Jul
28th
Wed
28th
Comments (View)
Mar
27th
Sat
27th
The Pre, one week on…
So, it’s been a week since I got the Palm Pre, and I promised some people I’d write about my impressions at this point. So here are some things that I’ve observed about the Pre and WebOS. Unlike last week, I’m gonna start with the annoyances this time:
1. Sluggish/Laggy - I wouldn’t exactly call the phone “snappy”. It sometimes gets hung up on scrolling through lists, and there have also been times while playing games that the phone would just freeze. (Mojo SDK games only…not the fancy OpenGL games with the new PDK.) This happens most when I’m on the subway, so I think it may be related to the phone finding and attempting to join a weak Verizon signal while moving underground. Perhaps that’s a testament to Verizon’s network, but it’s kind of annoying. A homebrew OS patch (more on that later) was recently released that will overclock the CPU…and supposed this helps a bit. It’s certainly something that can be overcome with future OS updates. (From what I understand, the phone’s GPU isn’t being used to render the OS, which puts a lot more burden on the CPU.)
2. Tiny screen - Tiny. Did I mention that it’s tiny? It has the same resolution as my iPhone, but damn is it noticeably smaller. I have decent eyesight, and there are times it’s just painful. How the webkit browser doesn’t have a menu option to adjust the font size is beyond me. Considering the hardware, I think it’s unconscionable that EVERY app doesn’t have the ability to adjust font size! (Tweed does, as does the fantastic ebook app pReader.)
3. No scrollbars. Anywhere. - I understand how this adds a minute amount of screen real estate, but it’s a bit odd to not know where you are on a page in an app. It’s no dealbreaker, it just feels kinda weird.
4. Contact suggestions - Contact searching is a bit unwieldy. I wish the phone were more aware of the type of contact details I want in an app so that I won’t get IM contact data in, say, the email app when it’s popping up suggestions.
But there are some good things as well…
1. Verizon - Oh my God. 3G everywhere. No dropped calls. 5 bars in places I used to never get a single bar. Case in point: we went to the Natural History Museum today to meet some friends. If you don’t know, the AMNH is crazy on the weekends, so finding people can be difficult. My wife was doing all the coordinating with our friends, but once we got inside her iPhone was useless. No signal at all. Fortunately for us I had five full bars on my Pre. We called our friends and found them in no time. And this relates to what I’ve found about the Pre overall…as a communication device, it blows the iPhone out of the water. And I don’t just mean call signal and quality. (Although my wife has told me that I don’t sound nearly “as far away” as I used to on calls.) It’s a bunch of things. WebOS allows you to add contacts directly to the launcher…which means you can access a page of your most-used contacts and initiate a call/email/sms from anywhere. The messaging app is great…I’m actually using IM on my phone! I’ve NEVER used it on my phone…but it’s just so easy. The email client, as I mentioned before, is pretty nice too. The unified inbox works well, but I really like the email notifications in the notification tray. I can see the basics about new email messages without having to open the mail client (or even unlocking the phone). In terms of communicating, WebOS just gets out of my way far better than the iPhone ever did. It tried, but feebly. App notifications were too obtrusive, and don’t get me started on the icon badges. (Hey there’s a “3” on the email icon! Uhh…I guess that means I have 3 unread emails in my “primary” account. What about my other, equally important, accounts?)
2. Battery Life - So far the battery life has about the same as iPhone. I bought a higher capacity battery online, and the first day I had issues where it seemed to be dropping 1% per minute, but after a few charges the battery is performing admirably. Now, I can’t say I’m terribly happy that the battery life is the same as my iPhone because I was never really able to get through an entire day (8 hrs) without having to recharge. The plus side, however, is that now I have TWO batteries, and I can keep a spare in my bag. Advantage: Pre.
3. Media sharing - I can finally upload photos and videos directly to YouTube & Facebook without having to launch their apps. I don’t know if this is possible with an iPhone 3GS, but it’s new to me! Also, the camera has a flash. That’s handy.
4. Homebrew apps - OK this is a biggie. There is a pretty vibrant homebrew app community, which is nice. Many of the official apps via the Palm app channel started as homebrew. From what I understand, Palm is actually OK with the homebrew community! I only wish there was a working commandline Terminal. (There’s one, but it’s been broken since the last OS update). In addition to applications, the homebrew community provides a series of OS patches that essentially let you make changes to core OS features. I’ve installed 18 patches, giving me features such as adding more apps per-page, adding the date to the time in the OS title bar, changing the carrier text (“Verizon Wireles”) to the current wifi SSID if connected, a bunch of browser tweaks (no auto-refresh, fullscreen, etc.), a character counting bubble in the messaging, and many more. In all there are more than 260 available patches. To get anywhere near this kind of configurability on the iPhone you’d have to jailbreak it.
