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Day One:

I purchased my Palm Pre from a general retail store, rather than a Sprint store or online. My salesman was pleasant, but given that the store had only gotten the Pre in stock four days before, he was not highly experienced with the device. He tried to sell me an extended coverage package, claiming that it would cover replacement of the battery. Since the Pre comes with the battery already installed, this has apparently led to a misconception that the device does not have a user-replaceable battery. The Pre, however, like all its Palm predecessors since the Treo 650, does have a user replaceable battery. In fact, it is the same battery as in the Treo 800w and the Palm Centro. I politely disabused my salesman of his misinformation.

There is no way to skip the tutorial; it is interactive. (”Ok, children, let’s do the back gesture. Good!”) Afterward, a video which shows more tricks plays while the device performs its last configuration steps, all of which (including activation) is hands-off OTA. Finally it is time for the rest of the un-boxing (I love that new phone smell!). The device comes with a wall charger that doubles as the sync cable, stereo ear buds, a slip case, and minimal documentation. The slip case is probably minimally useful, since you can’t use the device at all while it is in the case, nor can you charge the device with the standard charger while it is in the case.

I then set up my Touchstone Charger. This charger requires you to put a special back cover on the device which allows the battery to line up the device with the charger using magnets. I spent several blonde moments trying to figure out why my device wasn’t charging until I realized that I had the charger upside down. Sigh. The Touchstone charger has a sticky base which will keep it from moving when you place the device on it or remove the device from it.

I noted one other pleasing thing. When you turn the device off using the power switch at the top of the device or if the device turns off automatically, the device locks. However, unlike the iPhone and iPod Touch, which require you to follow a specific line (which if deviated from fails to unlock the device) the Palm Pre’s lock icon follows your finger. As long as you make it to the top one third of the screen, the device unlocks.

The rest of my first day with my Pre was spent arguing with Google Calendar, G-Mail contacts and Outlook while getting my previous device PIM data loaded.

Day Two:

I spent a fair amount of time cleaning up the mess made as a result of merging three sets of contact information (G-Mail, Outlook and Facebook). This is to be expected, and the Pre makes it very easy to accomplish. You can open a contact, and an option is available to “Merge with another profile”. Duplicate numbers and email addresses on the contact record can then be deleted by backspacing through the information in edit mode.

I did some customization of the device (changing the wall paper, time format, etc.) and connecting the device to my home wi-fi network. I also created shortcuts in the launcher to a couple of contacts, and set up my email. I was pleased that the device was able to set up the email from my ISP without me having to enter the information manually. It also set up my Fastmail account automatically. It defaulted the setup of that account to POP (just as my BlackBerry did), but unlike the BlackBerry, the Pre somehow figured out that I don’t have POP access to Fastmail, and switched it to IMAP. All of these changes were extremely intuitive.

I downloaded a couple of applications from the App store. The weather application there is very nice. I also downloaded the Evernote client, and Classic. More about Classic later.

Day Three:

I have a very large music collection, and there is no way it will all fit on my Pre. Thus, I created a smaller subset of my collection. I connected my device to the computer which brought up three options: Sync Media, USB Drive or Just Charge. Choosing Sync Media attempts to connect the device to iTunes. Beware that Apple has disabled the ability for the Pre to sync with iTunes in its later versions. I chose the USB option, and created a folder called “Music” and copied my chosen files to it. Very simple.

I decided to delete the contact links I had created in the launcher. This was the first thing I had to search for information about. The answer was very simple, though. Hold the option key, then touch and hold the icon until the rings appear around the icon. Let go, and an option comes up to delete the item.

I installed a few applications into Classic, the Palm OS emulator by Motion Apps. Installing applications into Classic is easy. After running Classic on the device one time, all you have to do is connect the device using the USB option, and copy the PRC and PDB files to the Classic\Install folder. The next time you run Classic, the applications are automatically loaded. Most of what I tried were games. So far, I haven’t found an application that does not run, although several of them give me warnings about not being “Classic Certified.” Applications requiring very accurate touch control (as with a stylus) are not going to work due to the nature of the capacitive screen, which, while very sensitive, is not very accurate. However, I did load Sling Player for Palm onto the device. While it configured, connected, and controlled my satellite box successfully, I had no picture or sound. Oh, well. You can’t win them all.

Summary:

The OS is exceptionally user-friendly. The screen is beautiful, with vibrant colors. The Web browser is nice. The accelerometer works very well. The camera takes great pictures. Despite my previous ambivalence about the Palm Pre, I have been more than pleased with the performance of the device.

Written by Diana McDonough - Email

July 30th, 2009 | Tags: Palm, Pre, Sprint, Webos | Category: Editorials | Subscribe to comments | Both comments and pings are currently closed