Posts tagged phones
One week with the Pre
Jun 12th
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
Jun 7th
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.
Week in Review…
Jan 20th
I’ve finished my first week back at VMware. For the first couple of days, I didn’t have a workstation, so I wound up using my laptop. Once I eventually got my computer, it took a couple of days before I had it up and running as well as last time, but as of today, I’ve been able to compile the latest revision of our software.
For the most part, I’m working on the same things as last summer, and I’ve seen some of my own code while looking through the latest source checkout, which was cool.
As usual, there’s some gadget I’m drooling over, and for the time being, it’s the Palm Pre. The Pre is the first phone I’ve been interested in that will actually be debuting on the Sprint network (the iPhone and G1 were on AT&T and T-Mobile). Unfortunately, there’s no release date known other than H1 09.
Hacking the Instinct
Nov 24th
I’ve been messing with my Instinct a lot today, and while I was successful in getting some things to work, other things did not.
Since the MR-4 update, there have been a number of third party apps that will now function on the Instinct. The most notable is Opera Mini, which blows the included browser out of the water. The next app that I managed to get working was Palringo, an instant messaging application.
Unfortunately, the list of apps that work well on the Instinct is very short. I was able to get MGMaps working only after enabling developer access on my phone, and I got an older version of Google Maps running as well. One app I wanted to get working was Strands, as it apparently supports scrobbling songs to Last.fm.
I’ll post again if I get anything of interest working.
Samsung Instinct
Nov 11th
A few days ago, I finally broke down and got a new phone. I settled on the Samsung Instinct, because I didn’t want to switch to another carrier. I’ve had it now for just over a week, so I thought I’d type up some of my initial thoughts.
My primary use of my cell phone is text messaging, because I can use it to manage and receive updates from Twitter, Facebook, and Google (including Google Calendar), so it was my first concern. At first, I was hesitant about going with a touchscreen keyboard, but I have been pleasantly suprised with the Instinct. The phone vibrates just a bit whenever a button is pressed giving it a little bit of tactile feedback. The on screen keyboard is also very accurate, and I rarely mistype on it.
The next feature that sold me on this phone was the GPS navigation (though a lot of Sprint phones are capable of that). Turn by turn directions are very good, and the rest of the phone also makes good use of the GPS location feature.
The phone has also replaced my iPod as my primary mp3 player. While the iPod is still a superior player, it’s not enough to warrant carrying two devices. It came with a 2GB MicroSD card, but I’ve ordered an 8GB card that should give me plenty of storage.
I’ll be writing some more in-depth thoughts on the phone over the next few days, for now I have to head to sleep.
Forget the iPhone, I want Android
Aug 3rd
I’ve been following Android for a while now, but the less I heard about it (and the more it got delayed) the more I looked into alternatives. I almost broke down and bought the iPhone 3G, but decided to at least wait until I got back to Kentucky to make a decision on it. Then, yesterday, I saw a forum post stating that an Android beta build had been installed on an HTC TyTn II, and again my interest in the project was back.
HTC is supposedly going to be making one of the first Android phones, so I poked around on their website, and quickly discovered what I want in an Android phone. The HTC Touch Pro looks amazing, and features a physical keyboard, which is a big plus for me. One of my main turn-offs on the iPhone was the touchscreen keyboard, which didn’t seem optimal for typing out emails or text messages.
Sadly, the HTC Touch Pro only runs Windows Mobile 6.1, but I’m hoping someone figures out a way to load Android onto the thing. It’s much thicker than the iPhone (to accomidate for the real keyboard) and only has 512MB of internal ROM (but has a Micro SD slot), but if I could get Android running on it, the hackibility would make up for it’s shortcomings. It also features a front-facing camera, which can allow for video chat, and all the extra goodies that I’d expect in a smartphone (GPA, Wifi, etc.) and a few that I didn’t (FM Radio and TV Out).
The phone isn’t yet available, so I can’t play with one yet, but I’ll try once it comes out here in the states. Apparently, it will be through Sprint, so I wouldn’t have to change carriers. I’d really like to know if it will be upgradable to Android once it is released, because I don’t want to buy a phone now that I won’t be able to run Android on later.
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