Palm Pre user reviews (Sprint)

Pros Great internet experience, MULTITASKING-cards are great, awesome camera w/flash, fluid OS, vibrant screen display, over the air updates, screen size, wi-fi, Palm account remote device erase, qwerty keyboard, email push, good speaker, copy & paste

Cons BATTERY LIFE, no message indicator light, unable to forward text, no spell check (at least not that I'm able to find), no zoom on camera, no video recording, a major lack of ringers and alerts, no memory expansion slot

Summary Overall I'm REALLY enjoying my Pre and even more so using Web OS. I'd recommend it to anyone looking to get a great smartphone with a reasonable Sprint plan. Many of the cons I listed can be corrected with updates. I got this phone on Sat 6/6 and an update was already out on Sun 6/7 (which included an alarm clock). I'm not going to feed into the iphone vs Pre war going on. Both are good phones in their own right. The Pre is currently very limited on applications, but the phone is NEW. Give it time.

Things to consider:

If you're an individual with larger (thick) hands, the keyboard will probably be a bit tight for you.

If you like to store a ton of movies and songs on your phone, keep in mind the Pre is only 8GB and no expansion slots

If you use the internet, social networks, and message a lot.... This is a great phone for you...Just keep your charger close

If you need many applications right now, you may want to wait awhile before purchasing.

My Feelings about my Pre... I ABSOLUTELY LOVE IT! I upgraded from my Blackberry Curve 8330 and I don't miss it at all. The keyboard was larger on my curve and made it easier for me to email and text. However, I've already gotten a little used to the keyboard on the Pre and I'm sure I'll improve in time. The email on the is Pre is great. I thought that would be the biggest issue from leaving my Blackberry behind. But the push email seems to work flawless. The fact that you get a Palm account that allows you to log on from any computer and erase your device (should it be lost/stolen) makes me much more comfortable using this device. The internet and email on the Pre so nice. I find myself using my wi-fi at home and giving my computer a rest. Again, I love it.

Pros Notification system is the best bar none
Email system feels like Microsoft Outlook
WebOS is highly intuitive
Fantastic web page rendering
Best mobile Calendar I have used
Virtually everything is search-able from almost anywhere in the OS

Cons Keyboard - its built for elves but its becoming easier to type on it each day
No auto text correction that I can see.
Battery - I will say the first two days was horrible but today it lasted from 6:30AM to 10:30PM must have been an OTA update.

Summary A preface to my subject title:
I was an early adopter of the iPhone and I truly enjoyed the time I had with it up until a certain point. I began experiencing some serious issues with the iPhone which include but are not limited to: phone would receive legitimate emails as blanks and at first I began to delete them unknowingly, constant application crashes (not just 3rd party apps), and faulty ringer switch. These are just a few of the major problems that led me to want to switch, and I could go on but I will save space for the Pre (I am still a Mac supporter through other products).

