I’m still get­ting ques­tions about my Palm Pre phone and since I still love it, I thought I’d do another update about my expe­ri­ence so far (see my ini­tial review here).

The first thing I want to note is that the Pre lived up to my expec­ta­tions dur­ing ALA’s Annual Con­fer­ence last month, mak­ing me a mobile ninja war­rior dur­ing while I was there. How? By act­ing like a com­puter, match­ing my work­flow, and let­ting me track what was hap­pen­ing in real-time.

• One of the phone’s best fea­tures is its abil­ity to mul­ti­task, which makes it more like a lap­top than the Treo and Cen­tro, and that really comes in handy at a con­fer­ence where so much is hap­pen­ing online. The fact that I could always have my email, text mes­sages, and a web browser run­ning at the same time — all the time — made me incred­i­bly effi­cient. Being able to swipe between all of the open cards with­out hav­ing to wait for one to close and another to open was lit­er­ally a joy. I finally have a phone that works like I do.
• All of the Pre’s Twit­ter clients are pretty good, but they’re all made bet­ter by the fact that they can be open in mul­ti­ple cards at once. So in addi­tion to hav­ing my email and text mes­sages open at all times, I also tended to have Tweed open in three cards at any given time — one for my per­sonal shifted account, one for the alaan­nual account, and one for the #ala2009 hash­tag. I could eas­ily favorite tweets and switch between accounts to man­age replies.
• The com­bi­na­tion of GPS, Google Maps, and Sprint Nav­i­ga­tion was a god­send for some­one like me who’s geopositionally-challenged on a cam­pus as large as Chicago. If only the GPS could have helped me nav­i­gate around McCormick Place, I would have been a punc­tual ninja phone warrior.
• Push email and wire­less sync for Exchange are phe­nom­e­nal on the Pre. I usu­ally saw new mes­sages on my Pre before they appeared in Out­look on my lap­top, and not hav­ing to plug in to sync my cal­en­dar or con­tacts was great on the go.

Despite all of these ben­e­fits, there were a few disappointments.

• The biggest issue I encoun­tered was bat­tery life, although I was very care­ful to recharge every pos­si­ble chance I could get so it was rare for me to fully drain the bat­tery. In the future, I may try one of the extended bat­ter­ies dur­ing con­fer­ences, but I’m going to track usage a lit­tle more before invest­ing in a sec­ond battery.
• From an orga­ni­za­tional stand­point, I need the folks mak­ing Twit­ter clients to rec­og­nize the need to add an option to the stan­dard reply/favorite/retweet menu for email so that I can for­ward tweets to get help answer­ing them. This isn’t really a knock on the Pre, as I need this func­tion­al­ity on my desk­top, too, but it would really enhance the mobile expe­ri­ence since email can be open at the same time as a Twit­ter client.
• The lack of Flash sup­port is still a prob­lem, so I’m glad this will be resolved by the end of the year.
• My Sprint recep­tion was nonex­is­tent in parts of the con­ven­tion cen­ter, but I think that’s to be expected in a con­crete struc­ture like McCormick Place. My friends who were on AT&T and Ver­i­zon seemed to have prob­lems, too, so I don’t think this issue was lim­ited to Sprint. It made me even more grate­ful for the addi­tion of wifi, though.

Despite the fact that many of the annoy­ances I noted in my ini­tial review still remain, I don’t regret buy­ing the Pre at all, and my enthu­si­asm con­tin­ues to grow now that I’ve hacked my phone to install home­brew apps. It’s great to be able to install pro­grams from any devel­oper again, the way apps used to be. (If you have a Pre and you haven’t done this yet, it’s very easy!)

Using the home­brew list, I’ve already been able to restore a ver­sion of text snip­pets (P2snippets, although I wish it had an auto­matic key­word trig­ger), the Shout­cast cat­a­log of stream­ing radio sta­tions, shop­ping lists, pic­ture dial­ing, Soli­taire, and Word Whirl, among other things. Of course, the prob­lem with this is that my pro­duc­tiv­ity level has dipped because I have Word Whirl again (I was addicted to Text Twist on the Treo/Centro).

After almost three months of use, I still stand by my orig­i­nal rec­om­men­da­tion that Treo and Cen­tro own­ers should upgrade if they can. I really don’t think you’ll regret it, as long as you can afford one of the unlim­ited data plans. I’m still hav­ing good luck on the Sprint net­work, far more so than the peo­ple I hear com­plain­ing about AT&T. The Pre is a great upgrade for past Palm users because it con­tin­ues the tra­di­tion of focus­ing on sub­stance, not just style (although, there’s plenty of that in this Palm prod­uct for a change).

Feel free to keep send­ing me your ques­tions or ask­ing them in the comments.