MattMaroon.com

I picked up a Palm Pre on Saturday, and have been playing with it quite a bit since. It’s already gone on a road trip with me, and I’ve pretty much put it through its paces at this point. Here are my thoughts, starting with the hardware.

The phone has a unique feel that some people love and some people hate. I mostly like it. People equate weight and metal with build quality, which is usually not entirely inaccurate in portable electronics, so I can see why some people are worried about durability. Time will tell, but I don’t get the feeling it will be a problem. It feels pretty well-assembled.

The body is all plastic and feels very smooth and very light. The opening of the keyboard is nicely spring-loaded. Overall it’s smaller than most other full touch-screen phones, and only a little thicker, so it feels a little more pocketable than anything else I’ve held.

The keypad isn’t as bad as I’d feared after reading many reviews, but it’s definitely no Blackberry. I prefer it to the virtual ones by a long shot (I can still type one handed without looking, something you’ll never do on a touch screen) and I got used to it enough to type relatively quickly after just a few minutes, but it does feel a little cramped. They keys are a little too small and too close together, and the top row is a little too close to the rest of the device. It’s not the deal breaker I’d feared at least, but I don’t think I’ll be able to type quite as fast as I could on my last few devices. I do really like the way the keyboard curves outward when dropped, to make the phone easier to hold when typing or talking.

On the other hand, the keys are very well laid out. You can hit the “@” and the “.” keys without having to shift into special character mode, a tremendous boon in this day and age for a web device. So many of the services you use ask you to log in with your email address, so it’s very useful to be able to type it quickly and easily. Shifting into caps or special characters is as easy as it gets on a mobile device too, and Palm puts a nice little symbol under the cursor to make it easy to spot which typing mode you’re in.

Like most Palms, they threw in the awesome volume switch on the top of the phone. That was the biggest feature I’ve missed over the last few years since moving away from the Treo. There’s a standard-sized headphone jack up there too (nothing more annoying than when phones put them on the bottom) so there’s no need for special headphones or goofy adapters to listen to your tunes. It’s now replaced my iPod Nano for listening to audio books and podcasts on the way to/from work.

The speakerphone on the back has reasonable volume. The camera is a 3.2 megapixel that takes very good pictures, and comes with a flash that can be turned on, off, or left on auto. The volume and power buttons have just the right balance of protruding enough so that you can feel them while being small enough that you won’t bump them on accident.

One gripe with the hardware is the chintzy little door to the micro USB connector. It doesn’t sound like much, but that connector is both the phone’s charging port and of course its connector to your computer. If that door falls off and some little piece of whatever from your pocket gets in there you might have a real problem, and that feels like a distinct possibility. Palm really should have thought that one through a little more.

The capacitive touch screen is stunning, and the gesture area with one button below it may be my favorite invention of all time. It makes it easy to navigate without accidentally bumping links and buttons in web pages and apps. The screen has a nice feel to it too. I hear tell that it’s incredibly scratch resistant, but that’s the sort of thing I’m not inclined to find out for myself. It’s spent a little time in a pocket with some keys and come out unscathed, but not much.

Technically this one is software, but it fits here so I’ll mention it. One brilliant feature I haven’t seen on other touch screens is the little ripple that appears whenever you tap it so you know exactly where you pressed. It looks the ripple you see in water when a drop falls in. With any touch screen you sometimes have the experience of missing something you meant to click, and with the Pre you at least know exactly why.

The biggest hardware flaw, however, is the battery life. It’s bad. I remember, when the iPhone 3G came out, Mike Arrington saying something about how he was willing to strategically place chargers (presumably in his home, office, car, etc.) to get through the day because the phone was so good it’s worth it. I thought he was nuts at the time, but now I understand.

With heavy use of non-phone functions you’re not going to get through a whole day, especially if you have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) on. In fact AIM has some sort of bug that causes it to drain battery life rapidly (though that seems like it may have been fixed with the latest OS update) so you have to be careful not to leave it on when you’re not using it. With all wireless protocols running, multiple apps in use and continuous web-surfing I’d say you’ve got about 3 hours on a full battery. I wish they had built in some way of at least intelligently cycling Wi-Fi off when you’re away from known networks, or turning AIM off after a certain amount of inactivity, or something of that nature, but they don’t seem to so you’ll have to do it manually.

The Wi-Fi antenna seems pretty solid, usually getting as many bars as my desktop. The GPS chip is reasonably fast for a phone too, which is nice when checking the weather or using Google Maps. I don’t think I’d want to use it for turn-by-turn directions, though it does come pre-loaded with that, but then I’m probably spoiled by my car’s built-in GPS.

