When I picked up my new Palm Pre smart­phone last week, one of the store employ­ees said, “You must have been wait­ing for this phone for a long time.” He could tell I was excited about it. I told him I’d been wait­ing for this phone for nine years, six of them on Palm Treos and a Cen­tro, wait­ing for the next leap.

And now that I finally have it, I can say that while it’s quite clearly a first gen­er­a­tion device, I love it. This post will explain why, but it won’t be a com­par­i­son of the iPhone ver­sus the Pre. I’ve only played with an iPhone a cou­ple of times, so it wouldn’t be fair, plus every­one knows I’m not a fan of Apple, so I can’t really be objec­tive about this. So instead, this will be a review of the Pre from the per­spec­tive of a Treo/Centro owner won­der­ing if she should upgrade, because that’s the ques­tion I’m get­ting asked the most. Back in 2003, I started a pop­u­lar page called What’s on My Treo 600 that listed all of the apps I used and as a result, I heard from Palm own­ers for years (and occa­sion­ally still do), so this is an area I know well.

In fact, a lot of my issues with the Pre come from fea­tures the Treos/Centros did bet­ter, but I’ll also describe what’s new, both the good and the bad. As a result, this will be a long review, so skip this post if you’re not inter­ested in smart­phones or the Pre.

Let’s start with the Pre’s prob­lems, because there are quite a few of them. There are a lot of lit­tle details that are just annoy­ing and even worse, time-consuming, as well as some big­ger issues.

Boooo

1. My biggest gripe with the phone is the lack of an expan­sion slot, lim­it­ing me to 8GB of mem­ory. While early adopters are liv­ing more and more in the cloud, it’s not enough yet to rely com­pletely on it for media. It also doesn’t help on air­planes, so Palm really needs to fig­ure out a way to increase mem­ory, either inter­nally or via a MicroSD slot like the Cen­tro had.

2. LED noti­fi­ca­tions are my sec­ond biggest issue with the phone. On my Cen­tro, there was an LED that lit up orange when I had voice­mail wait­ing, red when the phone was charg­ing, and green when it was fully charged. Years ago, I down­loaded an app called “But­ler” that turned the LED green when new email or text mes­sages came in. How­ever, on the Pre, there seems to be no LED indi­ca­tor what­so­ever, which is a huge issue for some­one who doesn’t want to be star­ing at her phone every minute. I want the phone to do the work, and the lack of LED noti­fi­ca­tions on the Pre, even acknowl­edg­ing a full charge, bugs the heck out of me. The lack of an LED light means an app can’t fix this for me, either.

There are also other inex­plic­a­ble quirks that are frus­trat­ing for for­mer Treo/Centro own­ers. Like the fact that there’s no way to for­ward a text mes­sage, and there’s no char­ac­ter count when I’m typ­ing one. That’s not a bad thing when I’m tex­ting a sin­gle per­son, as Sprint now auto­mat­i­cally divides the text into mul­ti­ple mes­sages, but it doesn’t work well at all if I’m send­ing texts to Twit­ter or Face­book. Hope­fully these kinds of things are just over­sights that will get fixed in soft­ware updates pretty quickly.

3. The key­board is about the same as the Cen­tro, so it’s not an issue for me, but the lack of the Key­caps pro­gram and the abil­ity to add it is a prob­lem. I real­ize this is purely my behav­ior based on how I had cus­tomized the Cen­tro, but the abil­ity to tap a key twice to get the sym­bol or hold down the key for a cap­i­tal let­ter can­not be over­es­ti­mated in terms of effi­ciency. And the Pre’s pre­dic­tive text dic­tio­nary isn’t strong enough to over­come this deficit yet, so I have to hold out hope that we can get Key­Caps back someday.

4. The mul­ti­task­ing fea­ture is fan­tas­tic (more about that in the “plus” list), but some­times it hits the wall at the weird­est times. Usu­ally, I can keep email, text mes­sages, and the web up in indi­vid­ual cards and not have a prob­lem. I can even open Pan­dora or the App cat­a­log or a cou­ple of other web­sites and be fine. But every once in a while I’ll get mes­sages that I can’t open a new card, even when I’ve closed most apps. In fact, at one point, the Pre told me I couldn’t open the App cat­a­log even when noth­ing else was open. I rebooted to clear out the mem­ory and then it was fine, but I haven’t been able to find a pat­tern to it, other than to know I can’t have too much else open when I want to play Sudoku.

