Picking nits: why I’m skipping the Palm Pre

Don’t get me wrong. In many respects, the Palm Pre is a ground­break­ing smart­phone that por­tends the oblit­er­a­tion of the line between phone and full size com­puter. It joins the iPhone and arguably the Android devices as the only com­puter some peo­ple would ever need.

How­ever, Palm missed a lot of the lit­tle things in this first release. It’s an admirable attempt, given what they’re shoot­ing for, but the fact of the mat­ter is that the devil is in the details, and Palm fum­bled too many. Any one of the fol­low­ing items is easy enough to over­look in an oth­er­wise stel­lar device. But the dif­fer­ence between, frankly, the Palms and the Apples of the world is that the Apples don’t miss over 20 of them. They add up to an annoy­ing user expe­ri­ence more akin to Win­dows Mobile than the iPhone.

  1. Tiny, un-​thumbable keys. One of the rea­sons the keys on the Pre (and Cen­tro) key­board are so rub­bery is that they’re intended to be snagged with your thumb­nail rather than the meat of your thumb. It works, but it’s not as com­fort­able or as fast as, say, the Black­berry Bold.
  2. No soft­ware on-​screen key­board. If the thumb­nail tech­nique doesn’t work for you, there’s no other way to do it. In fact, you even have to slide the device open to enter a things like passwords.
  3. 8GB limit on stor­age (really 7). 7GB doesn’t hold a lot these days, espe­cially if you like video. Of course, you can’t sync pur­chased videos from iTunes (DRM), so unless you rip your own DVDs this may not bother you as much as both­ers me.
  4. Let’s talk about that iTunes sync, shall we? Palm has done a lot to ensure peo­ple can sync the Pre as though it were an iPhone, but this trick only works as long as Apple chooses not to block it. Basi­cally, this works because the Pre reports itself as an iPod in Media Sync mode. But it still reports itself as a Palm Pre on the base USB chan­nel, so Apple could fil­ter this out if they decided they didn’t want to deal with sup­port calls about sync­ing issues with things that aren’t really iPods.
  5. Try scrolling a long web page on the Pre. Where are you on the page? How close are you to the bot­tom? You don’t know, because unlike pretty much every other smart­phone on the mar­ket, the Pre has no scroll­bars at all, not even the tem­po­rary scroll indi­ca­tors you see on the iPhone.
  6. And there’s no way to jump to the top or bot­tom of a long list. On the iPhone, you can tap the sta­tus bar to jump to the top. On every­thing else, you have scroll­bars. On the Pre, flick flick flick…
  7. Assum­ing you don’t fork over $70 for a Touch­stone charger, you have to plug the Pre in to charge it. No big­gie, but you also have to open and close the flimsy lit­tle door that cov­ers up the microUSB port every time you do it. I know they put this here to keep the Pre’s “organic, river-​stone” aes­thetic, but this is going to get old quick.
  8. For a device that’s designed to be online con­stantly, to live in the cloud, the bat­tery life on the Pre stinks if you actu­ally con­nect to any­thing. We’re talk­ing Android G1 bat­tery life.
  9. And you’re unable to use exist­ing Centro/​Treo 800w bat­ter­ies, even though they’re exactly the same size, shape and pins as Pre bat­ter­ies. Some­thing about inter­nal “mechan­i­cal” dif­fer­ences. Yeah, right.
  10. No on screen speed dial. I know you can assign speed dials to keys on the key­board (I know way too many peo­ple with J names) or put con­tacts on the launcher (see below), but this is lame.
  11. Speak­ing of the launcher, Palm didn’t fol­low their own pre­vi­ous suc­cess and include cat­e­gories. You get three unnamed launcher screens, each scrol­lable as deep as you like. But given that “out of sight, out of mind, what you really get is one undif­fer­en­ti­ated scrolling list, or three iPhone like pan­els with stuff you’ll for­get to look for underneath.
  12. At least you can find appli­ca­tions with Uni­ver­sal Search. You know what you can’t find? “Uni­ver­sal” search doesn’t search cal­en­dar, email, memos or tasks. Yeah, so much for uni­ver­sal. BTW, the iPhone does search cal­en­dar, email and notes with the 3.0 firmware.
  13. You can’t change noti­fi­ca­tion sounds. Your incom­ing text mes­sages and emails sound just like every­one else’s. ‘Nuff said.
  14. All or noth­ing Face­book and Google Con­tacts sync. A lot of review­ers men­tioned this. Face­book and Google Con­tacts prob­a­bly include a lot of peo­ple you don’t really know or barely know. But you can’t sync a spe­cific Face­book group or just your “real” con­tacts in Gmail. If you sync these ser­vices, be ready to flick through every­one you’ve ever emailed and friends of friends of friends in your con­tact list.
  15. Memos is a joke, but I’d prob­a­bly replace it with Ever­note, even a launcher short­cut to the mobile version.
  16. Can’t copy text from a web page. The Pre only allows copy (and paste) in “editable” fields. So read­ing a web page or read­ing an email, you can’t copy. You can for­ward the email and copy from that, now that it’s editable, but again, lame.
  17. Given that the browser doesn’t han­dle Flash, it also doesn’t direct YouTube links to the included YouTube app. Uh, what?
  18. No Ama­zon MP3 down­loads over 3G. We knew about this going in, and I know the iPhone had this lim­i­ta­tion when it was first released, too. But the iPhone doesn’t have that lim­i­ta­tion now. Why does Palm have to repeat Apple’s mistakes?
  19. The Music app has no “scrub” con­trol to select play­back posi­tion within a file. Not such a big deal with music, but a really big deal with podcasts.
  20. Music app also can’t fil­ter out pod­casts from songs when shuf­fling if you synced them via iTunes. Lame.
  21. No Lat­i­tude or Street View in Google Maps. What’s the deal with this? The Pre has GPS. Why is Google Maps for the Pre so infe­rior to Google Maps on the iPhone, Android, and for good­ness sake, Win­dows Mobile?
  22. Easy to run into “can’t open a new card until you close some exist­ing cards.” Say what you will about the iPhone and mul­ti­task­ing, but mem­ory man­age­ment gen­er­ally isn’t some­thing the user has to think about.
  23. Weak auto­cor­rect. Maybe this isn’t as “nec­es­sary” on a device with­out an on-​screen key­board, but you have to watch what you type on the Pre a lot closer than you have to on the iPhone, or even HTC Win­dows Mobile devices.

