by Matthew Noonan
7. September 2009 17:43
Recently, I traded in my beloved HTC Touch Dual for the new and much hyped Palm Pre.
It was a really difficult decision, because I really liked my Touch. It had a Windows Mobile OS and a really inventive interface on top of it, and I was hooked almost right away. Sure, there were some quirks I didn’t like, what cell phone doesn’t have those? But my main reason was that my Touch was tied to Cincinnati Bell and therefore the Edge network. In other words, no 3G broadband. To make matters worse, CB informed me that 3G would not be around until Q4 (which really means next year), and in any case the Touch doesn’t support 3G so I would have to buy a new phone to boot. Grrrrr…
So I decided to give Sprint a try. I had been using the Novatel MiFi 2200 card (which I absolutely love, btw) on Sprint, and I had a friend with an HTC Touch Pro, so maybe I could stay with HTC. No such luck. Sprint stopped selling the Touch Pro in advance of the upcoming HTC Touch Pro 2 (rumored around Sept. 8). Because I have had enough of CinciBell, I decided to give the Palm Pre a go, since I had 30 days to decide and I was within that window for the HTC release.
I had already seen all the commercials seemingly hyping the Pre as an “iPhone killer”. Well, it isn’t… at least not for me.
- For starters, it’s a battery hog (so is the iPhone, but that’s another story). A day to a day and a half was about the max I got out of it. That was a big change from the 3-4 days I got from the Touch.
- The app store… really isn’t much of one. This is understandable since the Pre is so new, but I have to believe that Apple has cornered the mind share on custom phone apps (for now). If you were going to write your own custom app right now, which platform would you target first? And since all of that work is probably throw away outside of Apple, are you going to invest in and support another proprietary code base? Probably not…
Update (9/28/09): For a different take on this item, read this developer’s experience with trying to get his apps published to the Palm App Store.
http://jwz.livejournal.com/1096401.html
- While I like the touch screen overall, the ability to copy and paste seems like an afterthought. There are too many times I want to copy some text from a web page and send it via email or SMS, but you simply can’t do it with the Pre. And for the few situations where you can select text, good luck if the text sits against the left or right edge of the screen.
- I’m sure this is the case with some of the iPhone apps as well, but why don’t all the built-in apps take advantage of the screen tilting mechanism? Email and texting seem to be an especially odd omission for this feature. I also hoped that Tweed would take advantage, but it doesn’t. Only the web browser seems to be aware that the feature exists at all. The one nice feature I have not seen before: the screen shuts off during a call, so you don’t accidentally hit any buttons while you hold the phone to your ear. When you swing the phone away from your, say to hang up the call, the screen pops back on. Nice, but not a killer feature.
- The keyboard is too small. I think a full keyboard spanning the length of the phone rather than the width would have been better. But I have big hands. In a way I miss the predictive typing that I had on the HTC. Sometimes its nice not to have to type the entire word.
- Opening PDFs seems to darn near impossible. There is an app included to read PDFs, but only from the file system. You can’t open PDFs from the web, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to save the PDF from the browser to the file system. Pretty big oversight, if you ask me…
- And will somebody please explain to me why all these next generation phones can’t display email in HTML format? I know you guys can do better than this…
When the dislikes add up to more than the likes, and in this case they do, the phone is going back. I enjoyed my time with the Pre, and it is good to get experience with different platforms so you can develop a feel for which ones you like and which ones you don’t. But my sense is that I am going to stick with the Windows Mobile platform for now.
Next up for me, a report on how much I like the HTC Touch Pro 2…
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