JeffKirvin.net

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.