Review: Palm Pre
While the Palm Pre is certainly one of the best smartphones available – smarter than the T-Mobile G1 and just about every other model released since 2007 – the question everyone wants to answer is: can it kill the iPhone?
Or, short of outright death and dismemberment, can it at least capture some iPhone glory?
The short answer is: not in a blue moon, but then the secret Palm has kept under wraps since the big reveal at CES in January is that the Pre is not necessarily meant as a personal entertainment device.
As we’ll see, the Pre has the makings of a truly powerful business communicator. In fact, peek under the hood, there’s a Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 processor, 8GB of internal memory, 802.11g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth with A2DP stereo.
Computer-like
What you’ll discover is a capable mobile computer that supports multi-tasking, contact sync across multiple Web services, and push e-mail that could lead to swift adoption at companies both large and small, filling the void left by the popular Palm Treo from years ago.
The real challenge then is that Palm needs to revive its lagging developer community – which is almost non-existent.
While Apple continues to sell MacBooks and iPhones to the college kids and trendy/smart/cool-types, the reality with those who take computing more seriously is that the iPhone is a limited device – despite the fact that there are some 50,000 apps available for it.
It doesn’t multi-task apps (at least, not yet), only barely supports enterprise-class e-mail, and has a clunky soft keyboard for typing longer messages. The Palm Pre has a true hardware keyboard and is designed to keep pace with big business in very tangible ways.
It’s a powerful smartphone that occasionally acts like a powerful computer – and shows amazing promise.
Chats and text messages are combined into one view, making it easy to track down conversations with both business and personal contacts.
CALENDAR: The calendar also syncs up Web services nicely, adding both Gmail and Microsoft Outlook meetings in one view.
GPS: Google Maps taps into the GPS on the Palm Pre, of course, but doesn’t support turn-by-turn voice nav.
FRIENDS: Contacts from FaceBook and Gmail get nicely combined – which is great unless you do not manage your contacts well.
EMAIL: Once you type an e-mail into the Palm Pre, it recognizes your Webmail service and starts syncing your mail.
Chats and text messages are combined into one view, making it easy to track down conversations with both business and personal contacts.
Unpacking the Pre, you get the sense that it is designed for fun and not as much for business, with an artistic design flare for the box and included materials. There’s an earbud headset and a USB charger, plus a small manual.
Palm also offers the Touchstone Charging Dock – the phone sits on a magnetic cradle and charges using inductive charging technology. You can’t charge the phone on the cradle and connect it to your PC, so you have to do one or the other.
SNUG: the Pre fits nicely in your hand
The Pre weighs 135 grams, which is a hair heavier than the iPhone 3G and exactly the same as the iPhone 3GS that Apple announced on June 8. Strangely, the Palm Pre feels lighter, because of the slide-out keyboard adds some overall length and the fact that the plastic feels a little chintzy.
Sliding the keyboard out, you will notice a slight curve to the device. One of the first oddities of the phone: the edge of the keyboard is actually quite sharp.
CURVE: the device is slightly curved with a sharp end
When you close the keyboard, you have to be careful because you can ever-so-slightly pinch your hand in the side of the phone (it happened at least twice during our tests). Overall, the Pre looks sleek and stylish, matching the sparse button of the iPhone and T-Mobile G1.
There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, power button, and a call lock switch on top, a side mini-USB port (with a cover) on the right side, and volume controls on the left side.
The phone just feels right in your hand – resting right in your palm and not quite as elongated (with the keyboard closed) as the iPhone or as thick and bulky as the T-Mobile G1.
SMALL: the Pre is a smaller device than the Apple iPhone
It’s also smaller and more portable than the Samsung Instinct. In fact, no other phone quite matches the size and shape – it is thicker than most slide-out phones like the Sidekick II, but not as tall as the Nokia XpressMusic 5800.
That said, after using the phone for 72 hours, we found the plastic construction to be a little worrisome – it feels as though a few tumbles and the enclosure could crack.