Again, I’m not say­ing the Pre sucks. It’s a really inter­est­ing device, and not bad for a 1.0 prod­uct. But Palm has to do bet­ter than this if they’re going to save their com­pany. The Pre needed to be as close to flaw­less as it could be to steal mind­share away from the iPhone and Black­berry. And the Pre we actu­ally got just doesn’t mea­sure up.

June 5, 2009 · Filed under Technology

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10 Comments »

  1. Still deciding whether to buy a Palm Pre? | Gear Diary Said,

    June 6, 2009 @ 4:34 am

    […] Read […]

  2. Why the Pre is not for everyone! | Just Another Mobile Monday Said,

    June 6, 2009 @ 5:59 am

    […] Check out the rest of Jeff’s rea­son­ing for hold­ing off on the Pre, He does actu­ally make some great points. If you are lin­ing up now, and read­ing this on your phone, I’m sorry! […]

  3. Warren Said,

    June 6, 2009 @ 1:02 pm

    Kinda obvi­ous here that your a iphone fan. Thats fine and all but be a lit­tle more objec­tive. How about all the ways its bet­ter than the cur­rent iphone?

    Its an awe­some phone. And most of these really arent issues.

  4. Jeff Said,

    June 6, 2009 @ 2:03 pm

    You’re new here, aren’t you? I’m not exactly known for my objec­tiv­ity. But I do give you my hon­est opin­ion. I’ve seen the Pre in per­son, I’ve typed on it, and I’m pretty con­fi­dent say­ing the following:

    I see no advan­tage to the Palm Pre over an iPhone with jail­bro­ken 3.0 firmware and Backgrounder.

    The Pre is nice, but Palm needed a grand slam, not a triple.

  5. michael Said,

    June 6, 2009 @ 4:23 pm

    There is one rea­son I can see the Pre fail­ing: Sprint. Based on my expe­ri­ence with them I’d never buy it; not because it’s nec­es­sar­ily a bad phone, but Sprint has a huge way to go before I’d ever be a cus­tomer with them I really wish Palm could have cho­sen Ver­i­zon or ATT (though with the iPhone that prob­a­bly wouldn’t have hap­pened), had the cov­er­age and I think they would have had a win­ner. And who knows, maybe things will work out for them. If so, it’ll be because of Palm and not Sprint.