Needless to say I was looking for a replacement. That replacement had to give me the fix the iPhone gave but it needed to step it up from a professional aspect. It was a close call between the Pre and the BB Bold, but I chose to go with the Pre. I will be honest and tell you that my first day with the phone I thought I might have made a mistake in switching, but now on the 4th day with the device I feel reassured I made the right decision. I find myself using a lot of the standard features and saying to myself "this is better than my iPhone" which then lead to me geeking out about how slick and intuitive the device is. Simple time saving steps like just typing a search phrase anywhere in the OS and pressing enter which spawns a google search page on its own, or doing the same for a web page and it spawns a new card with that web page. Gone are the days of going to an application to initiate what you want to do, just start typing something and the WebOS will provide you with logical solutions immediately saving many steps. The gesture functionality is a dream, it really keeps you moving. To give you some scale on this, if you have ever used an iPhone or similar device notice how often you hit the home button to navigate through the phone, now picture that home button as a red stop sign in your normal process, now imagine you have the ability to slip past that stop sign with a gentle swipe; slipping past those stop signs in day to day smartphone processes is what this phone does for you. All in all the WebOS allows for navigational bliss. Now lets talk about the calendar, aside from its syncro abilities with multiple calendars, this is the first calendar that I can say I enjoy using on the device itself. It has the look and feel of a desktop calendar so adding/viewing appointments is a snap and works as you would expect an excellent calendar to work. As far as media goes the screen is gorgeous, and the media tools are very impressive. Being able to sync with iTunes was a definite plus for me so kudos to Palm there. In the media player you can also employee a typed search to find songs/artists etc with ease. The browser rendering is second to none. The pages are rendered perfectly for the Palm Pre's screen making every site I have been to easy to navigate and read. As far as the look and feel of the phone, just seeing it on my desk in closed form is a thing of beauty. Its just a well design device that has a highly professional appearance about it. That being said, the slider could be tightened up a bit as I can feel it has a tiny bit of give in it. The call quality on the phone was excellent both on/off speaker mode. People I talked to were equally impressed with call quality. As far as the apps go, the app store is in Beta right now but new apps are popping up rather quickly. It will only be a matter of time before we see an arsenal of apps in the catalog. In fact I may develop a few we'll see. One last point I will re-iterate is about the notification system. I don't know how I operated without it before, but I will tell you it is so nice to be surfing the web or shooting off an email without being interrupted by a phone call. When a call comes in the notification just slides in underneath what you are doing allowing you to continue on leaving it up to you to decide if you want to answer the call or continue on. Pure genius I tell you. This notification is so unobtrusive even with multiple notifications (sms, missed calls, emails etc) it just feels like the phone is giving you a gentle nudge which is fantastic for staying productive on the phone.

Now that I have said as much as I can say about the good without writing a novel let me touch the faults. The keyboard is very very small which means the learning curve will be high. The battery performance at first was horrible but now on the 4th day it seems to have improved quite a bit. Not having an auto correct feature when typing is both a blessing and a curse. Lastly it is in need of enterprise level security so it can be meshed in with corporate networks, but I'm sure we'll see this down the line in an OTA update. I am not going to knock the app catalog because we are talking about a new device and OS here so that is to be expected. All in all fantastic smartphone and I can definitely recommend it to business users and consumers alike.

Pros -Slick
- Amazing multi-tasking
-Beautiful OS
-physical keyboard (although a bit cramped)
-amazing sync with contacts & calendar (maybe too good-read review)

Cons -Biggest problem: Battery is HORRIBLE
-Slow OS
"Universal Search" not universal
-no ability to UNDO
-finger-print magnet
-not enough preferences/options within apps
-Minor issue, but I'd like a message indicator light
-no ability to create short-cuts

Summary As a loyal 10-year Sprint customer, I was counting down the days until the Pre arrived. Finally I could have something like the iPhone without switching carriers... I bought it the day it came out, but reluctantly, I returned the Pre 48 hours later. I say "reluctantly because the Pre is beautiful. I really wanted to keep it, but with such a miserable battery life right out of the box, there was just no way I could. I even had the screen set to about 30% brightness and still after a few hours of testing out the phone it was virtually drained. Imagine how bad the battery life will be in a few months!
The "universal search" of the Pre seemed pretty lame actually. It basically just searches your contacts. When they say it searches your apps, they don't mean it searches through your apps, it just shows you apps that contain the letters you typed- for instance, if you typed "CAL" into the search, your friend CALista's name would appear in the results, as would the CALendar app, but it would NOT pull up your trip to CALifornia in calendars or your email about counting CALories. BlackBerry would have found all of those.
Another issue came up when I accidentally hit the back key on the keyboard while editing a phone #. Didn't know what the original # was and there was no way of finding out... ( because the sync function is actually so good, by the time I got to my computer, that # had already been erased off of my google contacts). If there were just an undo option or a preference where the OS prompts you to SAVE or cancel, but no such luck- once you've made a mistake, there's no way to fix it.
Ultimately, while the screen and OS are so much more sleek and down-right gorgeous,the Pre just didn't feel like it had the functionality of my BlackBerry.

Pros The new operating system is fantastic and the apps will come. Has a hardware keyboard, standard charging cable and headphones jack, screen is vibrant, iTunes compatibility is brilliant, web browser is very good. Has WiFi.