5. While I would never call “swipes” and “ges­tures” intu­itive, I’ve got­ten used to them pretty quickly. I do miss the nav­i­ga­tion pad on the Cen­tro, but I’m sure I’ll get used to the new ways of doing things. I men­tion it only so Treo/Centro own­ers know what they’re get­ting into. I still press the pearl but­ton to take a pic­ture, even though that takes me out of the cam­era app. I’m still learn­ing to tap on the screen to do a lot of things, but I’m sure that will get bet­ter in time the more I use the Pre.

6. The email pro­gram is really great and really annoy­ing. I’ll men­tion the good stuff below, but the fact that I can’t do mul­ti­ple deletes in one task from the inbox or delete a mes­sage and go directly to the next one is truly frus­trat­ing. I really dis­like things that waste my time, and this is one of them, so I hope Palm fixes it pretty quickly or some­one comes up with a bet­ter email app. At least it’s easy (and even fun!) to swipe spam off the screen to delete it.

7. There are some quirks in the web browser, although over­all it works very well. One of the sites I use the most, Google Reader, has an annoy­ing tic on the Pre where when I tap on “mark all of these read,” it reloads the page with the next items but remains at the bot­tom of the page. I then have to scroll up to see the top of the page. This doesn’t hap­pen on all sites, but when it’s one I use a lot, it’s a frus­trat­ing time-waster.

8. The lack of a pub­lic SDK that lets any­one develop an app is truly becom­ing a prob­lem, which is sur­pris­ing com­ing from the com­pany that invented cell­phone apps. In fact, the abil­ity to com­pletely cus­tomize a Palm phone was always one of its best fea­tures, so it’s trou­bling that Palm is frus­trat­ing its users in this way.

In addi­tion to the fact that devel­op­ers could fix some of the prob­lems I’ve noted above, wait­ing for the big name part­ners to come through is prov­ing a trial. For exam­ple, in the pho­tos app, I can set up an account for upload­ing pic­tures, but only for Face­book and Pho­to­Bucket. Huh? Yep, no Flickr. That’s just bizarre, and while I can con­tinue to upload pic­tures to Flickr via email, the Pre is sup­posed to make things eas­ier and it’s not doing that in all of the areas where it should be. If Flickr isn’t going to cre­ate the app or pay to be listed in the native one, a devel­oper will have to cre­ate it to make up for this short­com­ing. But no one can until that SDK is released.

I fully believe that the Pre’s app cat­a­log has the poten­tial to rival and even exceed that of every other phone, but the longer Palm waits, the more catch-up there will be. Things have changed since Palm phones were the only ones that used apps, and offer­ing new ones is now a stan­dard, not an option. With the rumor that iPhone apps can eas­ily be ported to the Pre and a com­mu­nity that tra­di­tion­ally loves to hack, Palm is los­ing cred­i­bil­ity on this one every day we go with­out the SDK.

I also want to address bat­tery life as both good and bad. For as long as I’ve had a smart­phone, I’ve used up the bat­tery like crazy, first pulling in email and surf­ing the web, later gob­bling up unlim­ited text mes­sag­ing plans for lunch. If you’re a power user, you have to expect that you’ll need to power up at least once in the mid­dle of the day if you expect to make it all the way through the evening. I think that’s just a fact of life now.

My friends who have a Pre and don’t use it as much as I do seem fine on bat­tery life. If I watch a cou­ple of videos, stream music, surf the web, and use the push email, I’ll need to recharge a cou­ple of times a day. I’m not a good barom­e­ter, because I’d need to recharge a cou­ple of times a day no mat­ter which phone I use. With charg­ers at work and at home, though, I haven’t felt a need to buy a sec­ond swap­pable bat­tery, at least not yet. We’ll see what hap­pens when I start trav­el­ing again. This issue is a wash for me, but it might vary for oth­ers. If the Pre’s fea­tures make you use it more, expect to power up more.

So those are the major things that have been bug­ging me, and luck­ily they’re mostly fix­able through soft­ware updates and won’t require hard­ware upgrades (although more stor­age might be worth it). So let’s jump in to the good things about the Pre, because the good is *really* good.

Hooray!

1. The mul­ti­task­ing is by far the best fea­ture about the Pre, and this alone makes it worth it for me. I can have email (for both of my major accounts) run­ning in one card, text mes­sages in another, a web search in another, and a Twit­ter client in another, all at the same time. Depend­ing on the Pre’s tem­pera­ment at that moment, I may also be able to lis­ten to music, check the weather, or find movie times for a show near me. And if a web­site or Tweet (for Twit­ter) is slow load­ing, I can just flip to a dif­fer­ent card while it fin­ishes. I expect to be rad­i­cally more pro­duc­tive at con­fer­ences and in meet­ings just because of this feature.

