Slashdot Mirror
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."
experience on this thing in comparison to previous Palm OS devices? In comparison to an iPhone?
The Holy Grail of mobile phones, for me, is the phone that can give a really good browsing experience and can thus replace (at least in some small way) the need to carry a laptop at all times.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Weird because while I love my Treo I hate my Treo, but using version 1.0 of web os makes me appreciate my Treo much more.
So yeah yeah yeah, Pre is great. But here is where I think it sucks compared to my Treo.
The calendar program is puny and worthless in comparison to the Treo + Agendus. It's very hard to visualize what is happening a month at a time on the Pre. On the Treo + Agendus, there are icons for birthday cakes, and icons for dentist appointments and all sorts of very useful 16x16 icons that help a great deal visualizing what's going on a month at a time.
The memos and tasks are truly worthless. Very hard to make detailed notes. No way to categorize or organize the notes. I have over 200 notes on the Treo and they are simple to find and all are searchable. None are searchable on the Pre and there is not even a way to categorize them.
Touchscreens are for noobs. All this time I've wondered what the iPhone crowd was crowing about with their touchscreens, but today, on the Pre, I really miss the fidelity and precision of a stylus and a 5 way navigation button the stylus lets me precisely hit exactly the point on the screen I am looking for and the nav button lets me precisely scroll up and down the number of items I desire. Exactly. Each time. Repeatedly.
The software is at a very simple and unsophisticated level. Websites constantly need to be zoomed and the browser doesn't remember that I've zoomed this website the last three times I've been to it, and so does not automatically zoom it the next time. Compare to Firefox.
And webos is slow. The whole thing feels slow compared, yes, to the PalmOS on the Treo 755p EVEN with it's white screens of death. It's frustrating and may go back to the store within the 30 day period while I wait for webos 2.0.
And I fear that contrary to what Palm has been saying, the problems will be firmware related and not an easy download. And frankly, the Treo experience is that Palm will release one new set of firmware, maybe two, and then consider the phone dead and push people to get the next one.
So we'll see. I think the hope of the phone is:
* a firmware upgrade from palm
* release of mojo sdk and native apps from long time palm developers
Ya know, just because the iPhone only has one button doesn't mean Apple was right to go that route. Apple loved their one button mouse for a decade when everyone else knew how stupid that was. 5 way nav buttons and a stylus isn't such a horrible klugey interface as much as forcing touchscreen for everything is.
No mention yet about Copy&Paste which the iPhone got a lot of comments about lacking, and was always brought up as a bonus for every other new phone.
Here's how it works on the Pre: You can't copy text that you can't edit. No copying text from a website, or an SMS, or an email unless you reply and copy from there.
http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre/182854-copy-paste-you-kidding-me.html