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.