For talking the device seems solid. I’ve only used it a little, but it’s worked perfectly. I was a Sprint customer for a long time previously, so I know their network is great (especially since you can roam on Verizon’s if needed). The entire rest of the world is blanketed in GSM, but for some reason the CDMA carriers own the US. It’s our technological equivalent of the metric system I suppose.

I would have appreciated a little extra volume in the phone’s speaker, but I was able to hear my aunt on the streets of Detroit, so it definitely isn’t bad. I don’t think it’s a phone I would recommend to the hard of hearing though, unless they were prepared to use a headset.

The Pre uses one of the most powerful processors ever put in a mobile device, and it feels like it. The loading times on most things are comparable to opening light to medium weight apps on your desktop computer. The whole system has an overall responsiveness that is truly impressive and friends who own the current iteration of the iPhone noticed a serious difference. I don’t know anyone with an Android unit handy to compare to, but it beats all the other phones I’ve tried by a wide margin.

So overall I’d give the hardware a 7.5 out of 10. The unit feels durable enough that I’m not too afraid of dropping it. It’s got a user replaceable battery (and I never go more than a year without doing so) which I consider a huge benefit, especially for a device that’s such a power hog. I plan on ordering a backup to carry with me when travelling and such. But the keyboard is cramped and the default battery inadequate, which keeps me away from giving it a higher mark.

If the hardware is a bit rough, the software is a perfect 10. Seriously, there’s truly nothing like it out there yet. WebOS is an engineering and usability marvel, such that I almost don’t know where to begin when describing it. I’ll start with the most basic feature, contacts.

WebOS uses what Palm calls Synergy. The idea behind Synergy is that you have little pieces of your life scattered across a number of places. Your phone has the names and numbers of most of your closest friends and family. Your Gmail or Outlook or Exchange Server account has scores of email addresses. AIM has instant messenger names and Facebook has all sorts of data, including pictures, depending on the privacy preferences of your friends there.

Synergy goes ahead and intelligently rolls them into one place in your phone. You give it your credentials (in my case, I use Gmail for personal emails, Exchange Server for work, AIM and Facebook.) Now you’ve got a contact card for everybody, and where it can it combines them into one. For instance if I search for my cofounder John Marks, who has an entry in every one of those accounts, it shows me one contact card that contains his AIM, Google Talk/Gmail, email addresses, physical address, phone number, his Facebook picture, etc. Every bit of data from every site is automatically lumped together into one contact. It does a very good job of this, and in the instances where it fails to combine contacts (usually an AIM account) it’s very easy to do manually. I have a lot of contacts and it took me maybe 15 minutes of work to get them all squared away. Without Synergy doing all of that would have taken days.

Synergy is also useful for IM and SMS, where it rolls the two together into one threaded conversation. So whether John texts or IMs me, I’ll see them in the same place, and automatically respond via the same protocol. I can view Buddies or Conversations in the Messaging app.

Email accounts are handled similarly. The Pre of course supports Active Sync, and it also supports IMAP IDLE, which means I can get emails from both my Exchange Server and Gmail pushed to me as soon as I receive them, rather than periodically polling. In the mail client, I have a combined inbox, but can also view the accounts separately and dig through subfolders.

Email is only missing one major feature, which is search. For some reason they left emails out of the Universal Search feature. With that and a better keyboard the Pre would be the best email device ever made, and I expect Palm to introduce both in future models and OS versions.

Which brings me to the next feature, Universal Search. Just start typing on the Pre home page and Universal Search takes over. It filters through your contacts and applications, showing you any applicable results, and if there are none it brings up a few buttons that let you easily search Google, Maps, Wikipedia, or Twitter with one press. It’s a brilliant feature for a web-enabled device, and makes using it a little more fun.

The web browser is nearly identical to that of the iPhone, right down to the pinching to zoom. They say good artists copy and great artists steal. If that’s the case, Palm is basically Pablo Picasso when it comes to the browser. They lifted everything right down to the double tapping to zoom into a div. They even stole the multi-touch gestures, patents be damned.

All of the above is tied together beautifully by the “deck of cards” metaphor. That’s something unique to WebOS, and within 15 minutes of using it you realize you could never go back. The rest of the features are available (if maybe not implemented as well) on other high end smart phones like the iPhone or G1 or, like Synergy, they’re really lovable but that you could work around with enough effort or simply do without. The easy and intuitive multi-tasking, however, is a new necessity.