When you turn the phone on for the first time, it’s easy to forget about the hardware. Palm put all of its resources into making sure the operating system – called WebOS and essentially a very well-designed Linux distro for smartphones – as fluid as possible.
It is so fluid, when you touch the screen, you see a subtle ripple effect. There’s a quick setup process where you create a profile for the phone, a tutorial, and a video.Let’s start by covering the touch interface
HOME SCREEN: the interface is extremely zippy and responsive
Palm uses a dualistic design approach where you touch the main screen to perform actions such as deleting e-mails (by swiping to the left) or moving windows on the screen.
Then, below the main screen, there’s a second gesture area where you can swipe to the left to close the current window. Apps run on “cards” that are easy to manage and move around.
CARDS: applications sit on cards which you can move about
You can swipe to the left or right to see cards on the screen, toss them up to remove them, and select options on each card with your finger.
The card interface is important because the Palm Pre supports multi-tasking, the best implementation of the PC concept of running multiple apps at once and switching easily between them.
Still, if you open more than about five apps, the phone will start to run slow and your swipes and other gestures won’t work as accurately. There’s an easy solution: close a few of the open apps.
Speaking of the touch interface, it’s powerful and accurate if you are already familiar with a touch phone interface, and we found it was great after about 15 minutes of trial and error.
APPS: the Pre can run many apps simultaneously
Some of the gestures are a bit odd – such as flicking your finger up to start the app launcher. You likely won’t find this gesture by accident. In fact, we tested our Palm Pre with several teens and a couple of adults who just couldn’t understand how to use the phone.
It requires some training, which is not good for a device that Palm hopes will sell in the millions. When we explained that you flick left to go back, and press the center button to see cards, our test subjects had a much better experience – but the touch interface is not as intuitive as the Instinct or iPhone.
Accurate touching
Accuracy is another story – the touch screen recorded finger presses and swipes perfectly — unless we had too many apps running.
The iPhone will occasionally have problems with finger presses, especially on the edge of the screen, but the Palm Pre is more accurate. Navigating through apps on the Palm Pre is a breeze, and it’s easy to add applications using the Pre App Catalog.
Applications
There are only about 18 apps available at present, but that will likely change soon – Palm offers a free SDK and has a long history of working closely with developers. In fact, there are thousands of apps available for the Pre if you count legacy apps that run using the free, third-party Palm Classic app.
However, classic apps can’t match the ease-of-use and integration characteristics of apps designed for Palm Pre – running classic apps would likely appeal only to those who have a Palm app they really need.
Below the main screen, you can store five apps – they are interchangeable, so you place the music player icon there instead of the mail icon.
SHORTCUTS: store five apps at the bottom of the home screen
Holding apps there is reminiscent of Palm phone of yesteryear, but you quickly learn to access apps from the main launcher. It’s impossible to know, incidentally, whether having hundreds of apps installed on the device is even possible or will make the Palm Pre hard to use, since there are so few apps available.
Be that as it may, the paradigm for accessing apps is sound – you can flick up or down or side to side to see more windows. The T-Mobile G1 has a much more awkward paradigm where all apps are either stored on the desktop screen in a viewing area that only supports one center screen and two side screens (one on either side), or in one long collection of apps.
The iPhone offers up to 9 holding areas for apps and can support up to 148 apps at once.
More interface features
There’s a few more interface options to mention. If you move your finger up from the lower portion that holds up to five apps, you will see a ribbon that flows on the screen in an animated fashion.
It’s impressive, but not necessarily that useful because you can’t load dozens of apps there and use it like the dock on a Mac or the taskbar in Windows Vista.
One other interesting UI feature – there’s a drop-down menu in the upper left corner that is easy to miss unless you look for it. For example, when you are typing up an e-mail, you can access the menu to see priority options for that e-mail (such as marking the message as a high priority), saving the message as a draft, and the copy and paste functions.
Pinch to zoom
The Palm Pre also supports zoom in and out by pinching and spreading your fingers out, such as when you are browsing sites and when you are viewing photos.
