Official Palm Pre User Review Thread

[sanmanc]

Originally Posted by CozBoogie

Both of ours are fairly "twist free". I hope it's not a problem that develops over time though.

I don't think it is. Eveyone that's reported it had it out of box. Our's are "twist free" as well.

[tx_dbs_tx]

I have had my Palm Pre for 6 weeks or so. First things first, no device will ever be perfect in everyone's eyes. The Palm Pre isn't perfect but I will say that it's cons are minimal and most of them will most likely be addressed in future updates. The Palm Pre, on the other hand, has some SERIOUS pros! Well above the competion and it will continue to get better in the months to come. I think the first review was great and covers the Palm Pre for the most part so I won't repeat the numerous facts about it.
I will however give my comparison of the Palm Pre vs the new BlackBerry Tour 9630 from Sprint. Being that both phones are the newest and probably concidered the best Sprint currently has to offer right now. So I went ahead and bought a new BB Tour because the hype and intrigue was killing me. I am a BlackBerry user since the 8700 series so I"m very familiar with BlackBerry devices. I have been using the BB Tour for a week now and honestly I love the ease of use with BlackBerries, but I have to say I really miss my Palm Pre. Seriously. The battery life on the BB Tour is actually quite good and seems better than the Pre. The Tour's web browser is total junk and useless with very slow web page loading and the browser freezes very frequently. BlackBerry browser is not known to be that great and I already knew this but I was hoping for a speedier browsing experience over the BB Curve... NOT!!! So this is where the Palm Pre puts a SERIOUS spanking on the BB Tour! The other thing I want to mention about the BB Tour is the MMS is working great like it's supposed to. You can send pics, ringtones, video clips with no problem. The Pre can only send pics at this time which for me is a minor con. The video playback on the BB Tour has been greatly improved and can play your mp4 encoded videos almost perfectly with very minimal frame skipping. The Palm Pre still out-performs in the video playback department by a long shot. Which brings me to Youtube videos. The BB Tour does not have a youtube application so you have to visit the mobile website. The youtube video playback on the Tour is an embarrasement to say the least. Yes it plays fullscreen, but the video quality is terrible and no enjoyment whatsoever. The Palm Pre plays HQ youtube videos beautifully and perfectly with no lag on my Pre. Again the Palm Pre puts a major spanking on the BB Tour in the Youtube department!
I want to love the BB Tour but I just can,t. It's basically the same BB Os with some improvements but nothing that puts it in the record books. I kove emailing and text messaging on a BlackBerry because of ease of use and that's the ONLY reason I would have one. BUT... The Palm Pre is VERY intuitive in that department and is actually just as good if not better than BlackBerry when it comes to sending, receiving and forwarding emails and texts. I can definetely say that the Palm Pre's handling of email is excellent and very easy to setup and use.Infact I think it's better than BlackBerry with real html pages that actually works unlike BlackBerries. Pre wins here in my opinion. The screens on both phones really isn't much of a comparison... The Pre dominates in every way. The keyboard comparison is basically a draw for me. I really like the designated @ symbol on the Pre where The Tour requires the alt key. That's a great feature of the Pre and it saves time. Otherwise it's all user preference here and neither phone is bad at all in the keyboard department. To sum up my comparison of the Palm Pre vs the new Sprint BlackBerry Tour... I'm more than ready to switch back to my Palm Pre! I don't travel so I don't need the world phone features of the BB Tour, so other than that there's no good reason why anyone should pick the BB Tour over the. Palm Pre. Oh one more thing about the BB Tour is the trackball/cursor is laggy at times and freezes in the web browser from what seems a lack of memory while rendering web pages and also while data is sending/receiving. That's a warning for those who are wanting a BB Tour. Palm Pre is my phone of choice in every category hands down winner! Sorry for the lack of paragraphs and formatting guys.

[CozBoogie]

Nice write-up dbs!

late,
Coz

[tx_dbs_tx]

Originally Posted by CozBoogie

Nice write-up dbs!

late,
Coz

Thanks Coz, I thought there might be folks who where curious about a BB Tour/Palm Pre comparison and that was my quick run-down with my honest opinions between the two. I hope some find it useful since I really enjoy helping people as much as I can.

[tx_dbs_tx]

I just wanted to inform everyone that there are some bad batches of Palm Pre's still being sold at Best Buy and Sprint stores. I witnessed several "screen twist" Pre's and also 2 Pre's with "dead" pixels straight out of the box brand new. This was yesterday evening in a Houston based BB store. My advice to those who are on the picky side like myself is to have the sales rep hand you the Pre so you can visually inspect it BEFORE they begin to activate it. The "twist" syndrom is not anything to get alarmed over as it's a minor quality issue that does not affect the phone's function other than occasionally causing the slide to bind and drag in which case I would definetely exchange it or not purchase one that does that. The dead pixel(s) is something you will really need to look very closely for. A dead pixel in the screen looks like a white dot that never goes away and can be confirmed by simply navigating through the phones features while paying attention to the dead pixel never changing colors and remaining a constant white. It's not the end of the world if you happen to have gotten a phone in this condition, just return it to the place where you bought it even after the 30 day return period because the Pre has a 1 year manufacturer warranty reguardless. No need to file an insurance in these cases. Well that's my tip of the day for everybody...

