| Cringer |
06-04-2009 05:47 PM |
Ah, what I have been waiting for. This is an actual, nothing held back from the reviewer review. Unless the Diamond2 gets a release date announced over the next 2-3 weeks I will probably end up with a Pre now. This review is thorough and answers many questions I had about it. The negatives were either known (no SD expansion slot) or expected (Palm always has battery life issues) and keyboard size, and some negatives even have a chance of being fixed in firmware updates down the road (flash video and video recording). The positives are huge for what i am looking for in a phone right now though...
hxxp://reviews.cnet.com/smartphones/palm-pre-sprint/4505-6452_7-33490473.html?tag=smallCarouselArea.0
Very long review so these are selected parts, read the whole thing if you want more as this isn't even half the review....
Quote:
The tiny QWERTY keyboard isn't going to draw any praise, nor is the lack of an expansion slot. We're also disappointed that the Pre lacks some basic functions, such as video recording and voice dialing, though Palm has said these features can be added later through an over-the-air update. Battery life is also a concern, as the smartphone only lasted about a day on a single charge, which, in all fairness, is about the same as the iPhone. All that said, the Pre's "Deck of Cards" multitasking functionality and notification system are what make it special and they are areas where the Pre beats the iPhone or any smartphone on the market right now. In addition, personal-information management is completely changed (in a good way) with the Synergy feature.
We have to say the Pre's display is one of the main highlights of the phone. It measures 3.1 inches diagonally, so it's smaller than the iPhone's and some other touch-screen devices, such as the T-Mobile G1 and the Samsung Omnia, but what it lacks in size, the Pre makes up for in quality. The 24-bit color HVGA display is vibrant and sharp with its 320x480 pixel resolution. Images, text, and Web pages all looked amazing. We'd say it's on par with, if not just slightly crisper looking than, the iPhone's screen. The Pre's display has a built-in accelerometer so the screen orientation will automatically change from portrait to landscape mode when viewing photos, videos, and Web pages. The accelerometer is fast and changes pages without any lag. There's also a proximity sensor, which will automatically turn off the display when you lift the smartphone to your ear for a phone call.
We'll say it outright: the Palm Pre isn't the most intuitive device to use, at least at first. When you fire up the smartphone for the first time, there's a brief animated tutorial to familiarize you with the various gestures, such as swiping right to left in the gesture area to return to the previous page. The gestures are also illustrated in the quick start guide, but even so, it takes some time to learn all the various commands.
The first time you boot up the Palm Pre (which takes quite a while, by the way), you'll have to set up what's called a Palm Profile. It takes a few moments, but is worth the time, since it gives you access to several key services, including backup and restore settings, remote erase in case of a lost or stolen phone, and over-the-air updates. The latter will become important as Palm pushes out firmware updates that include new features and any bug fixes for the device.
E-mail delivery was almost instant (you can also set different retrieval intervals), and an action, such as deleting a message or moving an e-mail to a folder, is reflected on both sides whether you do it from the Pre or your computer. We were able to download and view attachments as well as send them.
With the e-mail set up, all relevant Calendars will also be synced to the Pre and brought into one calendar view via Synergy. Appointments are color-coded to help you differentiate between the different accounts. Alternatively, there is a drop-down menu from where you can view each calendar separately. Again, like e-mail, the synchronization of our Outlook and Google calendars was seamless. We also created new events from the device, which automatically synced back to our Outlook and Google calendars
With all the data that the Pre can handle, searching for items could be a cumbersome and tedious task, but universal search takes care of that problem. From anywhere on the phone, you can start entering a search term and the Pre will look through your contacts, applications, the Web, Google Maps, and Twitter. The feature worked well when we searched for contacts, businesses, and more general terms, but it's not quite as robust as the iPhone's search in that it doesn't search e-mail headers, calendar, notes, or the music library.
If there's one area where the Palm Pre holds the edge over the current iPhone, G1, and other smartphones, it's in its multitasking and notification capabilities. The much-talked-about Deck of Card feature works well, allowing you to keep multiple applications open and running in the background while working in another. Like on a computer, you can minimize and maximize tasks by using the center button and swiping through the various cards. In addition, the aforementioned quick-launch bar makes menu access and launching new apps a snap.
The limit on the number of cards you have open will depend on which applications you are using. The more memory-intensive ones, such as complicated Web sites, will take up more memory and consequently reduce the number of apps you can have open. A notification will appear if you've reached the limit and recommend you close other applications to open up memory. We got this alert twice during our testing period, and it was while we had several Web sites active and also had three or four other apps open, so you still get a good amount of multitasking. We even got up to 12 active cards at once.