There are quite a few interesting gestures to explore on the phone. When you have the launcher up, you can close it by flicking up from the gesture area. You can press and hold down on a card to move it to another spot. You can double-tap to zoom all the way in or out on the screen.
RIBBON: active apps can be controlled from the ribbon
The touch interface is not entirely perfect, however. The ripple effect when you touch the screen is helpful, but there are times when you press the screen and you don’t see a ripple, or you see it and it seems like nothing happened. If you are running too many apps, you can swipe to delete an e-mail and nothing will happen for about a second.
If you swipe again, you can delete multiple e-mails by accident as the Pre catches up. These are occasional glitches, and likely all related to memory handling.
Keyboard niggle
Another minor issue: the Pre has an accelerometer that senses the direction of the device, so it will switch to landscape modem if you are viewing something at that orientation, but that also means the keyboard is now useless.
Someone will probably invent a soft keyboard to use in landscape mode, maybe even by the time you read this, to solve the problem.
The webOS interface is amazingly fluid – it supports gestures such as flick left to delete and a ribbon of icons that you pull up from the lower touch screen portion of the phone. And, you can run multiple apps at once and switch between them.
The ribbon shows up when you drag icons above the app launcher, just below the main screen. It is interesting to try out, but is not that useful in terms of actually controlling apps on the phone.
Interestingly, making phone calls – like on the iPhone, but not as much with the G1 – seems secondary, almost as an afterthought for people who actually still talk to each other occasionally.
The truth is, the Palm Pre is a better voice device than the iPhone and is actually one of the better smartphones for making phone calls.
CALL: dial a number of select contant from your contacts book
Palm likely learned its lesson with the Centro and previous devices – voice communication better work, because without good voice controls and quality, a smartphone can die a quick death.
Crisp voice
In a series of calls made during all times of the day, each call sounded crisp without any of the strange audio delay found with lower-end smartphone models.
CONTACTS: selecting a contact is easy and intuitive
The speakerphone is loud and picks up extremely well; it works better than the iPhone. However, while the calls sounded good in the sense that there was no artifacting or distortion, there was a lot of audio compression
This means voice chats tended to have a bit of a robotic tone to them rather than sounding full and life-like – e.g., calls were clear, but highly compressed.
Making calls is extremely easy – you press the green phone icon and can start typing a number. Or, you can use universal search. Here, you can just start typing the name of any contact to find the phone number for that person.
Easy operation
Once you find a contact, you just click the number to dial. The Palm Pre does not support visual voice mail – a text indicator about who called, or the fancier transcription features in Google Voice that take a voice mail and convert it into text for you – but the Pre does use alerts to let you know when you do have a voice mail.
Unlike the T-Mobile G1, which shows alerts in a small portion of the screen above the main apps, the Palm Pre shows alerts below the main screen, and they are quite large.
The only downside: if you happen to get an alert at the exact same time as another incoming call or when you are about to dial a number, the alerts obscure part of the phone dialer screen.
The dialer is functional and easy-to-use, although we would have preferred a dedicated hardware button for making a phone call.
Soft keys on the phone dialer are responsive enough even for fast dialers – we never had any problems dialing numbers.
The Palm Pre is a good messaging phone, but not the best we have ever tried. It beats the iPhone, which is why we think the Palm Pre has a better shot as a business phone than a personal media player.
Keys on the slide-out keyboard are quite small – a hair smaller than the soft keys on the iPhone, in fact – but you will likely be able to type faster on the Palm Pre because of the tactile feedback – you can pres quickly and move on, but the iPhone soft keys provide no sensation when you press – unlike the Samsung Instinct, which uses haptics to give you feedback on finger presses.
TYPING: the slide-out keyboard is a real asset
We typed dozens of messages, both in Gmail, as SMS, and instant messages in AOL IM (the only support IM client that anyone actually uses). We loved the @ symbol being on the keyboard itself rather than having to access it with a modifier key, because it meant typing e-mail addresses much faster.
