My quick and dirty review of the Palm Pre

A friend of mine who works for Sprint asked me through Facebook today how I liked my Palm Pre. It’s been two weeks and one conference since I bought it, so here’s what I told him. This is directly copy/pasted from my comments on FB. If I’m inclined, I’ll add some screen shots, pics and more updates to this later. Feel free to ask me questions in the comments.

hmmmmm…okay. Overall, I LOVE it. Such a vast improvement over PalmOS (or POS as I like to call it). Email handling is awesome, Calendar is fantastic, the camera is great, contacts are great, web browsing is excellent.

You can load mp3s as ringtones…very cool. You can take screen shots (which I have since forgotten how). The flash on the camera has made me the envy of many iPhone users.

The app store is still lacking in a wide range of apps. Most of them are tools to use in place of visiting websites (craigslist, opentable, etc). I’m hoping that there will be camera apps and other functionality apps in the future.

Where is it lacking? Cursor placement can be very frustrating. You have to tap very precisely to move the cursor to the beginning of a line and I miss most of the time. There’s no joystick ring around the one button to aid in cursor movement, which is stupid imho.

Also, You can’t highlight text you’re not typing. So, if there’s something in an email you want to copy paste into a text message, you’re SOL. I hope that changes soon. You can copy text in a text edit area.

I’d also like to be able to map the virtual camera shutter button on the screen to the actual button on the phone face. It’s incredibly difficult to snap a self portrait….or a pic with a friend. I wound up looking like a tard several times last week at the conference I attended because of this.

Oh, and big whoopsie. I forgot to mention battery life. The Pre is always updating, syncing, checking email. Definitely buy the car charger to juice up on the road. And always plug it in at night. The battery goes from completely dead to full charge in about 3 hours. I made it about 6 hours of what I’d consider heavy use on a charge.

There are some extended life batteries out there, but none made by palm yet, so I’m going to wait…wouldn’t want to void my warranty or insurance.

I haven’t splurged for the touchstone yet, so I can’t tell you about that.

USB and media sync are pretty rad. iTunes recognizes it as an iPod and iPhoto sees it as a camera, so very easy to sync/import.

Thanks to (jeff)isageek for inadvertently prompting me to write a blog post.