Decisions decisions decisions… to Pre or not to Pre was the question. As a long standing (suffering?) Sprint PCS customer since January 2000 I’ve been through ups and downs. The ups being consistently good coverage where I live and travel. The downs primarily being Sprint’s random customer service quality.
With my current contract expiring in August it is decision time. Do I lock in for another 2 years with the Palm Pre? Tough it out with the Treo (which I want to drop kick into the Pacific due to consistent crashing / email problems)? Switch to AT&T for an iPhone (and pay the significantly higher data service rates as a result)?
With the security of a 30-day period where I could return the Palm Pre without a 2-year contract lock-in I decided to go for it. Here is where I stand with a week left in my 30-day return window:
- the Palm Pre setup was painless – including Outlook and Comcast email setup (some glitches ongoing noted below); I was concerned about the keyboard size being slightly smaller than a BlackBerry or Treo but that ended up being a non-concern after a day or so
- the hardware including the keyboard are excellent – esp. the Touchstone cordless charging system
- the web access speed on Sprint’s 3G network and WiFi setup is excellent (the 3G speed likely good because Sprint is losing customers faster than they are adding customers – fewer people on the network means faster data speeds for the holdouts)
- the web browser is excellent with strong rumors of Flash support in early 2010
- the applications available at lunch are limited and a mixed bag – the iPhone rules here in large part because they’ve had several years to work it and have a huge installed base
- iTunes integration (which I don’t care about but many will) is gone with Apple closing whatever loophole that allowed Palm Pre’s so synch with iTunes; I don’t care because I buy all my electronic music via Amazon.com and access my music over the net via Orb.com and a home media server
- battery life has been no better or worse than I expected – and friends with an iPhone 3Gs report the same results – watch lots of video content and expect to re-charge often
- update process is over the web and excellent – no effort, happens in the background and updates installed apps as well as the WebOS platform
- online backup is included and automatic – no need to synch to a PC to backup – fantastic included feature
- Sprint Navigation works just as well as a standalone Tom Tom or equivalent GPS nav system – I’ve used it several times and since it is included, free and additionally includes real-time enroute traffic updates is extremely useful
So that’s the “fucking good” part. The fuck-ups part had me close to returning the Palm Pre but I’m likely going to hold out because the “fucking good” so outweighs the “fuck-ups” (and I know that the fuck-ups are fixable):
- Outlook integration has some widely documented (on Palm support forums and other places) glitches that need to be addressed: replying to or forwarding emails in Outlook will in most cases remove all formatting from the email thread (no line breaks or formatting – just a blob of text) – for some people this is a showstopper and waiting for it to get fixed won’t be an option and receiving emails has stopped randomly twice requiring removing and re-adding my Outlook account on the Palm Pre – a nuisance
- the only way to move the cursor around is to touch the screen – hard to be that precise at all times – I do miss the Treo buttons dedicated to this function
- small numbers of apps
All points above are fixable over time – assuming Palm survives (and I believe Palm deserves to survive given the strength of Palm Pre version 1).
