Palm Pre Is Out, Time For Discussion

caffiend666 writes "Palm Pre is out, let's discuss the status and compare stories. The first day seems to have gone as well as expected, with many selling out before noon. I bought the second at the local Sprint store, and so far I like it. Much more one-hand friendly than the iPhone. I haven't gotten the main apps to sync with Linux, but the media portion functions much like a thumb-drive with my Fedora-8 Linux system. For the Pre-verts out there, here's some Palm Pre dismantling pictures."

Anyone have words about the browsing

[aussersterne]

experience on this thing in comparison to previous Palm OS devices? In comparison to an iPhone?

The Holy Grail of mobile phones, for me, is the phone that can give a really good browsing experience and can thus replace (at least in some small way) the need to carry a laptop at all times.

Really pretty sweet

[oddman]

I had a chance to play with one a little bit, it was really nice. I was particular impressed by the quality of the screen and the fast response times in Google Maps.

After 20 minutes of use...

[StreetStealth]

I think I can say it's a notch better than the iPhone's web browser. I'm not quite sure what it is, but there's something about the way it's antialiasing the fonts and the way it's wrapping lines of text that makes non-mobile-targeted sites easier on the eyes on the Pre than on the iPhone, despite the iPhone even having a slightly larger display.

This was the one thing I was pretty sure the Pre wouldn't do as well as the iPhone, go figure.

Re:Submitter Quality Control

[lymond01]

I tend to feel the days of thinking it's okay to insult someone out of hand on the Internet are drawing to a close. People used to do it because they could. Now with user posting histories and login names, people are doing it less often. I'm hoping they are also not doing it as much because they are learning it's a big world and a "community" not a boxing ring.

The person may not have been a native English speaker, but I have doubts that calling him "dumb" is accurate.

Typed on iPhone.

So the Pre 1.0 makes me appreciate my Treo 755p

[jerryasher]

Weird because while I love my Treo I hate my Treo, but using version 1.0 of web os makes me appreciate my Treo much more.

So yeah yeah yeah, Pre is great. But here is where I think it sucks compared to my Treo.

The calendar program is puny and worthless in comparison to the Treo + Agendus. It's very hard to visualize what is happening a month at a time on the Pre. On the Treo + Agendus, there are icons for birthday cakes, and icons for dentist appointments and all sorts of very useful 16x16 icons that help a great deal visualizing what's going on a month at a time.

The memos and tasks are truly worthless. Very hard to make detailed notes. No way to categorize or organize the notes. I have over 200 notes on the Treo and they are simple to find and all are searchable. None are searchable on the Pre and there is not even a way to categorize them.

Touchscreens are for noobs. All this time I've wondered what the iPhone crowd was crowing about with their touchscreens, but today, on the Pre, I really miss the fidelity and precision of a stylus and a 5 way navigation button the stylus lets me precisely hit exactly the point on the screen I am looking for and the nav button lets me precisely scroll up and down the number of items I desire. Exactly. Each time. Repeatedly.

The software is at a very simple and unsophisticated level. Websites constantly need to be zoomed and the browser doesn't remember that I've zoomed this website the last three times I've been to it, and so does not automatically zoom it the next time. Compare to Firefox.

And webos is slow. The whole thing feels slow compared, yes, to the PalmOS on the Treo 755p EVEN with it's white screens of death. It's frustrating and may go back to the store within the 30 day period while I wait for webos 2.0.

And I fear that contrary to what Palm has been saying, the problems will be firmware related and not an easy download. And frankly, the Treo experience is that Palm will release one new set of firmware, maybe two, and then consider the phone dead and push people to get the next one.

So we'll see. I think the hope of the phone is:
  * a firmware upgrade from palm
  * release of mojo sdk and native apps from long time palm developers

Ya know, just because the iPhone only has one button doesn't mean Apple was right to go that route. Apple loved their one button mouse for a decade when everyone else knew how stupid that was. 5 way nav buttons and a stylus isn't such a horrible klugey interface as much as forcing touchscreen for everything is.

Re:First Impressions

[Planesdragon]

Non-native JavaScript-based apps running in a browser (WebKit)? Good luck with that.
Especially with games.

1: Your complaint is "non-compiled", not "non-native." Objective-C ain't machine code, you know.

2: Go look at a random sample of 100 iphone apps that were actually purchased. Find me 25 that aren't essentially web-applications anyway. (Find a local cab? A bird-watcher's aide? Seriously, am I the only one who saw those iPhone commercials and thought "wait, shouldn't that just be a web-site?")

3: A lower-level SDK is doubtless in teh works, but it won't be widely available. The Palm emulator was not made using Javascript, and neither will Documents to Go. (My personal suspicion is that the two companies created a new WebOS component, which then is pulled via WebKit.)