Cons Hardware feels and looks cheap, 8GB storage and NO expansion? Slide-out keyboard is extremely poor, USB jack under cheap plastic cover, $70 wireless charger is absurd, screen is a bit too cramped, few apps, Palm delays sending kit to developers

Summary The Palm Pre should have been an iPhone killer. The operating system is everything the iPhone OS should have become and the fact that you can drag and drop files (unlike an iPhone) makes it an instant winner. If you've used an iPhone you practically want to jump off a bridge with managing files - you have to use WiFi to move files into the phone and only the application transferring that file will be able to see that file. The Pre is the same as always - sync music, video and files or just drag and drop them onto the phone The multitasking and convenience of switching between applications. On an iPhone you need to press the main button, swipe your way over to another application, open it up, hope copy and paste works, go back to the original app, etc. The Pre allows you to have several applications open and easily go back and forth. The information management is well integrated. Unlike the iPhone, it doesn't assume you're always connected to the Internet - it allows you to use a great email client offline without warnings, attempts to go online, etc. It will import Outlook tasks (iPhone has no Windows based task manager at all.) Palm really did a good job with the basic core applications. Apps will come in time, especially since the cost of producing them are much less than with an iPhone and because, unlike Apple, Palm gives developers greater freedom to provide hacks/apps that will improve upon the OS. You can download email attachments (can't do that with an iPhone. ) The wireless sync with other common online applications is brilliant. The "card" based system to move around in the OS is far better than the iPhone as is the way data works together. This phone should have been the iPhone killer - it's not designed to be a phone and media player with some applications thrown into the mix.

Palm made the greatest phone hardware for years with their Treo series. Unfortunately whomever designed those phones is apparently not with the company and one has to wonder whether those that are have been sitting on their brains. Sure the phone will sell out its 300,000 production run but in a competitive market, Palm will fall far behind where it is already in danger of extinction.

To begin, the phone is made rather poorly in comparison to other phones. I've seen worse but it's just mediocre build quality and looks strange in shape. The slide out keyboard is flimsy and the keys are Centro-like tiny and far more difficult to press because they are more cramped and don't provide good tactile feedback. This keyboard should be used for a last option - but Palm doesn't provide virtual keyboards as an option. The screen is a bit too small, even with the same resolution as the iPhone, and at times the device also "rounds" corners to make the screen appear even smaller.

The USB connector makes the phone not really dockable and is placed under a very shoddy USB cover. Perhaps Palm thought it could push a $70 wireless dock as a solution - fat chance.

The 8GB of memory in the device is paltry and looks especially mediocre when Apple's new base model at $99 provides 8 GB of storage with the mid range beginning at 16GB. Palm didn't include an SD slot for expandable storage for reasons that are beyond my comprehension. Not that the phone is unusable, but this limits you to probably 700 songs and 2-3 movies if you want to make sure to have adequate storage space, including backup of your internal non-media files with room to grow.

The challenging part about this phone is that, while Sprint's offer is fantastic, you have to wonder how many developers will care to create apps for this platform when the kit to do so still isn't out and won't be for another month or two at minimum. In the meanwhile, Apple has thousands of applications, Windows Mobile devices will offer incredible new hardware shortly and already have thousands of applications. We haven't even factored Nokia's attempt to push Symbian and, the big giant - Google - putting out its second generation Android phone which is surely going to be even better than the first. Do you want to commit two years to seeing whether Palm will get this effort off the ground?

Since the Pre is not even available... one can only wonder how Palm will stay in business given its huge losses and inability to meet demand at its hottest moment, even with mediocre hardware.

Updated on Jul 12, 2009

Two additional items:

Battery Life: There are already aftermarket sellers of extended batteries for the Pre that don't add size. This should easily make battery life adequate in addition to Palm enhancements on the phone.

Lack of Video Camera: This is mostly a gimmick. Most other phone video works as well (see "poorly") as expected from a phone cam. Software will come in time to support the hardware and I highly doubt people buy a phone for this purpose.