MattMaroon.com

Now that I’ve had a couple weeks to play with the new phone, I can give a little more perspective on it. For one, the battery life isn’t as bad as I’d thought. Probably due to some combination of firmware updates (got the third one today), me not playing with it incessantly, and learning to turn instant messenger off when not in use, I’m now getting through the day with very little trouble. If I pull it off the Touchstone in the morning and head in to work, I’ve usually still got 50-70% when I get home. I’m going on a trip Sunday, so we’ll see how it performs on the road.

The Touchstone is pretty much the awesomest thing ever. You set your phone on it and it charges. If someone calls you can push the answer icon and it automatically goes to speakerphone. Or you can pick up and it automatically answers. The magnet in that thing is very strong, so even though you have to orient the phone just so to get it to charge, it’s almost hard not to.

The Pre is turning out to be one of the most hacker-friendly devices ever produced. Palm has published all of the open source packages they’ve used and modified. People have already got Doom up and running. And with one exception (in which Palm politely asked a developer forum to stop talking about tethering at Sprint’s behest in order to maintain positive vibes between all parties) they’ve been pretty encouraging. So despite the lack of a hardware-level SDK, I’m pretty encouraged about the future of the currently rather empty app store.

There are definitely a few improvements I’d like to see. For one, the ability to click a YouTube link found in a web page and have it load in the YouTube app. That app works perfectly, and that seems like a rather trivial feature to implement so I don’t really understand why this functionality is missing.

Tethering would be nice, if only so I could stop reading donkeys whining about the lack of it online. I had tethering on my previous phone (EVDO Rev A on Verizon’s network) and it worked as well as tethering does anywhere, but it still sucked so much that I just went back to purchasing the $10/day Wi-Fi from hotels. It’s one of those things that sounds cool, until you want to watch a YouTube video or download something from Bittorrent. Plus how often do you really want to use it? Especially with a device like the Pre, which already does much of what you’d use a laptop for anyway, it seems like a low priority.

I personally would like to see (and suspect we will before long) a soft keypad that works in landscape mode in browsers and apps. The physical keyboard is still unbeatable for typing out emails/SMSes/Tweets/IMs. But sometimes when you’re surfing the web, which for me is nearly always in landscape, you only need to enter a few characters (for instance to find a friend in Facebook’s search box) and for that an optional soft keypad would be really handy.

On the same note, I’d like a little more spelling correction and predictive typing. Apple had to add that to their phone to make up for the general crappiness of soft keypads, but Palm probably figured it unnecessary since they’ve got a dedicated QWERTY. And while they’re correct, it would be really, really nice. They do a little, automatically capitalizing the first word of a sentence, inserting an apostrophe into obvious contractions, and changing "u" to "you", but that’s about it. Because the keypad is such a superior input mechanism they should use a spelling-corrector that’s significantly less aggressive than Apple’s and just covers the basics, but they still should have that.

Better copy and paste would be very useful as well. As far as I can tell, right now all you can do is copy from one editable text field to another inside the same card. That borders on uselessness. I got a cool app to keep my encrypted passwords, but I can’t paste them into a browser. Since I use Roboform on my 3 computers, most of my logins are some 12 digit randomly-generated string of numbers and letters. Typing them is a major hassle, and involves me switching from one card to another and back again over and over. Please, oh please let me cut and paste.

Video recording would be a nice touch, and is one of the features whose absence I notice most. This is just software people, and any $20 clamshell can do it. It was ridiculous that Apple didn’t have that for 2 years (and still doesn’t on all but the newest model, despite the fact that third parties have proven it’s possible) and it’s ridiculous that Palm doesn’t now. I expect Palm will fix this too, since their current SDK wouldn’t enable a third-party to do so.

The IM client on the Pre makes iPhone users with their crappy third-party apps jealous, but I wish they’d do something about the battery drain like automatically logoff after ten minutes of non-use. I’d also like to see Yahoo! and MSN added, though people digging through the code have found what would appear to be those under development.

I love the way the Messaging app combines SMS and IM, showing me them both together in one thread and automatically responding using the last used protocol. It’s fantastic. What I don’t like is that it continues to use IM even when the person is signed off. In those cases I’d prefer it to automatically switch back to SMS, though at least they make it very easy to do manually.

Another goofy thing about the phone I discovered is that data roaming is turned off by default. Thankfully you just enable it once and then forget about it, but that’s sort of odd since Sprint requires you to get an all-you-can-eat plan in which that’s included, unlimited and for no extra charge. For only $70/month I get 450 peak minutes, nights starting at 7pm, unlimited EVDO Rev A data on both Sprint and Verizon’s networks (thanks to roaming) and unlimited text-messaging. (Anandtech’s awesome Pre review shows just how great Sprint’s pricing is, and hilariously shows a Target ad that’s clearly contextual because if you click it, it takes you to a light up plastic palm tree.) Maybe Sprint requested that of Palm in order to keep costs down.

Finally I had written that:

I’d also like the ability to easily clear email notifications. They stick around until you click them and load the email app, even if you delete it through your desktop client on Exchange (or presumably Gmail). It’d be nice if I could swipe them off to the side like you can do with many things to get rid of them.

Then I realized I hadn’t even tried it so I pulled out the phone and gave it a shot. It worked! Kudos Palm, kudos.

This entry was posted on June 22, 2009 at 3:51 pm and is filed under gadgets . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed Both comments and pings are currently closed.