The real advantage to using the Palm Pre is that you can run multiple apps at once and copy and paste between them.
Say you just got an e-mail from a business associate and you want to send the text as an SMS to someone else. This simple activity is not possible on the iPhone.
ATTACHMENTS: adding attachments to messages is very easy
On the Pre, you hold down the Shift key, highlight text, and then access the Edit function (you click the menu in the upper left corner). Then, you switch over to the SMS app, start a new text message, go to the menu again, and click Paste to paste in the text. It’s useful – and unique to the Palm Pre, for now.
The Pre uses Microsoft Direct Push technology when you are connected to an Exchange server.
This means the phone operates like a BlackBerry in that you will receive e-mails without having to click refresh or send/receive. You can use one inbox for all of your messages – from Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail.
EMAIL: setting up your mail is easier than on many smartphones
The Pre uses a new Palm feature called Synergy that automatically syncs contacts form Facebook, Exchange, and Gmail. It means you will have one long contact list, which sounds more cumbersome than it actually is in practice.
Also, the Pre uses the Google model of search rather than the Microsoft model of organization. For example, you can just start typing a name – such as Jack – and you will see anyone with that name. Then, you can click their e-mail address and start typing the message, regardless of whether they are an Exchange, Gamil, or Facebook contact.
COPY & PASTE: you can copy and paste text between apps and messages
A few complaints about messaging, though.
At times, the curvature of the device made it a little hard to type on the keyboard. As we mentioned earlier, we feel this smartphone has potential in business – because of the support for Microsoft Exchange, a hardware keyboard, and other factors.
However, it is a bit crippled by the curved keyboard. In a hands-on comparison between the Blackberry 8900 and the Palm Pre, it was no contest – we could type circles around the Pre because the keys on the 8900 are just big enough and separated from each other such that you can type much faster.
The Pre also has a limited auto-correct system that contains only common words such as “the” and “and” compared to the iPhone and Blackberry, which fill in words from a database of thousands. IN typing message son the Palm Pre, we only saw the auto-correct feature kick in a couple of times.
The Palm Pre is an amazing Web device, which is not a big surprise since it uses the Webkit engine – the same one Apple uses for the iPhone. We tested several complex sites with multiple sections and languages – IGN.com, ESPN.com, and iGoogle.com – and the Pre rendered the sites perfectly.
Like the iPhone, you “pinch and spread” to zoom in and out on the page, and when you flick down to scroll through a page, you can press again to stop quickly
WEB: best-in-class web browsing is a highlight of the Pre
The Web features on the Palm Pre are the best we have seen, even compared to the iPhone and G1. There are quite a few hidden surprises as well.
For example, you can add a Web site to the app launcher so you can visit the site quickly.
Rendering is fast and never got bogged down unless – once again – we had too many apps running, which was a common occurrence during our testing (we think the average user won’t try to run 30 different apps at the same time, start a new e-mail message, and browse the Web at the same time – so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem).
CARDS: you can add bookmarks and place then on homepage Cards
We tested another 10 sites and never saw any rendering problems, even when we visited Twitter.com, Last.fm, Pandora.com, and several other Web 2.0 sites that tend to break the browser on other smartphones.
SHORCUTS: add your favourite sites to your shortcuts list
Really, there are only a couple of minor gripes – there is no “global view” that we found that lets you see all open pages, and we would have liked a back button that shows previously visited sites so we could back up three or four sites before the last one we visited.
The 3 megapixel camera is not the strongest selling point here, mirroring the limitations of the iPhone and G1.
We prefer the Nokia N95, which provides all the typical digital camera features you would expect, such as white balance controls and multi-level zoom. Interestingly, while the camera is limited, the photos we took were not half-bad.
FLASH: with the flash, the image is crisp and well balanced
NO FLASH: without the flash, the performance was not so good indoors
There are a few options for controlling the flash, but overall the photos looked crisp and colorful without the usual dull color treatment found on other cameraphones – including the iPhone.