5. Ease of development - Along the lines of homebrew, I’ve found that developing apps for the phone is really easy. I haven’t created a full-fledged app yet, but I will. What’s great about it is that unlike the iPhone SDK, there’s no annoying-as-hell certificate system that takes 10 yrs to figure out and can keep you from testing on actual hardware. You also don’t have to pay $99 a year for the privilege to do so. (OpenSource app devs will always be free, Palm is waiving the $99 fee for the foreseeable future to spur development.) Additionally, as a developer you can give your beta app to as many users as are willing to install and test it, which is huge…and again you don’t have to go through Palm to do this if you don’t want. Of all the mobile OSes, Palm seems to be the most adult about the whole thing…they realize that users who are willing to get apps from outside the official channel know the risks and are perfectly capable of making the decision whether to install an app on their own damn phone.
At this point I’m still leaning towards keeping the phone. If anything, I’ve learned that picking a phone is all about priorities and tradeoffs. With the iPhone, I sacrificed a good telecom network and communicator experience for a large app library and tight OSX integration. With the Pre it seems I’ll be sacrificing the huge app ecosystem for a better communications experience.
Mar
21st
Sun
21st
Jumping Ship
I’ve been getting a lot of heat about my decision to switch from an iPhone to a “dead” platform in Palm’s WebOS and the Pre Plus on Verizon. I looked at it as a leap of faith. I’m fully aware Palm has its back to the ropes, and that the prevailing wisdom is that while WebOS is a nice product, Palm didn’t execute properly and is therefore dead in the water. Regardless of all the prognostication, I was so intrigued by WebOS I felt compelled to at least give Palm a chance. 24 hours into the switch, I’m so far glad I did. This isn’t cognitive dissonance talking…there are some concrete benefits I’m downright giddy about. Here are some of my observations from one day of WebOS use:
1. Multiple App “Cards” - Now that browser tabs are ubiquitous, it seems inconceivable for most people to live without them. Yet somehow we consider an equally constricting environment as “the best” in the iPhone. With the Pre I can launch an app and quickly switch back to something else while I wait for it to load…or to simply let it just hang out. Wow. What a complete shift from the imprisoning iPhone system of one-app-at-a-time. I quickly got used to the ability to launch an app, leave it running, and launch another. Leaving apps running gives me the ability to get notifications from them, but also to switch around at will. For example, we went to the museum today with some friends and I left the Camera app up but not active. When I wanted to take a shot, I unlocked the phone and just switched to the open Camera app. As Steve Jobs would say…Boom! Picture taken. On my iPhone that process would have taken at least three times as long. This type of interaction is so smooth and obvious that when I went back to using my iPhone for a bit I found myself primed to switch to another running app…but then remembered that this was an iPhone was dealing with!
2. The notification tray - Leaving apps up lets them give me notifications and alerts in the WebOS notification tray…which is always present. If I leave Tweed running (a really nice Twitter client on WebOS), I can get unobtrusive notifications when I have new tweets (in my home feed, mentions, or direct messages…or any combination of all three). On my iPhone I had to either let a Twitter client send me popup notifications (assuming there are iPhone Twitter apps that will do this), or I could let Twitter send me an SMS when a Tweet was sent. Either way was considerably more obtrusive since iPhone notifications completely obscure a large portion of the screen. (Don’t get me started on the inability to hang up a call until you close one or more SMS popups on the iPhone.)
3. Unified Inbox - One nice thing about GMail and Mail.app on OSX is the ability to view all of your incoming email messages within a single inbox. The iPhone, however, forces you to check each inbox individually. What’s worse, navigating between inboxes requires no less than four clicks…and that’s not including the disruption of having to quit your current app to launch the Mail app to begin with. The Pre, however, gives you an “All Inboxes” list, just like GMail and Mail.app. Ahhhhh.
4. The physical keyboard - Yes, the Pre’s keyboard is tiny. It’s no Blackberry. But I’m already faster and more accurate on it than my iPhone, and I don’t have to worry about the message “We’ll meet you at the corner of Waverly and University.” being sent as “We’ll Meer you at the circle of Eagerly and University.”
5. Touchstone charger - I’ve had an iPod since Apple incorporated a Firewire jack for charging and syncing. Ever since they switched to the dock connector, I’ve hated virtually every iPod dock I’ve owned. Not a single one was usable without looking at it or feeling around for the right position. I have an iPhone dock next to my bed for the times when I read in the dark and want to charge it overnight and I have never been able to just reach over and place it in the dock without considerable finagling. The contactless Touchstone charger, by contrast, is a freakin’ DREAM. It’s so elegant…the phone just snaps into place on the surface via magnets. (It’s like Apple’s MagSafe power cord on macbooks, but better.) And Palm even let’s you keep the display up while it’s charging so you have a clock and notifications. My iPhone was never really able to do that without an app that kept the phone from sleeping. (Which was dangerous if you WEREN’T charging!) It’s even smart enough to go ahead and pick up a ringing call when you gently lift it off the charger. You can also charge it in portrait OR landscape orientation so you can read/watch videos while charging. Smooooooth.