Exchange ActiveSync SSL issues

[bherman]

There seems to be many people having issues with s self signed SSL certificates on Exchange. The phone requires you to load the certificate and "trust" it before you can connect. It doesn't allow for you to "trust" it inline with the EAS setup (ala Windows Mobile and iPhone). If you get past that, and you are running a standard SBS sever which by default creates a self signed cert with CNs for the private AD host name, the public dns host name and some SBS specific websites (companyweb and others). The pre supports multiple CN certificates, but it seems from some early research I did with a friend who just picked one up, that it uses the 1st CN to create the SSL connection (or verify the root ca) instead of the server url the user entered in the setup. Since many small shops don't use their public domain name as their AD domain name there seem to be many people having an issue.

Also, the error message it provides is not very helpful and is generic "SSL certificate error. Is the date and time correct"

Thankfully my friend's company happened to own the domain they used for the internal AD as well and since he is the admin he just added in the DNS records for it. It then worked as designed.

Re:Anyone have words about the browsing

[Anonymous Coward]

So for all intents and purposes it doesn't support multitasking, because ultimately whether or not it's solely used for Apple's stuff or simply doesn't exist at all, ultimately as third party developers, we can't use it.
Fat load of good that does us

Yay Copy&Paste... oh wait

[Amorpheus_MMS]

No mention yet about Copy&Paste which the iPhone got a lot of comments about lacking, and was always brought up as a bonus for every other new phone.

Here's how it works on the Pre: You can't copy text that you can't edit. No copying text from a website, or an SMS, or an email unless you reply and copy from there.
http://forums.precentral.net/palm-pre/182854-copy-paste-you-kidding-me.html [precentral.net]

Re:So far, 4/5 stars

[jra]

Cock-a-doodle-Jeezus, Slashdot's code sucks.

Fourth posting attempt. Sorry; if this looks like shit, it's Neal's fault.

Only the second real new electronic toy I've ... well, ever gotten -- I work the secondary market *hard*...

It's on Sprint, which is the carrier I've been on anyway for the last 10 years... well, ok, Nextel, but what can you do. My initial impression?

B-

Here's why:

• The ringer isn't loud enough, by 30db or more; I need that thing to be audible in a machine room with 39 servers going, or a car with no A/C. The ringtones that come with it are these piddly-ass little things that are probably ok in a boardroom, but aren't gonna make it in the real world - UPDATE: No, it's the hardware. I took uniphone.wav -- the Universal Studios default WECo300 phone ring (you heard it in the opening of The Rockford Files, among other places) -- and converted it to MP3 and dropped it in the phone (which isn't a phone while you're USB-Driving it; LAME) and set it to that. No louder. I've *heard* that speaker be louder; I don't know what the hell they're doing with it that it can't ring at a ring-y volume...
• The browser needs a "right-click" menu on objects such as embedded images, click-and-hold on the navigation buttons to move more than one page at a time in the history, and an *easy* way to turn off all that nifty CSS rendering and get information on the screen in a size my 43 year old eyes can actually *see*. I'm happy for you that you can render pretty pages. On a phone, I'm not generally interested in pretty pages; I'm interested in *information*.
• And the global font size doesn't seem adjustable either, which will also get it sent back
• At least the audio is good... and my partner and I are both picky...
• I come from a 5-column BlackBerry SureType hard-keyboard background--and Grafitti before that--and I'm pretty happy with the keyboard. It's got enough tack to it that, as shiny as it is (and I'm worried about that cause the keytops are convex and glossy, which causes glare problems), your fingers catch on the keys pretty decently. I just hope it's double-shot molded, so the labels don't wear off.
• That said, it needs the auto-punctuation and abbreviation facilities of the BlackBerries.
• On the other hand, in their rush to make it have as few buttons as possible -- you know, cause style trumps functionality -- they didn't put a hard-button on the side for the *camera shutter*... which means that not only is it difficult to frame pictures of yourself, it's impossible to *take* them, cause your hands won't bend around that far.
• Oh, Christ Jeezus... it's not a Nextel phone: it roams. Like, at my office desk. No *wonder* I got an Alltel intercept message. That's fatal, right there. If it doesn't get a signal, in all the places I spend my time, it's going right on back.
• The more I use it, the more I decide that it's just really not all that comfortable to hold and use. I'm not talking about the shape of the body; I mean that if you want to do anything besides hold it in one hand and gesture at it with the other, you're screwed: there are no edges to hook your fingers on; it's uncomfortable to try to drive one handed, and so much of the front is active that if you try to hold it in your off hand for, say, reading while lying on your back, you're going to *do* things you didn't intend; a problem neither my Blackberry 7100i nor my Nokia n800 presents me with
• There is one gripe everyone else seems to have that I want to counter: until you can't get through a day with it, would you quit bitching about the battery life? Really...
• More to follow here, as I screw around with it

And, on another related note, I should say that I picked up a Plantronics Voyager Pro headset to go with it -- the newer, even geekier looking version of the Voyager 510 I used to use -- and I'm even happier with its fit and audio quality than I was with the 510. Recommended.