We were quite impressed with the Pre's GPS capabilities.
The Pre's browser is quite good. Based on WebKit, it renders sites onscreen as you would see them on your desktop, and pretty quickly at that.
Overall, we were happy with the Pre's browser in terms of navigation and functionality, but there were a couple of misses. One was the lack of an onscreen keyboard. Without it, you can't type URLs or enter any text into relevant fields when you're viewing sites in landscape mode, so you'll need to switch back to portrait mode, which is annoying. Also, there's no Flash support at this time, so you can't view Flash videos within the browser. However, Palm announced its commitment to Adobe's Open Screen Project back in February and promised to bring the Flash 10 Player to its WebOS devices by the end of the year.
The Palm Pre has got a solid set of multimedia features....... It's not quite as slick as the iPhone's Cover Flow feature, but it works.
There are several methods for getting media onto the smartphone. First, the Pre has the capability to act as a storage device, so you can sideload music and video by connecting the smartphone to your computer via a USB cable and selecting the USB Drive option from where you can then drag and drop files.
the Pre also works with iTunes, so you can sync any non-DRM tracks (no videos) to the smartphone. There's some question about whether Apple will eventually put the kibosh on this, but for now, we're happy to report the iTunes synchronization worked and it was easy as pie (and yes, it worked with the most recent iTunes 8.2).
The 8GB memory cap really became an issue when we were transferring our music library.
While you can't purchase tracks from iTunes, the Palm Pre works with the Amazon MP3 Store, from which you can download songs over the air using your Amazon account. There is no support for Sprint's Music Store. Be aware that while you can preview and queue up songs for purchase on Sprint's 3G network, you must be connected to a Wi-Fi network to actually buy them and download them wirelessly. The iPhone 3G allows you download songs over Wi-Fi and 3G.
There are several streaming-video options on the Pre. There's a dedicated YouTube app right on the device and access to Sprint TV, which includes programming from a variety of channels, such as CNN, Bravo, Comedy Central, and Sprint Exclusive Entertainment. A select number of channels also offer live programming, and there is a Sprint Radio channel for streaming music.
The Pre's music sound quality was quite good. Needless to say, we're happy that Palm included a standard headphone jack........and while there are no audio settings or EQ presets, we thought songs sounded rich and we noticed a good amount of bass.
The Pre comes equipped with a 3-megapixel camera and an LED flash. The camera functions are about as basic as you can get......Picture quality was quite impressive, though we thought otherwise at first. It takes a few seconds for pictures to render on screen, so immediately after taking pictures the photos looked extremely blurry. In reality, they were extremely sharp and colors were vibrant and rich, without any weird orange or grayish tones. Also, there was barely any lag from the time we pressed the capture button to the moment the photo was taken.
The Palm Pre App Catalog is still in beta and will only have about a dozen titles at launch.
We also like that Fandango and CitySearch used the phone's GPS to customize the app to pull in local theaters and other businesses. In addition, with Fandango, you can watch previews, buy movie tickets, and, once purchased, the Pre will create a calendar entry to block out that time--very smart.
All that said, we're disappointed by the sparse selection of apps........Palm has touted the fact that developers can create apps based on standard HTML, CSS, and JavaScript technologies as one of the advantages of WebOS; and developers will be given access to the features of WebOS, such as the notifications service, to use with their programs. We're sure the catalog will fill out in the coming months, but at this point, Palm's got a lot of catching up to do.
On our end, the audio was clear, with very little background noise. Voices sounded rich, not tinny or digitized as on some cell phones. Our friends also reported good results and more than once, we got an "I'm impressed" comment about the audio quality.
When we used the speakerphone, it didn't surprise us that call quality diminished a bit. Voices sounded slightly far away, and in louder environments, you definitely need to have the volume set at the highest level. The problem then is that audio can sound blown out. That said, we were still able to hold a conversation and our callers didn't even notice we had turned on the speakerphone during the call.
Battery life is an issue and probably one of our biggest concerns. The Pre comes with a user-removable 1150mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 5 hours and up to 12 days of standby time. While CNET Labs is currently conducting its series of battery drain tests on the Pre, we managed to get in one talk time test and the Pre met the claimed 5 hours.
Also, Palm acknowledged a problem in which the AIM client is drawing power, especially for users with a lot of buddies, and said it will issue a bug fix. We're glad a fix is coming, but this is not exactly how you want to kick-start your product launch.
The Palm Pre's sales package contents are similar to the Palm Treo Pro. The smartphone ships with an AC adapter, a Micro-USB cable, a wired-stereo headset, a soft-protective pouch, a recycling envelope, and reference material.
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