Palm treats every phone function as an app. Calling, messaging, email, music, everything. It’s all its own app, and each app resides in its own card. Switching through cards is like riffling through a deck, you press a button or swipe upward from the gesture area to get into your home view, where you see them all shrunk down. Background apps are continuously running, and you can see them all changing in real time. Then you simply flick through them side-to-side. When you want to close an app you flick it upwards. You can even reorder them in the deck, though I never find that necessary.

The ability to multitask so well is the phone’s money shot. A recent example would be me listening to music from the music app, while reading news in the New York Times app. Then I got a call, so my music automatically paused and the phone app came up. After I finished the call, I closed the phone app and the music started again, then I flipped back to NYT and got back to reading. I could have read the news while talking too, but I probably wouldn’t be much of a conversationalist that way.

Palm also has a great system of notifications, so when an out-of-focus app has something important to tell you (for instance, an incoming email or SMS) they pop up at the bottom briefly, then disappear and leave a little icon behind for easy access. They strike the perfect balance, being simultaneously noticeable and unobtrusive.

The Launcher, where all of your apps are, is very well done. It shows 9 at a time, and you can easily add any webpage to it. I added Google Reader and Yahoo News. It even lets you easily make thumbnails from their page. You can reorder the apps, and swipe through pages in the launcher similar to swiping through running apps in home view. Personally I’m finding it easiest to put my top 9 apps on the Launcher’s start page, and simply use Universal Search to get to anything else.

The included apps are nice. It comes with a YouTube app, though I haven’t used it much so I can’t really say anything about it other than it works. You can search YouTube for anything, or view popular videos just like you could on YouTube.com. There are music and video players which are rather Spartan for sure but get the job done. You won’t mistake the Pre for an iPod, but it does most of the stuff an iPod does, and comes with about the same storage as a Nano, so for a lot of people it will obviate the need for a standalone mp3 player. You can also purchase tunes directly through Amazon if you’re so inclined, but really, who actually pays for music anymore?

There’s Calendaring, Tasks, and all of the other little frills you expect in a smart phone these days, but the killer app is probably Google Maps, which works with your GPS chip to make it easy to find nearby businesses and get directions. There’s also a memos app that lets you make little sticky notes, a clock app (that doesn’t ship with the phone but installs when you upgrade the OS) a calculator, Sprint TV and some Sprint NECKCAR thing, and some other frills I haven’t really explored much. The built in IM client in the Messaging app that uses AIM and Google Talk is great, if a battery hog.

Over time the App Store will presumably be where you’ll go to extend your phone. Right now it’s rather sparse, with just a handful of apps. There’s a good weather app, a New York Times and an AP app that gives you the news in an ideal format. The ubiquitous Pandora is there of course. There are some other things, mostly location-based services that all blend together into one big pile of “who cares?”, but the platform is still clearly in its infancy. The ease of development though, and the speed at which the phone sold out on launch day, make me think it will become at least the second biggest app platform in a relatively short amount of time. It’s got quite a mountain to climb to get to the top, but I’m betting a chunk of my IRA on the fact that it will get there.

The help application is also fantastic. The overall OS is so intuitive that you can figure out how to do most things on your own, but whenever you get stuck, there’s the help app. It does an awesome job of telling you how to customize the phone as much as possible. I’ve searched through it quite a bit and it’s very extensive. It turns out most of the stuff I couldn’t figure out how to do just can’t be done.

Which brings me to my one major gripe with the OS, the lack of customization. Some of the apps have preferences pages, but there’s generally very little there. I feel like the OS is a little dictatorial. I can’t, for instance, remove Twitter from universal search, or add Google News instead. I can’t set AIM to turn itself off after a half hour of inactivity. I can’t do a lot of little things I’d like to be able to. I realize there’s a balancing act there for sure, but I feel like Palm could have put a lot more customizability in there without detracting from usability or intuitiveness. I’m hoping future updates fix this.

But overall I’m betting that Palm and WebOS have a very bright future. There are some serious limitations so far on the hardware, but for a first release they did a magnificent job. On the software end, they have a significant lead over everybody right now. Going forward, they need to do a good job of courting developers to the app store. They also should open up the SDK a little more to some of the lower-level parts of the phone to widen the range of what app developers can make, while leaving the simplicity of development they currently have available. Right now graphics-intensive games like many of the ones running on the iPhone are basically out of bounds, but you could build a simple app in about the same time you could on the web, which is pretty exciting.

I can’t wait to see where they go from here.