My opinion on the Palm Pre

On Saturday, June 6th, Palm and Sprint released the Palm Pre. I’ve been waiting for this phone ever since it was announced at CES in January so I was pretty anxious to finally get my hands on it. So in this post I just want to give my thoughts about the Pre so far.

First off, I’ve been using the Palm Treo 755p for the last 2 years. Before that I used the Treo 700. So I’m somewhat familiar with Palm and was hoping the Pre would be able to live up to the hype.

Bottom line up front, this phone is awesome. Granted, it has its flaws but for version 1 of a phone (and a new OS to boot) it is amazing. Ok, now for a few things that I would like to see added or changed (I’ve been keeping a list as a memo on my phone):

1. The first thing I had was that the keys were not backlit because during the day you can’t tell at all. So I was very pleasantly surprised tonight when I opened my phone in the dark and saw that they are indeed backlit. So my first issue was fixed already :)

2. The only sounds that are able to be changed by the user are the ringtones. You cannot change any of the system sounds to include notifications, alarms and text messaging alerts. This is kind of a big deal to me because the text msg alert is just a brief beep and I usually end up missing it unless it’s relatively quiet where I’m at. So I would like to be able to change that sound to something more likely to catch my attention.

3. Along the same lines, the speaker is rather quiet. So ring tones, alerts, etc… are hard to hear.

4. It would be nice to have some kind of reminder for missed calls/messages. Granted there is a notification at the bottom but it doesn’t make any noise or vibrate or anything. So unless you turn on the screen you won’t see it. Perhaps this will be addressed by third party software because Butler accomplished this on the Palm OS.

5. When you are typing a text message there is no counter to keep track of how many characters you are typing. This is a big deal since text messages only allow 160 characters and Twitter only allows 140. So whenever I send a message to Twitter via text I never know if I went over the character limit.

6. Battery life leaves something to be desired. Today my battery only lasted maybe 7 hours with only moderate use. But I was roaming for about 2 hours so maybe this affected things. I’m hoping for a third party extended battery soon. Or maybe a firmware update will address this. And remember, even the iPhone had horrible battery life when it was first released.

7. The last thing on my list has also been fixed already. When I was roaming today I could not connect to any data network. So I thought maybe the Pre couldn’t roam for data. This would be a huge issue because the Pre loses a heck of a lot of functionality if it can’t connect to a network. But in the phone preferences there is a place to enable data roaming (it is disabled by default apparently).

I also wanted to cover a few apps. The app store is very nice and quite functional. I think once it is populated with more apps it will be top of the line. I think it’s just as nice if not nicer than the app store for the iPhone/iPod Touch. I only have a few apps so far but this is what I think of them:

Where – I think this app has potential but I couldn’t get it to work right. Today when I was in Charleston, SC it could never figure out where I was. It would just continue to search for my location. I tried to enter my location manually but I couldn’t get it to stop searching. So I just closed it and gave up.

Google Maps – Wow. This app is almost perfect. Very nice the way it finds me wherever I am and puts a little blue dot on my location. Easy to update my location and find things near me. I can search for something in the box at the top of the screen and Google Maps will find it and show me where it is and how to get there. My only issue was that sometimes if I left the app open and was doing other things, when I came back to the app it didn’t seem to want to update my location. But if I closed it and opened it back up it worked fine.

Pandora – Works just like you would expect. Almost identical to the web experience and other great app.

Tweed – This is a Twitter app. It does the job but it’s not as nice as Twitteriffic for the iPhone. But it is very useable until something else comes along.

Sprint Navigation – Works just like your portable GPS for your car. I’ve never used it before but it looks great on the Pre. Gives turn by turn directions via voice and even allows you to call in your destination so you don’t have to enter it by hand if you’re driving.

So that’s my opinion on the Pre so far. All the other nitty gritty info can be found on a plethora of other blogs so if you’re interested search through those (I highly recommend www.precentral.net). Even though I’ve only listed the bad things and the things I’d like to see changed, the list of good things greatly outweighs the bad. And 99% of the issues I have can be fixed with a firmware upgrade and/or third party program. So I fully expect this phone will only get better over time. I think Palm hit a home run with this one. Great job!