LOW LIGHT: in these conditions the camera does well although it lacks sharpness and detail
We tested the camera in two primary conditions: outdoor shots and indoor shots. It’s possible to take a photo with the Pre that looks indiscernible from a regular pocket digital camera in an outdoor setting.
INDOORS: the performance is not great, with washed out colours and minimal detail
Indoors, though, the flash and ISO correction are too limited – it is not a phone you will want to rely on for birthday parties or graduation ceremonies, except in a pinch.
One interesting feature that trumps the iPhone though – you can enable GPS geotagging so that images you take on the Pre have their location stored in the metadata.
We loaded several different kinds of media onto the Palm Pre.
In two cases, the Pre had problems – we loaded the movie The Incredibles as an H.264 video file, and loaded some sample Windows Media files saved as MPEG-4. The Pre was not able to play any of them.
It’s supposed to support MPEG-4, H.263 and H.264, so we think with our H.264 movie the file was just too big – at about 1.5GB – to load into memory.
Interestingly though, the Palm Pre does work with iTunes. This feels a bit like loading Windows onto a Mac, and we wondered how Palm was able to get permission to make iTunes think the Pre was just another iPod or iPhone.
ITUNES: the Pre is the first device other than an iPhone to work with iTunes
Once connected, we had no trouble copying hundreds of music files, photos, podcasts, and other media over to the Pre (but not movies or TV shows).
Playback on the device is excellent: the speaker on the back of the unit is large enough for listening in a pinch, and the included earbud headset matches the quality of those included with the iPhone
MUSIC: audio performance is fantastic, and the inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack is welcome
Thankfully, the Pre has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so we used both an earbud set (the Denon AH-C700) and hi-fi quality headphones (the Ultrasone HFI-580) and found the Palm Pre to be up to challenge – music sounded full and rich, not tinny like it does on some smartphones, making the Pre a worthy MP3 player.
For movie playback, the 320×480 screen resolution makes video look sharp, and the screen runs in 24-bit color so movies also look colorful. (You can only load movies when the Pre is in USB mode, though.)
The actual screen dimensions – about 3.1-inches – mean the size of the screen is a hair smaller than the G1 and a finger width shorter than the iPhone, but the benefit is that – at the same resolution – movies actually look a little sharper. You can’t record movies with the Pre, which is a problem since that is the new exceptional feature of the iPhone 3Gs.
Battery life on the Pre is a fairly predictable five hours, or up to six if you only use it to check your schedule and have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth turned off.
Since the phone was released just a few days ago, it is hard to tell whether battery life will stay the same or suffer from issues that have plagued a few other smartphones where the battery works fine at first and then fails to take a complete charge and slowly lasts shorter times the longer you own it.
We’ll keep this review updated so if we have any problems of this nature we’ll let you know.
BATTERY: You can check the battery usage in the preferences window but there is no large battery icon like there is on the iPhone.
Organiser
The concept of a PIM (personal information organizer) originated with Palm, and in many ways the Palm Pre is a return to that concept.
However, it’s not just because there are contacts, a scheduler, a simple notes app, or any particular tool. It is now because of multi-tasking.
MULTI-APPS: switch between apps seemlessly providing you’ve not got too many open
You can actually keep all of those apps up all the time and check them at will. Over the course of 48 hours, we relied on the Pre in countless ways to keeps us on tasks, for reminders and meeting notices, to check in with our contacts, and as a phone to keep in lock-step communication with friends and business associates.
LIFE: Using the calendar is pure joy – since it combines all of your appointments from Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar into one.
CLOCK: you get all the usual organiser features like clock and calculator
We also liked the alerts system, which pops-up a large reminder about upcoming meetings. When the device is in stand-by mode, there is also a helpful summary screen that shows any new messages, appointments, and missed calls. (To use the device, you flip a lock icon up into the main screen, which is cool.)
