ so that I can get filecoaster on my Pre so that I can install the latest and, perhaps, greatest homebrew app to date..

Yes, that's right: There is now a Google Voice homebrew app that looks too good to pass up.

If homebrew app installing is not so much your style, vote over at Google Voice for them to work on a native app for the Pre. For now, as Derek over at PreCentral explains:

Blackberry and Android owners can get apps. iPhone users, well, they've just been blocked out of the service thanks to Apple's insanely terrible app policies. Seems like a good opportunity for Palm, doesn't it?

Do you want such an application for webOS? Of course you do.

Mosey on over to Google Voice's suggest a feature page, scroll down to the mobile applications section, and check off Palm Application. Hopefully Google will make it and Palm will accept it and you, friend, will use it.

So, um...what are you waiting for? Vote already!

(Credit: jkOnTheRun)

Yesterday, Jonathan Downer posted a tip for previewing email. This feature is thought to be new with WebOS 1.1 though it was not one of the many noted by Palm when they released the update. We know about it now because it was reported in the forums by Pre Central user imop45 and also over at jkOnTheRun.

The short-but-sweet original tip:

Go into your inbox and pinch out on a message (like the zoom in gesture). This will expand the message without having to open the message. You can do this on multiple emails at once also.

And a follow-up tip from chodaboy:

Here's an even easier way: you can anchor the thumb of the hand holding the phone *anywhere* on the screen, and swipe horizontally over any message with the index finger of the free hand and the preview will expand.

Though some users have described the original method as "tricky," I have found that all methods work really well and are pretty easy to perform. The best part about this for me (and others, of course) is that I don't have to open and close every single email just to see what each is about. All I have to do is pinch out (across or up--it all works) and preview some or all of one or more emails.

This might qualify as not only my favorite new tip but my favorite WebOS 1.1 feature. Sweet!

I'm back to talk about a few apps I downloaded, but before I do that, I want to inform you about what just happened to me. I just received my SPRINT phone bill and there was an extra $70 added onto my bill for call forwarding. Actually 350 minutes of call forwarding at .20 a minute. The reason for the call forwarding, which I've never done before, was so I can test drive the Palm Pre, but the Pre has it's own phone number so I just forwarded all my calls from my cell phone over to the Pre. Not knowing I was going to be charged for the forward calls, it's been a month since I turned on the call forward option. So I called SPRINT and told them of the $70 over charge and without any hesitation or combat, they removed the $70 immediately...My hat goes off to you SRINT, that's why I've been with you all these years. Kudos to your customer service team.

Now back to the App Store. I've been missing the games I like to play on my phone, like Backgammon, Free Cell, Bejeweled, etc., however, the Palm Pre doesn't have these apps as of yet, but they do have the Classic Motion App, which is the old Palm OS that is on the 700p, 650, 600 and the 755 Palms. Here are a couple of pictures of what Classic Motion looks like:

Classic Apps looks like the little tuxedo in the first picture. The second picture is the old Palm OS desktop once Classic Apps opens up. Noticed backgammon and bejeweled? They are the old games I had on my old Palm 700p. I just opened up the install folder in the Classic Apps program and dragged and dropped these two games over and they work perfectly, like they were on my old Palm OS. You just have to get use to the arrow keys and tweak it a little and away you go. So now I'm really happy with my Palm Pre. You can even buy games or programs off the Classic Motion website,LINKTEXTHERE without having to do the home brew thing, which I am terrified of. Manipulating my phone has never worked for me, it would always lock up then I would have to take out the battery, reset the phone and remove any program that caused the conflict. I like the Classic Motion Apps program much better. Enjoy.

(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 recently got my Google Voice account set up and am pretty excited about its potential. As of now, there is no native application for using Google Voice on the Pre, but it is possible to dial out through your Google Voice account either by going through the web page or calling your Google Voice number from the phone and following the instructions.

My first few experiences making and receiving calls were pretty seamless. Messages I received from others are transcribed into visual voicemail and sent to me almost immediately as a text message and somewhat later as an email (but only because I have my email set to pull every hour). And the transcription was spot on.

As of now, Google Voice does not accept ported numbers, but when that day comes, this user will port away and finally be able to fully own the number I have had for the last decade.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Google Voice, check out this video (or scroll down for a list of features):

Still interested? Here are the listed features:

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There has been much excitement about a new application, filecoaster, that allows some users to install homebrew apps without going through a desktop.

(Credit: PreCentral)

However, after much trial and error and forum discussioning (I made that word up), I can report that if you have Mac with OSX 10.4, you can not enjoy this ipk installer.

I, and some very confused others at Pre Central, had understood the claim that filecoaster allowed for "downloading and installing homebrew applications without needing the desktop" to mean that this was a way for downloading homebrew apps totally without the need for a desktop, but that is not the case: You need to be able to install the SDK on your desktop first.

Ah, well. That was exciting for about 20 minutes. Guess those of us with 10.4 or other trouble installing the SDK are still SOL.

Thanks, in any case, to PreGame who created filecoaster for some awesome work! There are lots of happy people who have started using it.