Palm Pre (8 GB) Smartphone

If you are reading this review, most likely, the main question on your mind is

“should I buy a Pre, or should I buy an iPhone 3G”?
 
“Which one is the best choice?”

Therefore, I will start by saying that,  although the Pre is not necessarily better than the iPhone, it certainly offers  an excellent cellular phone experience and hardware appeal that not only earns  5 STARS for this review, but, in many ways bests the current software build of the iPhone and the Storm, until Apple  updates iPhone 3G users to version 3.0 later this month.

If you are currently a Sprint user, the Pre is possibly the best phone you can  buy to use on their service. There are lots of Samsung models on Sprint right now but, the Pre definitely upstages them with build quality and with functionality.



HARDWARE

The Palm Pre is a CDMA phone for the Sprint network exclusively (in America) but there is also a GSM version for Europe and a model for Bell Mobility in Canada. Out of the box the phone has access to Sprint’s EV-DO high speed network and unlike the Blackberry Storm, the Pre has built in WiFi for access to home/office/school/restaurant WiFi routers – which will give you the highest data access speeds providing the site has  a broadband connection.
The phone comes with 8GB of built in storage – 7GB of which you have access to, plus, 256 MB of RAM connected to its 600 Mhz Texas  Instruments processor.  

The phone is about the same weight as the iPhone and slightly heavier than the iPhone 3G.  Because its design is candybar/slider with a keypad underneath, it is slightly chunky through the center.
The touchscreen is slightly, and noticeably smaller than the iPhone’s, but does support the same 480x320 resolution and uses a very similar graphical user interface style.

As for the battery, the Pre uses an 1150mAh battery which can be charged through its included micro-USB cable, or for $70 you can buy the “Touchstone”  which is a  wireless “induction charger”.  With the Touchstone, you can simply place the phone on its pad and leave it, for it to charge.  Like most induction devices, the back of the phone does get hot, but, its nice to be able to do things wirelessly so there is less cable clutter.

The phone comes with a pair of headphones designed similar to the iPhone’s, but, unfortunately, these earbuds are just as bad as Apple’s.  Decent sound but a poor ‘one size fits all’. Fortunately they are colored Black, which should alleviate someone jacking you thinking you had an iPod.

The phone also features enhanced Bluetooth with A2DP “stereo Bluetooth” for wireless Bluetooth headsets.  Most of us don’t have media centers in our homes that support A2DP, but, I’m expecting that more A2DP devices will be produced after iPhone is upgraded to 3.0 since the mass markets seem to react to the iPhone/iPod touch – the best selling Digital audio playing devices on the planet.



KEYBOARD

When Steve Job’s announced years ago in Macworld that the iPhone and iPod touch would not have a keyboard, many people worried about how good typing would be on the devices because of the high sensitivity and software design that would be necessary to emulate a virtual keyboard.  Apple has stuck with the no keyboard design based on the belief that its better to have a graphical user interface that could be designed and redesigned to meet whatever need we had, rather than burden the device with an unchangeable, bulky keyboard.  

The iPhone typing experience set the bar for all touchscreen phones and while some designers have added vibration and “haptic” touch elements to help the human brain register a button press,  other designers such as the T-Mobile G1’s  have combined touchscreen with underslung physical keyboard which almost certainly continues to present us with bulky phones that have varying keyboard quality.
The Pre’s keyboard  is very similar to the previous Treo and Centro models, which have a slick rubbery design. But, unlike those previous Palm’s, the Pre’s button spacing is not very good for people with bigger fingers and would definitely be a bother to those used to typing on the ever-spacious Sidekick 3.  You have to have small girl fingers to really get the most out of typing on the Pre and for Texters, this is a very big deal.

The build quality of the keyboard is fine, but the software needs revision. Why is there no double tap of the spacebar for a period?  Why is the backspace button right above the enter button so that I can accidentally hit it?



GRAPHIC USER INTERFACE

The Pre makes use of a special designed software called WebOS as its graphic user interface, unlike the Storm which simply had software ported to it from older Blackberry’s.    Due to the copyrights and patents Apple holds on the iPhoneOS, the WebOS had to be designed with lots of differences in order to ensure that while some of its graphics and animations resemble the iPhone’s, it did not come dangerously close to picking up a lawsuit.

What the Palm does differently is found in its use of “Cards” and  finger motion “gestures”.

The main screen of the Pre looks just like the iPhone’s – with user placed widgets for access to quick launching of software such as “Phone”,  “Camera”, “Sprint Turn by Turn Navigation”,  “Google Maps”, “Youtube”, etc.     The main screen allows you to have a wallpaper – which the iPhone doesn’t until it is jailbroken, and at the bottom of the screen is an OSX-like  widget bar.  On the bottom of the screen, non-obtrusive pop ups will gather to notify you of new occurrences – such as a received email or text – and you can choose to touch it to read it, or keep doing what you are doing.