OK, so all isn’t perfect in la-la land. The app store, while not paltry, is clearly filled with crappy applications. There’s no Instapaper clone, which is gonna hurt. And I’ve run into a couple of “Can’t do that right now” errors when I try to view app details…which required a second or third attempt to go through. There are some definite app gems, though. (I very much like the Twitter client Tweed, and I actually like the Foursquare app better than the iPhone one.) Still, I find myself wishing for more…
1. Small screen - the Pre’s screen is quite vibrant, and is the same resolution as the iPhone 3G. Yet it’s smaller by a couple of tenths of an inch. This is not insignificant. The result is harder-to-read text. It’s not illegible, but it’s definitely noticeable. You can compensate in some apps by increasing the font size, but this has the effect of reducing the available resolution, which isn’t good. Additionally, the notification tray can take a chunk of space from the bottom, reducing usable space even more.
2. No compass - the Pre Plus uses virtually the same hardware as a 16gb iPhone 3GS, with one exception. It has no compass. This certainly isn’t a dealbreaker, but some of the cooler/cutting edge a applications use the compass for “Augmented Reality”…which is not an option on the Palm Pre. Additionally, I would LOVE to have an app like Android’s Google Sky Map. This application uses the GPS, accelerometer, and compass to determine your location and the phone’s orientation to display an annotated map of the sky as you hold it over your head. To me, it’s close to magic…but I’ll have to forego having such a luxury until at least my next phone.
So that’s it so far. I could also give honorable mention to WebOS’s music player (which is way better than Android’s but not quite the iPod) and the ability to selectively toggle bluetooth and wifi from the title bar (both are buried in the separate “Settings” app on the iPhone). I’m anticipating getting to know the phone better so I can accurately speak about battery life, other hardware issues (micro-usb?), and syncing calendars and contacts.
Jan
22nd
Fri
22nd
Although reading has been moving away from paper for several years, the only real advantage digital technology has had is over distribution of content.
But things get exciting when people utilize the processors of digital devices to change and measure the experience of reading. Robin Sloan has posted a fascinating visualization of how readers scroll through his short story The Truth About the East Wind over time. I don’t know that this type of metric provides much utility in terms of marketing content, but Robin’s observation how each line in the graph is a story unto itself really grabbed me.
Oct
19th
Mon
19th
“To fulfill our mission of providing the odds of everyday life, we conduct research in many different topical areas. To date, we have researched over 50 topics and are always adding more. Book of…
Oct
18th
Sun
18th
NOWISM | âConsumersâ ingrained* lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences. Consumers are…
Oct
15th
Thu
15th
“Over a quarter-century ago, Xerox introduced the modern graphical user interface paradigm we today take for granted. That it has endured is a testament to the genius of its design. But the industry…
Oct
11th
Sun
11th
Sugar: The Bitter Truth | Robert H. Lustig, MD, UCSF Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Endocrinology, explores the damage caused by sugary foods. He argues that fructose (too much) and fiber (not enough) appear to be cornerstones of the obesity epidemic through their effects on insulin.
The takeaway from this talk is that the percentage of fructose and sucrose as a fundamental part of the American diet has increased in the last 30 years, and can be directly correlated to our being heaveir. That is, the entire population. And we continue to feed our kids foods that are extremely high in sugar, which is as toxic to our livers as alcohol because it is metabolized exactly the same way in our livers. (Alcohol is also metabolized in the brain, producing the buzz.) We would never hand our kids a can of beer, yet we’re perfectly willing to hand them a can of Coke.
Oct
10th
Sat
10th
Everyone should see this. I wish it was mandatory viewing before getting your driver’s license!
Oct
10th
Sat
10th
“Continuing our multi-touch research, weâve been working on turning an off-the-shelf rear projection TV into a multi-touch display. This screen has the best width-to-depth ratio of any multitouch…
May
24th
Sun
24th
The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to build a publicly accessible digital library of human languages. Since becoming a National Science…
May
20th
Wed
20th
Check out this amazing visualization of MTA ridership from 1905-2006, built on top of Google Maps.
May
18th
Mon
18th
Cookie Monster interviewed on NPR | Om-frickin’-nom…
Apr
27th
Mon
27th
My recent interview about the Kickbee with Reuters correspondent Karina Huber.