When mul­ti­task­ing is work­ing prop­erly (which is prob­a­bly 90% of the time), my phone acts the way I expect to it, like my lap­top. I don’t have to close one app to open another one, and I don’t spend any time dur­ing the day wait­ing for my stan­dard apps to load. I can tap on a URL in an email or text mes­sage, and it will open a web browser while leav­ing the mes­sage open so that I can refer back to it. If I reply to a mes­sage, it comes up in a new card so that I can eas­ily refer back to the text in the orig­i­nal mes­sage. I can also go look some­thing up and come back to the mes­sage I’m work­ing on. I think at one point I had ten dif­fer­ent cards run­ning at once. I can’t stress enough how use­ful this is, and in many ways, it makes up for a lot of the time-wasting annoy­ances I listed above.

2. The Touch­stone charger is beyond cool — it’s incred­i­bly prac­ti­cal and con­ve­nient. It’s one of those things that per­me­ates your expec­ta­tions once you start to use it. While it’s an expen­sive add-on for the Pre, almost every­one I know who has the phone bought one because it’s so con­ve­nient. In fact, I just bought a sec­ond one for work, because this is one of those moments where I’ve got­ten to taste the future, and I want it all, now.

Think for a minute about how much time you waste plug­ging in and unplug­ging your phone. It’s some­thing we try to make as pain­less as pos­si­ble by putting the charger in a con­ve­nient spot, but we take for granted that every day or two, we’ll have to actu­ally stop what we’re doing, look at the phone, and work the cable into it. It sounds like a small thing and it is, but you don’t even real­ize what a time waster that is until you don’t have to do it any­more. Being able to walk in the door when I get home and just set the Pre down and not has­sle with cables is pretty phe­nom­e­nal. It’s just as great at work, too, where the slant of the Touch­stone makes it eas­ier for me to check mes­sages as they come in. It also serves as a handy desk­top clock, and when I head out to a meet­ing, I just pick my phone up.

I know it doesn’t sound like much, and it’s cer­tainly not a big enough fea­ture to pull some­one away from a dif­fer­ent phone to the Pre, but this is the future, my friends. I wrote about a cou­ple of prod­ucts that promised this tech­nol­ogy sev­eral years ago in a “Prod­uct Pipeline” col­umn, and now it’s finally start­ing to hap­pen. All this really does is make me impa­tient for this to become avail­able for my lap­top, but if you want a glimpse into how tech­nol­ogy will make life bet­ter, this is one of those things. The way it just works is com­pletely full of win.

As a side note, I haven’t expe­ri­enced the reset­ting prob­lem a few peo­ple have reported with the Touch­stone, and I don’t think the back gets all that warm. In fact, I think it gets warmer when I use it as an actual phone and talk on it, but then I don’t actu­ally talk much on my cellphone.

Palm Pre rest­ing on the Touch­stone wire­less charger

In addi­tion, I pre­fer the con­duc­tive back cover that comes with the Touch­stone. It makes the Pre less slip­pery, and it makes it eas­ier to slide the phone open with one hand. For me, the Touch­stone is a win all the way around and back.

3. Along those same lines, I very rarely use a cable with my Pre at all thanks to the wire­less, push Exchange synch­ing. This would work with Gmail and other email providers, as well, but it’s par­tic­u­larly impres­sive to a past Treo/Centro owner like me who’s had to man­u­ally syn­chro­nize bits and pieces over the years. When I first set up the phone, I just put in my Exchange info once in the email client, and it mag­i­cally started sync­ing my email, cal­en­dar, con­tacts, and tasks. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s not grab­bing my memos for some rea­son, but every­thing else is there, and it all hap­pens in real-time with­out me ever plug­ging into my lap­top. For busi­ness level users, this is indis­pens­able stuff, and it shows how Palm pays atten­tion to that mar­ket. You don’t have to install apps via the Palm Desk­top any­more either, as it all hap­pens “over the air.” In fact, there is no Palm Desk­top any­more, and the Pre doesn’t even come with an instal­la­tion disc.

4. The key­board is a sub­jec­tive mea­sure, but I’m one of those peo­ple who wants a phys­i­cal, tac­ti­cal key­board for typ­ing, so the Pre is per­fect for me. I got used to the smaller ver­sion on the Cen­tro, so the size isn’t an issue for me, although I could see where it might be for peo­ple with larger fin­gers. That said, the Pre fits in my hand very well, and I can still type with one hand if I need to. In fact, I can com­pletely oper­ate the Pre with one hand, which was always one of my favorite fea­tures of the Treo/Centro. I espe­cially like the curve of the phone, which doesn’t feel like a square brick, and it fits eas­ily in my pocket even more com­fort­ably than the Cen­tro did.

