Palm Pre Summary So Far

I have an updated review of the Palm that summarizes what I’ve experienced thus far with the Pre.

I’m going to recap my experiences with my Palm Pre since Saturday.  The more I use it, well, honestly, the more I use it, the more I dislike it.

I got my Palm around 11 am Saturday.  I bought 2 (one for me and one for my husband).  I know 2 other people who also got them Saturday so I was able to compare notes (I know that 3 days isn’t a very long time. This is not meant to trash the Pre, these are only MY observations and MY experiences, your needs may be different and so your evaluation criteria should reflect YOUR needs.  And I really, really want to like this phone.  The Centro is an awesome phone.  Any Treo users I talk to love their phones.  Palm has such a great foundation to build on).

The first thing I noticed is the HUGE learning curve.  The touch screen and the “cards” make interaction with the phone so different (I had the Centro, so I’m used to, no, I demand a touch screen, but the usage of this touch screen is far different).

And if I have to read a manual, I HAVE FAILED!

The Sprint store that I was at offered to sync contacts only.  Since I also needed to transfer all my other stuff (memos, documents, photos, videos, and music) I figured I’d go do this on my own time.  Palm has transfer software that says it will transfer the memos, contacts, calendar and something else (I already deleted the program and I don’t feel like finding it again).

Well, my contacts transferred fine (I think) except that the categories disappeared and I only know who some people are based on the contact category they were in.

My calendar transferred, sort of, but any repeating calendar event is wrong.  Birthdays and any other all day event came up a day before.  Weird repeating items like, the third Sunday every 12 months come up wherever they want to.  And I can’t convince my Palm calendar that Fathers’ Day, this year on June 21st, is the 3rd Sunday of June.  It keeps telling me that June 21st is the 4th Sunday and there’s no way to change this!

The repeating (incorrect, which all of the repeating events are incorrect) appointments cannot be edited.  I go in and edit them and it changes the date (and the menu comes up asking me if I want to change that single occurence, the series, or cancel the change) but when I back out and look at the calendar the appointment is still on the same wrong day.  I even erased all my calendar data (actually, I erased all the data on my phone) and re-transferred it.  No luck.  I ended up with two copies of each incorrect appointment.

The calendar is a major issue for me because my whole life is in here.  I have 3 kids who are all in several activities, many, many birthdays (huge family and loads of friends), and tons of my own activities.  Often, my phone is the only place where these things are recorded.

I spent several hours reading about how to export a calendar from Palm desktop (I religiously sync-ed my phone with the Palm desktop software, mostly because I had all my important information on my calendar).  And when I read the comments to these instructions, many of them contained a note that repeating events did not transfer.  So, I’m going to just bite it and enter all my repeating events in Google calendar and any new calendar items will be in Google calendar also.

The camera is a bit difficult to use.  Because of the way the keys slide out, the camera lens ends up sort of in the middle of the phone and I keep putting my fingers in the way.  The flash is a nice touch as is the mirror for self-portraits (watch out myspace, for more cheesy Juli pictures).  But I must confess that the loss of the tiny bit of zoom rather sucks.

And no camcorder.  I don’t care that supposedly there will be a software update that will introduce this functionality.  There’s no excuse for not having this.

I don’t like the lack of a central preferences place. It doesn’t appear that you can change the time that the screen stays lit (this makes my husband nuts).

There are no themes (that I’ve found).  And you can’t change alert sounds.  I love to customize things.  The only sound you can change is the ringtone.  This bites.

The interface is different in another way, the menus are really spartan.  And this, honestly, is a really bad thing.  Don’t change things just for the sake of changing things.  Ease your customers into the changes.  Don’t alienate your loyal customers by changing things so drastically that they have a hard time adapting.

One of the most beautiful features of the Centro was cut and paste.  That is brilliant! I wish the paste feature worked when entering things into contacts.  Well, this feature is in the menu.  Aside from Help, this is one of the very, very few things in the menus.  But it’s unusable.  When you attempt to highlight stuff to copy it, the “card” just moves and you’ve highlighted nothing.

There are no directional buttons so you have to insert the cursor precisely where you need to add/correct/edit text.  This is almost impossible.  The touch screen is not nearly as precise as the touch screen on the Centro.

The touch screen, as I’ve said above is not very precise.  I’ve had to move things in order to select things (like the days in an appointment).  This really complicated things.

The phone sometimes is really, really slow.  I almost never have had more than two cards open at once and sometimes I’ve had to wait as much as 30 seconds for the phone to respond to a command.

Alerts for calendar events are 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 3o minutes, 1 hour, and 1 day.  That’s it.  No 12 hours (which, trust me, when you have to pack a bag for a child’s activity, 12 hours is THE interval), no 1 week.  This is ridiculous.

I hate that there’s no desktop software.  I understand why Palm wants to not provide this.  It’s much cheaper to NOT develop your own applications.  I understand why they push for people to use Google calendar.  Let Google spend the money and effort to develop and maintain and improve calendar software.  Just let your software work with their software.  I get it.  It still sucks.  I don’t really want to use a program like that which puts my personal info online (I don’t care that it’s “supposedly” private.  It’s still out there somewhere.  I am no longer in control of protecting my information – this is the same reason that I hate the Sprint backup of my data from my phone).

You can’t forward a text.  And you can’t copy and paste it either.  And really Palm, where the f*&^ are the emoticons.  Even the cheap phones have the pretty yellow emoticons.  Hey, the cheap ass phone I got for one of my kids has anitmated emoticons.  I have the total old-school ones that don’t show up as the little yellow faces. Seriously.  WTF?

Oh, and I don’t like that the character count on the texts is gone.  I know that I can send and receive texts larger than 160 characters now (thank you, Palm.  It’s about damn time!), and I really appreciate that the Pre automatically splits messages longer than 160 characters into multiple messages (see, I just said two positives!), but I like to twitter (I know, lame, but hey, it’s my time I’ll use it how I see fit) and it was nice to have the character count.

I hate the proprietary mini USB converter/charger cable.  And they only give one.  You use it as is for connecting to your pc.  And you plug it into a AC plug to use it to charge from a wall socket.  Palm, if you’re only going to provide one AC/charger cord, include a car adapter you cheap bastards.

My phone reception hasn’t improved.  My Centro had only mediocre reception, I really expected improvement.

I’ve been told that many of these things will be fixed with software updates.  This sounds like a product was rushed to market.  Since Apple announced a new, super iPhone today, I would say this was why the Pre was rushed with all these flaws.  That’s just a shit way to treat your customers.

This is my fourth consecutive Palm Pre post.  I’m really on the fence about keeping it.  I have 27 more days to decide.  If I was seeing some of these rumored software updates, I’d be feeling a bit better.  But all’s quiet on the update front.

That rose colored Centro is sounding really good (and they sell this tough skin cover for it! I need a Nerf cover. One of my daughter’s friends has this Nerf protective cover for her Nintendo DS, it’s the coolest thing.  I need one for every thing I own.  I drop things constantly).  I initially said that I wouldn’t shell out cash for the same phone, but the Pre has me so frustrated that I’m thinking about it.