The CARDS is where the WebOS truly shines.  “Cards” is basically a multitasking subroutine which seeks to eliminate the one problem most iPhone users have.  On the iPhone, when an App is closed, it is automatically suspended. Therefore, if you are using AIM or playing a game, when you want to go the Home screen or browse the web, you end up disconnecting from AIM or closing that game and must completely reconnect to AIM or  restart that game.    The Cards  are the paused application held in the system memory awaiting you to return to it.   By making a single swipe gesture, you can quickly return to the scrollable “Card view” which lets you swipe left or right to get back to the app you were just using. Therefore, you needn’t suspend anything.

Just like Windows, the more programs you have open at once, the slower the system runs because of the taxing of the embedded 256MB RAM, but, since mostly people will only go between game – internet – text messages and phone calls, its not bad at all.   I was able to open up 8 programs before it crashed but if it’s a bunch of  apps using low memory, you can go higher than 10.

The center button on the bottom of the screen  - similar to the home button on the iPhone”  has a capacitive touch area where you will be able to use your gestures. By swiping up, you bring up the “card view”.    A slower swipe will bring up the quick launcher bar.   Swiping left can signal the browser to back up a page.

There is also a gesture for Copy/Paste/Cut.   You must use the keyboard though… pressing the orange button to access the cursor and then selecting the object you want to manipulate – followed up by using the keys: X, C or V  (cut, copy and paste  respectively)

WebOS is also very smart at compiling information from various contact lists.  There is a background app called Synergy which will take your AOL, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Exchange, Twitter, etc information and compile it, while trying to eliminate multiple entries.  This way, you can quickly organize your friend’s data – provided you input it correctly when you first filed them.  Most smartphones do this but, again, if you haven’t filed everyone properly using their first and last name, it gets sloppy and requires you to edit a lot of it after its done.

Some of the lists, such as Facebook, automatically take your entire contact list and send it to the phone, even if there are people you aren’t interested in downloading  so, its annoying that you couldn’t choose who to take and who to leave beforehand.

Just like the iPhone, contact information is handled in multiple locations in the phone such as the Phone app, the contacts app and the web app, but for the most part, Synergy does a good job of  editing itself to ensure that proper info gets to its proper title.
You can also assign speed dials to individual people through WebOS – which will be linked to individual keys on the keyboard.   Press and hold [V]  for Vicky;  Press and Hold [S]  for Sam, etc.

Integration of Contacts is especially good here because the phone automaticaly recognizes messages from contacts whether they come from SMS, AIM or whatever messaging program you use and groups them together under the same contact.  On iPhone, you'd have to check SMS' and IM's seperately.

Sprint also offers a Turn by Turn navigation application for the Pre.  It works and looks just like a Tom Tom and many other Tom Tom clones on the market, but STUPIDLY… the visual map can’t be rotated to landscape mode by turning the phone on its side. Why?
Not to mention no one currently makes a cradle for your Pre to add to your dashboard.

USING THE INTERNET  on the Pre felt mostly like using the internet on the iPhone and the G1.  The phone renders images very well and you can zoom in and out just like you can on the iPhone – by pinching or tapping the screen.  The one mistake  Palm made here is that multiple pages in your browser are treated like Cards rather than web browser pages (ala iPhone). This can sometimes make finding a page you navigated away from difficult until you take into account that you need to make a swipe gesture to get back to it.



CAMERA

The 3.2 Megapixel camera on the Pre is a lot better than that of the 2MP iPhone and that of the 3.2MP Storm.

Simply put, the brilliance here is that when you take pictures, the Pre backlogs them  allowing you to take more pictures without having to deal with them one at a time.  This means you can shoot 1 picture per second and then choose to save or delete them at your leisure  - like a real camera ought to  - completely getting around shutter to memory lag.

Image quality was very high  and I’d say the Pre is one of the few cellphone cameras that doesn’t require a backup camera for special occasions.   And, it even has a flash you can toggle on or off.
Unfortunately, like the iPhone  there is no option for video recording – which is a pity given the large storage capacity.



DATA BACKUP

First of all, worth mentioning is that the Palm Pre will sync with iTunes (at the moment) and is recognized by iTunes as an iPod.  I believe this has been done using a hack or spoof to fool Itunes into thinking this is one of their devices. Most likely, Apple will release an iTunes update to change this – possibly locking the Pre out altogether.   For now, iTunes will simply back up your contacts and settings data.