5. Despite the things I dis­like about the email pro­gram, the way it com­bines my inboxes into one is pretty cool, and it mim­ics how I think about my email. I can still view each inbox sep­a­rately but I’m find­ing the com­bined view very use­ful, and when I reply to a mes­sage, the Pre auto­mat­i­cally knows which account to use. The attach­ments are seam­less, with plain text files appear­ing in the email itself. Plus, with the mul­ti­task­ing, I can open the attach­ment and still read the email at the same time. The inte­gra­tion is really stel­lar. In fact, some­times the push is so great that I get mes­sages on my phone before they appear on my computer.

Email on the Pre — com­bined inbox or view each one individually

6. The toolbar/notification area is very use­ful, and it’s a huge improve­ment over the way past phones have han­dled inter­rup­tions. When a new email or text mes­sage comes in, it doesn’t fill the whole screen. This is as use­ful as some of the tics are annoy­ing. You can deal with the incom­ing notice by tap­ping on it to open it in a new card, and thanks to the mul­ti­task­ing fea­ture, you won’t lose what you were work­ing on or have to re-open it. Or, you can ignore the notice and just keep doing what you were doing. Mak­ing these notices less of an inter­rup­tion makes me more effi­cient, which I appre­ci­ate. It’s clearly one of the ben­e­fits of start­ing over and cre­at­ing an oper­at­ing sys­tem designed for this type of device.

The same thing is true with the app inte­gra­tion into the tool­bar. When I lis­ten to music, whether in the native app or via Pan­dora, the Pre puts the con­trols right in the tool­bar so they’re always avail­able. I can envi­sion a day when that tool­bar gets too crowded, but right now, this is another exam­ple of the Pre work­ing the way I do on my lap­top. It’s a killer fea­ture for me, because I don’t even have to switch cards to con­trol the music.

Con­clu­sion

There are lots of other small quirks or cool things, but these are my over­all impres­sions after a week with the Pre. Major enhance­ments to the Palm line include the 3-megapixel cam­era (with flash), much bet­ter Google Maps inte­gra­tion, WiFi, GPS turn-by-turn direc­tions, YouTube videos, and they’re all well done on the Pre. The backup fea­ture is a huge improve­ment, as I found out when my first Pre died and I had to replace it with a new one. I was able to just enter my pro­file name on the new device and almost every­thing syn­chro­nized down to it from Palm’s server. There were some app pref­er­ences that I had to re-enter, but I don’t know if that’s stan­dard or if the first Pre just hadn’t fully syn­chro­nized yet. Either way, it’s nice to not have to worry about back­ing things up, although it does raise some pri­vacy con­cerns for me.

As do the location-aware ser­vices, which I turned on in exchange for the con­ve­nience of find­ing restau­rants and movies around me, along with the cus­tomized weather and nav­i­ga­tion ser­vices. That’s another post, though, so suf­fice it to say that while I don’t plan to ever broad­cast my loca­tion in real-time, I still strug­gle with this issue. It’s not unique to the Pre, though, so it’s a wash in the plus/minus equation.

So should you con­sider get­ting a Pre? If you can get the rebate that makes it $199, I think it’s well worth it, espe­cially if you’re one of those peo­ple who likes the cut­ting edge. I’m really look­ing for­ward to see­ing what the hack­ers and app devel­op­ers do with it, and the suc­cess of the phone will depend quite a bit on what hap­pens in that arena.

On our com­put­ers, we’re liv­ing more and more in a web browser, and on our phones, the early adopters are spend­ing more and more time in these tun­nels (apps) that cus­tomize the expe­ri­ence and make it more con­ve­nient. Con­ver­gence was always going to hap­pen, but I’m not sure we real­ized the road that would get us there would start with apps. It won’t stay that way for­ever, but it’s the tran­si­tion bandaid of the moment, and if the Pre can com­pete on apps, it will bury the bar with multitasking.

It’ll need a stronger proces­sor and more stor­age to get there, but it’s a very solid first gen­er­a­tion device, espe­cially for one that’s been com­pletely rewrit­ten from the ground up. It’s not for every­one (no phone is), but if it can deliver on the promise of its poten­tial, the future will arrive that much faster. I’d give the Pre two thumbs up if I didn’t think it would make it eas­ier for some­one to pry it out of my hands. I’ll raise that to four thumbs when that SDK is released and we get to see what the phone can really do.

Come on, Palm — let’s get moving!

Tags: centro, palm pre, review, treo