  6. Why the Pre is not for everyone! | PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) Reviews, News, and Information Said,

    June 6, 2009 @ 4:24 pm

    […] Check out the rest of Jeff’s rea­son­ing for hold­ing off on the Pre, He does actu­ally make some great points. If you are lin­ing up now, and read­ing this on your phone, I’m sorry! […]

  7. Strikerage Said,

    June 7, 2009 @ 3:45 am

    Wow. Never heard such an amaz­ingly blind review of a phone. I under­stand being a lit­tle biased since you are obvi­ously in a huge love affair with your iPhone, but at least be a lit­tle impar­tial. All but maybe… two of your com­plaints are just plain laugh­able (point #23 for exam­ple. You really think that the iPhone’s onscreen key­board beats out a phys­i­cal key­board in accu­racy?!?! I don’t like the small key­board either, but come on! My friend is skinny as hell and he can never type accu­rately on his iPhone. I make fun of him all the time for that. I find things search­ing with my Cen­tro faster than him for this rea­son alone!)

    Any­way, besides the key­board, most of your com­plaints are things non-​Apple fan­boys already don’t care about any­way, or they would have already owned an iPhone (me included). The only thing I can tru­ely agree with you is point 21. I don’t under­stand why the Pre wouldn’t come with Street View. It just looks so awe­some on the iPhone and G1 phone. I know it will have it even­tu­ally, but come on!

    Besides that, you need to check your facts with some of your points. I can refute almost every point you make, but I’ll just point one out where you are com­pletely wrong, and appar­ently didn’t even use the phone or you would have noticed it: The browser DOES direct videos straight to the Youtube app. I did when I used the test unit. It was the first thing I tried when I used the test unit. Surely a tech blog­ger, like your­self, would have tried using the web browser, go to Youtube.com, click on a link, and see what hap­pens! You obvi­ously didn’t or you would have seen that the video qual­ity that becomes of click­ing a link is almost HD qual­ity. Freak­ing awe­some! Bet­ter than I ever saw on my friend’s iPhone.

    Oh BTW, you might not wanna knock the Pre for not hav­ing flash since it will be the first phone to even impli­ment this fea­ture in the near future, mak­ing the iPhone look archaic in that area.

    Come to think of it, after see­ing your hilar­i­ously biased review of the phone, I almost think you just put it up to gar­ner responses from Palm fanboy’s like me. :-)

    There’s just no way that a ratio­nal, intel­li­gent reviewer would have made so many bla­tent errors in review­ing a new prod­uct. Don’t get me wrong, I have issues with the Pre also for some of the.… two prob­lems you found out with it at release (no flash, no Google StreetView), but being open source and com­pletely web devel­oper friendly.… ANY tech per­son will tell you that Palm has some­thing that could com­pletely destroy other mobile plat­forms. Just not sure if this first incar­na­tion (Pre’s hard­ware) will fit the bill for what WebOS can do, in and of itself.

    There’s an unbi­ased review from a self advo­cated Palm fan­boy. Next time try doing the same Jeff. (wink, wink…)

  8. Strikerage Said,

    June 7, 2009 @ 3:55 am

    Oops. Ok, cor­rec­tion: it doesn’t direct videos straight to the Youtube app. Sorry for my error on this one point. But I’ll tell you this: for me not rec­og­niz­ing this, doesn’t that kinda tell you that you are SERIOUSLY reach­ing to find issues with the Pre so that you can jus­tify still car­ry­ing your iBrick around? The video’s open so fast… plus what it actu­ally did was open a com­pletely new window.…

    Hold on a sec!!!! You mean to say that you can have mul­ti­ple win­dows open.… each with it’s own video run­ning.… and you can flip between each video?!?!?!? OMG! I’m glad I have an iPhone so I can be able to do the same thi-​.…. oh.

  9. Picking nits: why I’m skipping the Palm Pre - Benny Ling’s Bling Said,

    June 8, 2009 @ 1:30 am

    […] via Pick­ing nits: why I’m skip­ping the Palm Pre. […]

  10. MC Said,

    October 23, 2009 @ 5:38 am

    Time to review your review, lol !

    http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138606/Opinion_Palm_Pre_firmware_update_fixes_many_flaws?taxonomyId=16

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