[sec1rxg]

I bought this phone for my wife as a B-day gift and had to return it on the the spot, Palm Pre doest not respond to anytnig else but finger touch; my wife has long finger nails so keeping this phone beyond the activation screen was not possible much less give a review. Back to WM phones, gonna try the Tocuh pro 2 which I hear will be available Sept. 3rd

[sanmanc]

Originally Posted by sec1rxg@yahoo.com

I bought this phone for my wife as a B-day gift and had to return it on the the spot, Palm Pre doest not respond to anytnig else but finger touch; my wife has long finger nails so keeping this phone beyond the activation screen was not possible much less give a review. Back to WM phones, gonna try the Tocuh pro 2 which I hear will be available Sept. 3rd

Yep it is a capacitive screen rather than a resistive screen. Capacitive uses the electrical conductivity passed through the finger as opposed to the resistance used to operate resistive screens. Several devices either use this capacitive technology or will be using it in the future so I would recommend researching the devices before purchasing. Current devices that I know use it are the iPhone, iTouch, Zune HD, Palm Pre, and the soon to be release Palm Eos and HTC Hero.

[tx_dbs_tx]

Windows Mobile will need a major facelift in order to be able to use capacitive touchscreen technology. Simply because of the tiny buttons etc in windows mobile that need the "pinpoint" accuracy that resistive screens have. Capacitive screens are less accurate but work waaaaay better than resistive screens. I prefer capacitive on anything except win mobile then that's where resistive and a stylus is mandatory. So keeping in tune with this thread topic I'd like to say that the Palm Pre's capacitive touchscreen is very nice and much better than any resistive touchscreen that I've ever used and far better than the Touch Pro with the lag associated with it's screen. The Pre's touch screen lag is very minimal and mostly non existent only happening on rare occasions and is to be expected depending on circumstances.

I can't believe I'm gonna say this but I'm done... Selling the Pre

I have a love-hate relationship with winmo but I'm gonna jump back to it. I realize the Pre is a first gen device but to have it function like a winmo device is too far away... Here is my personal list

1. We have a cpu nearly identical to the iphone 3gs but no hardware acceleration in 2d rendering, or any for that case, its all done by software thust choppy animations and taking a toll on battery and heat. (why have such a strong cpu then?) and since the SDK (crappy btw) and OS itself is web based thust it only uses javascript or similar languages, you really can't do OpenGL to make it communicate with the GPU so its touch to see this soon. It not only affects games which doesn't bother me, but rather the overall performance of the device

2. Back to the sdk, its so neutered that atm its only limited to no better than web widgets with no hardware support and who knows when Palm will release another one? A year? Too far off...

3. No native web downloading / uploading, and a file manager to support it. (you have a mass storage device but no way to universally access your files? I'm so used to downloading music albums via RAR, ZIP, and also decompress them on the device as well as movies, pics etc.) That this alone could be a dealbreaker

4. Neutered copy / paste (why make such a big deal against the iphone to have it this poorly executed)

now I realize that some of this is software but to have this fixed will look like a WebOS 2.0 and I see this too far off for me to stick around cuz I need a lot of these features now not then... I'm prolly gonna wait till september to see how the app catalog rolls out and the rumored WebOS update, so unless it fixes a lot of missing key features I'm getting rid of it to get me a touch pro 2 cuz its the first time I regret selling my laptop back when had my mogul (touch pro after that) which filled all my mobile computing needs despite occasional winmo gripes and issues and now with the Pre I feel like I have a fancy phone rather than a PDA or pocketPC.... Time will tell

[jbearamus]

Originally Posted by mike20pr

I can't believe I'm gonna say this but I'm done... Selling the Pre

I have a love-hate relationship with winmo but I'm gonna jump back to it. I realize the Pre is a first gen device but to have it function like a winmo device is too far away... Here is my personal list

1. We have a cpu nearly identical to the iphone 3gs but no hardware acceleration in 2d rendering, or any for that case, its all done by software thust choppy animations and taking a toll on battery and heat. (why have such a strong cpu then?) and since the SDK (crappy btw) and OS itself is web based thust it only uses javascript or similar languages, you really can't do OpenGL to make it communicate with the GPU so its touch to see this soon. It not only affects games which doesn't bother me, but rather the overall performance of the device

2. Back to the sdk, its so neutered that atm its only limited to no better than web widgets with no hardware support and who knows when Palm will release another one? A year? Too far off...

3. No native web downloading / uploading, and a file manager to support it. (you have a mass storage device but no way to universally access your files? I'm so used to downloading music albums via RAR, ZIP, and also decompress them on the device as well as movies, pics etc.) That this alone could be a dealbreaker

4. Neutered copy / paste (why make such a big deal against the iphone to have it this poorly executed)

now I realize that some of this is software but to have this fixed will look like a WebOS 2.0 and I see this too far off for me to stick around cuz I need a lot of these features now not then... I'm prolly gonna wait till september to see how the app catalog rolls out and the rumored WebOS update, so unless it fixes a lot of missing key features I'm getting rid of it to get me a touch pro 2 cuz its the first time I regret selling my laptop back when had my mogul (touch pro after that) which filled all my mobile computing needs despite occasional winmo gripes and issues and now with the Pre I feel like I have a fancy phone rather than a PDA or pocketPC.... Time will tell

many valid points and for a lot of the same reasons i'm jumping to the Hero next month. I may give WebOS another chance later but right now i'm liking the hero. as for the #s 3 & 4, those are supposed to be addressed in WebOS 1.2 which will be out sooner rather than later however with it being pushed back once already who knows when it'll drop