I’ve had my new Palm Pre for about 5 days now and I finally feel comfortable in giving it a thorough going-over. First, I have to say that this was a HUGELY anticipated product for me. I’d been looking forward to getting my hands on this for quite a while!! I’ve read the reviews that others have posted and I’m ready – now that I’ve got it – here are some of my thoughts:
ConsPros
It’s freakin’ beautiful. It fits perfectly in even my tiny little hands and is comfy. I’ve heard that some have issues with the keyboard being a bit difficult to slide out, but I’ve had no problems – the mechanism works beautifully and the keyboard itself is plenty big, easy to use and backlit (another drain on battery life, to be sure, but very handy in the dark!).
The OS is REALLY well thought out, being both beautiful & usable. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of navigation (though I wish someone had told me that swiping things to the right deletes them – that one took a day or two for me to “get” – so I was opening each email to delete it…).
The applications are a *current* weakness, just because there isn’t much there, but the ones that are work nicely (mostly – my shortcovers ebook reader has been crashy today) and are universally useful.
I have:
- Pandora
- New York Times
- Where
- Tweed (Twitter client #1)
- Fandango
- Sudoku
- AccuWeather
- Spaz (Twitter client #2 adn the one I’ll probably stick with)
- SplashID
- Shortcovers
- Speedbrain
Besides the apps that are currently available, you get a few pre-set bookmarks for the web application, including a link to Facebook that is pretty easy to set up. I can’t quite figure out how to get all of the FB info through the interface they provide, but given time, I’m sure I’ll be able to figure it out… Speaking of the web, the browser is nice and fast – and does a great job of rendering standard web pages. I’ve yet to hit a site that gives me problems – and today is the first time I’ve fired up my computer since I got the phone – I’ve been able to keep up using just my phone!
Summary
In summary, the phone has it’s issues – there are some hardware concerns that may cause some to give up on it. The interface and the features, though, are more than enough for me to deal with any glitches that show up in this first few weeks of use.
