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Palm Pre Is Out, Time For Discussion
caffiend666 writes "Palm Pre is out, let's discuss the status and compare stories. The first day seems to have gone as well as expected, with many selling out before noon. I bought the second at the local Sprint store, and so far I like it. Much more one-hand friendly than the iPhone. I haven't gotten the main apps to sync with Linux, but the media portion functions much like a thumb-drive with my Fedora-8 Linux system. For the Pre-verts out there, here's some Palm Pre dismantling pictures."
Well, considering that the entire OS is HTML/XML based, I'd say that they have a pretty efficient/good rendering engine.
Just so people aren't confused, the Palm Pre runs a stripped down Linux distro and Webkit. All the applications and the GUI are running on Webkit and the OS's only real job is to handle the hardware and provide a nice platform for Webkit to run. The browser they implemented for the Web should perform similarly to the iPhone or Safari or Chrome or any of the other Webkit based browsers, with the browser GUI being the real make or break aspect of their implementation.
I too bought the palm pre today...just as a note, I came from a motorolla q9h, not an iphone. Overall, I love the phone. I wish palm would release the sdk already so more apps would come out and so I could start customizing/contributing, but the apps that were there generally feel solid. There's about as much delay as one would expect on a smartphone, but the phone overall feels very responsive (which was my very first impression.) The webos's shortcuts are very intuitive, and between quick launch, synergy, etc, I can probably match my productivity on the Q9H that has windows mobile.
:) I feel much safer with it in my pocket in a nice sleeve.
I don't care about syncing anything other than mp3's and emails over imap so I can't answer syncing questions. Ubuntu 9.04 detected it as a usb device just fine.
I think that tales of the keyboard being way too small are overrated, but it definitely will take getting used to...I think you will pretty much know instantly if you will be able to adjust to it or not.
Really the only thing that may make me regret buying it may end up being the battery life...but it's hard to tell considering I didn't really give it a decent first charge (I charged it for 4 hours then took it out exploring for 6 and it was dead by the time I got home with about an hour's worth of talk, constant browsing, and a little pandora streaming.) Even with that said, I think there will need to be a few more battery saving options...like maybe not being logged into AIM/etc. (you can just not enter aim information...but I don't want to disable it completely)
Another thing I wasn't expecting was a free (cheap?) sleeve that came with the phone.
The browser is nice...it can be hard to zoom in and click on certain links, maybe like the iphone? But it is nice having a fully functional browser with ajax. The only problem I had was with iGoogle not loading properly (I think due to the calendar widget), and I just had to use the mobile version.
So far though, I've loved the palm pre. I hope it returns the love.
It's not quite the same as the original iPhone situation. With the iPhone, you were supposed to write a "web 2.0" style application that ran off your web site in the browser. With the Pre, the applications are packaged and run from the handset's memory. That means they work without connectivity, and their use doesn't consume your data allowance. Palm also provides a comprehensive set of JavaScript APIs for building WebOS applications, while iPhone web applications had nothing over regular web applications. But the biggest difference is that with the Pre, you're on equal footing with Palm's developers - all of Palm's applications are written with the same HTML/CSS/JavaScript toolkit as third-party applications; with the iPhone, Apple applications were always built with Cocoa, so third-party developers were at a disadvantage.