Monthly Archives: June 2009

One week with the Pre

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Time for another update.  First up, apps!

Since the Pre released, several additional applications have appeared in the “App Catalog,” and I’ve been playing with most of them.

I got my Pandora account working on my phone after emailing support, and I have to say, it’s a great little app.  I put in a few of my favorite artists and just let it go.  The popup notifications on a new song are nice, as I’m generally doing something else while listening, and they allow me to easily control the player without switching applications.

I was also excited to see the Evernote app show up yesterday, but it seems to have a pretty glaring bug: I can’t scroll horizontally.  Most of my handwritten notes only show the left side on the Pre, and I can’t scroll across to see the whole note, nor can I resize the note or switch to landscape mode.

Also, Tweed started playing nicer once I turned off notifications, which prevented it from automatically refreshing in the background.

As for the device itself, I have actually been having some problems lately.  First, in the web browser, sometimes it won’t finish loading and/or rendering the page.  This happens both on Sprint’s 3G network as well as wifi.  Resetting the device fixes the problem temporarily, as does simply waiting and trying the browser again later, but it’s a very annoying issue.

The second problem I ran into was hardware-related.  After reseating the battery, my keyboard would not work.  The phone ran fine, and I could use the touchscreen, but not the physical keyboard.  I tried several things, including doing a factory-reset of the phone, but they didn’t help.  However, taking the battery out and reseating it again eventually fixed the issue.

Finally, since reseting my device, it doesn’t seem to want to fully sync over my Google Calendar.  It shows events more than a couple weeks old and events a couple weeks from now, but nothing in-between.  There are some annoying work arounds online, but I’m hoping the issue gets resolved soon.

So far, I’m still enjoying the device, even with it’s quirks, as I assume(hope) that most of these are being worked on and will be addressed in upcoming WebOS updates.

24 Hours with the Palm Pre

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After six months of waiting, including a few hours outside a Sprint store here in Louisville, KY, I finally got my Pre at 8AM on June 6th.  I was fourth in line at the Sprint store, but the first to complete the activation process and exit the store, phone in hand.  Since then, I’ve been using it almost constantly, save for a few hours napping after staying up all night, and so far, I’m very happy with it.

Synergy works very well, and after adding my Google and Facebook accounts, I hardly had to enter any numbers manually.  In addition to contacts, it set up my Google Talk, Calendar and Gmail on the device, and they all integrate well into the Pre’s Chat, Calendar and Mail apps, respectively.  One interesting feature in the Pre is the way SMS, MMS, and IM are all integrated into a single app.  If a contact has both a phone number and instant messaging screenname attached to it (the Pre supports AIM and Google Talk) then you can seemlessly transition from texting to instant messaging while keeping the entire chat history intact.

WebOS is so far, very stable.  I have had to restart it once, but I think it was due to an app leaking memory, which I’ll talk about more later.  Aside from that, I’ve been able to easily run several apps at once, juggling a few web pages, chat sessions, and a calendar with ease.  The cards interface works very well and is easy to use.  I especially like closing apps by flicking them off the screen.

I’ve been using Tweed as my Twitter client on the Pre.  While the interface is very nice, I am hoping it will add support for uploading images to Twitpic from the phone.  Also, I suspect that it may be leaking memory, as it doesn’t seem to actually be closing (I still get popup notifications from it after closing it, but I can’t click on them) and after a while my phone got a little sluggish and informed me that it was out of memory. (I’d love to have a bash shell on this thing to run ps aux)

Pandora was one of the first apps I downloaded, but so far, I haven’t been able to listen. I get an account suspended error when I launch it, even though the web client works fine.  I’ve sent them an email and hope to have it working soon.

Battery life has been OK, but not great. I have had to recharge it a few times, but I have been using it constantly since getting it. I don’t forsee any problems getting through the day on a charge with normal use.

I got a chance to use it as a GPS earlier today, and it works very well in that role, even fitting nicely into the car mount that I got originally for my Instinct.  One nice feature is the ability to search along your curent route, so if you needed, say, food or gas on a long distance trip, you could easily check what you’d be passing soon.

Now I’m just waiting for the SDK to come out so I can get some more apps on the thing and really see what it’s capable of.