Palm figures you will rarely physically connect the Pre to your computer, but if you do, it works flawlessly.
There’s a prompt to use the device to sync data, as a USB storage drive, or just to charge it. The only slight glitch we found here is that, if you really do drain the battery dry, it takes quite a while (upwards of 20 minutes) before you can even use the phone again, because it needs to charge up for a while first.
We had no trouble using the Pre with a Lenovo X301 laptop, a home-built desktop, and a Mac Mini we had laying around. For media sync, the Palm Pre worked flawlessly with iTunes – even though it is weird to see iTunes recognize the device as an iPod – but only for music, not movies.
Comparison versus iPhone and G1
In the end, we enjoyed using the Palm Pre. It’s different from the iPhone and the G1 in a good way, acts more like a computer (which is ideal for power users), and syncs contacts from Facebook and Gmail automatically
CLOSE CALL: they’re similarly matched but the iPhone still comes out on top
After two years of living with the iPhone, we’re ready for a new interface and recommend the Palm Pre for those in a similar situation – wanting to multi-task apps, explore a new interface, and even get inspiration in their own job from how the Palm Pre operates as a smartly designed gadget.
That said, the Apple iPhone is still a better device.
Compared to the T-Mobile G1, there are some interesting differences. Sure, the Palm Pre has a minimal set of apps, and that could change quickly.
There are not that many truly useful apps for the G1, however – other than G-Mote, EasyTranslator, and a few tools that exploit the location-awareness of the device or work with Twitter (you might disagree with that if you have found more useful apps, but many of them are designed for very specific purposes.)
In a grudge match competition, we’d pick the Pre over the G1 but not by a wide margin. And the Pre is a much better touch phone than the HTC Touch Pro, the Samsung Instinct, the Blackberry Storm, and the Nokia XpressMusic 5800.
It is not, however, a better business phone than the Blackberry 8900, due to the small and overly curved keyboard and the fact that the Blackberry is already an accepted, trusted device at many large companies.
Palm does not deliver on every single promise with the Pre, but the device will certainly find a sizable niche and appeal to anyone in the US who already uses the Sprint wireless carrier or is considering a carrier switch (UK operator and availability not yet announced).
In some ways the world is not ready for all of the Web integration the phone could have offered.
There are just shades and shards of things to come: you can use one calendar to see your upcoming schedule in Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook, instead of the more common multi-calendar approach, but you can’t use Yahoo! Calendar (not yet, anyway).
You can start typing just about anything – a contact name or an app name, for example – and the Palm Pre will start searching, but you can’t search browser history.
There are finer details you discover over time: when you type a contact name that is not on your phone, the Pre shows you links for sites like Wikipedia and Google to explore that name.
Yet, the smartphone avoids over-reaching – you’ll see Facebook integration and Twitter apps, but Palm avoided less popular social networks like Bebo.
It’s really a taste of what a grown-up Web OS on your PC will look like, where standards such as OpenSocial, OAuth, and HTML5 start behaving like Windows, where apps communicate with each other and you login just once to the Web and then use all of your apps and access data as you do in Windows.
We liked:
You might have to pry the Palm Pre from our hands – we definitely liked using it, and the interface is a joy to use once you understand how it works and figure out all the tricks.
We’re power users – we like being able to multi-task the apps, playing music in the background while we type an e-mail and check SMS. The multi-tasking allure might wear off eventually, but for now we are hooked on it.
We disliked:
The keyboard is just okay – it is to curved and too small for any really long typing sessions. The device is not as well-constructed as the iPhone – the plastic feels like it could crack too easily. And, we were disappointed by the battery life, even though we did not expect too much from a media phone.
Verdict:
In the end, this is what makes the Palm Pre so compelling, and a better choice for savvy computer users than the Apple iPhone or even the highly extensible T-Mobile G1. It’s a new mobile computing paradigm more than a highly useful phone.
Related Links
Related Stories
 |
 |
Read the whole story on TechRadar: Mobile phone reviews