The true service you are to use is called PALM PROFILES  which asks you to register your phone and create an account username/ password.

Palm Profiles pushes and pulls data from your Pre, wirelessly and backs up information such as contacts, email settings,etc.  If you buy a second Pre and then access Palm Profiles, that backed up data will be resent and downloaded to the new Pre according to the salesman. This is great because it prevents you from having to reenter all your information if something should happen to your phone. However, it isn’t as perfect as iPhone’s iTunes sync.  I’ve had to rebuild my iphone a couple times and also transfer my info to the newer iPhone 3G.  Every single detail is exactly transferred from phone to backup to phone via itunes. The Pre’s backup neglects to perfectly remember all preferences – though Synergy does get your contacts managed to their previous save point.




BATTERY LIFE

Battery life on smartphones with large touchscreens hasn’t been spectacular. Using the iPhone3G and the Storm as the benchmarks the Pre does a decent job of giving you a day’s worth of power, so long as you aren’t playing with it or browsing the web. You’ve basically got to charge it at the end of the day – which may necessitate having the Touchstone laying around.   When phones are pushing and pulling data over the air with their high speed data networks, they are killing their battery…it would have been nice if someone designed a plug in Ethernet/charging cable to go directly into a router – but, with the included micro USB cable, charging takes less than an hour.  You can maximize life by not using WiFi or Bluetooth.  This phone by the way does the same things the iPhone does to save power such as turning off the screen using proximity sensors and also allows you to decide periods of push/pull.



COST TO YOU

Because AT&T controls the iPhone right now, unless you buy one unlocked,  you end up paying an automatic $20 a month fee for data on the 1st generation iPhone $39 a month for the basic voice plan, or, you end up paying $30 a month for 3G iPhone data $39 a month for the basic voice plan. I own an iPhone 3G and my monthly bill is typically $84 since I use the basic plan – though, I’d love to cut back on minutes to save more money.    If I had text messaging on my Phone I’d be paying another $50 plus taxes.
 
With the Verizon Blackberry Storm  you get screwed for $99 a month – JUST FOR VOICE !  - plus $20 for  “the 5000”  messaging plan (optional)  and then another $30 a month for data which brings your monthly bill to a ridiculous $150 before taxes !
The same Voice/Data/text messaging offered by T-Mobile for the G1 will run you almost $130.

SPRINT offers the PALM PRE at 199.99 (with mail in rebate) with the “simply everything” plan for $99 which is ultimately the best value of the major carriers. For any of these phones, you simply can’t get by without having Data services because web access,  email push/pull and text messaging is basically the point of the phones in the first place.   Sprint definitely wins with this new plan, but, I’ve heard rumors the Apple was going to roll out a new, cheaper iPhone, cheaper iPhone plans from AT&T along with their new OS version. Hopefully, the price of ownership does go down because it seems to me, my cellphone should not be costing me more than my  FIOS  service which comes in at $84 a month.

Many people won't be happy that purchasing a Pre currently requires you to start a brand new contract and Everything plan rather than integrating veteran Sprint users.


OVERALL

I’m not sure if my girlfriend is going to prefer her Pre over her G1, because she tends to be finicky and intolerant of cellphones – but, as it stands, she seems to like it a lot. The build quality of this phone is  nearly excellent, the monthly fees are decent and the software/camera functionality is awesome.
The only problem I’d have buying a Pre for myself is that I’ve already invested in iPhone. Every app and game I’ve purchased will only work with my iPhone. Therefore, I’m basically locked into iTunes and the iPhone line of devices.  And that’s not a disappointment – I love my iPhone…its basically become a part of my daily routine.   

The Palm Pre is the first proposed “iPhone Killer” to come within potential striking distance of knocking the iPhone off its pedestal  and now, I’m left wondering what the new version from Apple will bring to combat the  reckless eyeballin’ the Pre will cause when potential buyers get a look at its better features.

But why isn’t data tethering available?  Why is it that Sprint, unlike Verizon, keeps selling phones that can’t be used to share some of that unlimited data with our laptops?

And since Sprint basically ruined Nextel, why doesn't the Pre offer a direct connect feature for that handful of Nascar users, construction workers and drug dealers that still use it?

And why is it that Palm couldn’t have made the keyboard a landscape design so we could not only have a larger keyboard, but also have plenty of screen real estate?  No one ever learns from the TMO Sidekick’s keyboard popularity do they?

The Pre needs a few minor tweaks in the next update, but, thus far, its launch quality is nearly perfect and this is definitely a phone I could see myself purchasing if I was on the Sprint network. If you are on the Sprint network, this is the phone you will definitely want to have.





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