Early this morning I did something that I have been dreading for a long while: I called Sprint to see when I qualified to get a new phone. Why did I dread this you ask? Well, I knew once I was able to get a new phone that I’d impatiently wait until I broke down and go buy a Pre. Here are some of my initial thoughts. This is in no way comprehensive nor unbiased; it’s just what I think after playing with the phone for 8 hours, but if you don’t agree with me then you’re wrong.
First an overview. The Pre uses a “card” for each actively running program. You can switch between cards at any time by hitting the center button. When you’re looking at the screen, the programs all look like cards, so it’s not that much of a stretch to call them that. The point of these is to easily switch between programs without needing to close any.
Hit the jump for a few thoughts on specific features and for more of my literary witticism.
Keyboard
They changed the layout of the keyboard from the Treo/Centro, and in my opinion it’s an improvement. The comma and period are now primary buttons, and there’s a [Sym] key that brings up a list of commonly used symbols so you don’t have put in a symbol that you think looks like the one you want and then hit the [alt] key to see if you won the prize. If you’ve used a treo/centro then you know what I mean. I’ve seen a few people complain about the size of the keys, but I’ve gotten used to the Centro ones and are no longer an issue. The thing I don’t like about the keyboard though is its thinness. The part that you hold is fairly thin and makes it tough to grip the phone properly, especially in one-handed operation.
5-Way Button/Gestures
Psyche! They killed the 5-way button and they killed it good. That little button opened up a myriad of directions you could move something, be it the screen or a text cursor. And by myriad I mean 4. So of course the Pre improved on this by adding something way cooler, right? Yep, they added a single button to the screen. That doesn’t select things. Wow was that anticlimactic. Well, they’ve brought back the gesture pad from the old Palm V days, if that makes you feel any better. Probably the most useful part of that is the “back” gesture, which takes you back a screen, pretty self-explanatory. The “flick” gesture, in which you push cards off the screen is actually pretty neat, makes me feel like I’m in The Minority Report, but with less creepy kids chained up.It allows you to quickly push cards up and off the screen, effectively closing the program.
I have a theory that that “center” button that doesn’t really do anything except bring up all your cards was originally intended to be like the Blackberry Curve’s roller ball, but Palm ran out of either time or money. Look for them to do something cool with it in the future. That’s a threat, by the way, Palm.
Oh, say you wanted to move your cursor in a text field but didn’t want to erase everything you’ve typed since the spot you needed to edit? They have a solution for that! Hold down the alt(orange) key and slide your finger on the screen in the direction you want to move it. It now takes 2 hand (or 1 incredibly skilled one) to move the freakin’ cursor. Needless to say, the Konami Code just got a lot more hard. Just the way I like it.
UPDATE: Apparently if you type in [upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart] in the launcher it brings up developer mode where you can connect a computer running the Palm SDK and get access to the phone. Huh. Guess I’m psychic after all.
Synergy
The Synergy system of the Pre synchronizes all of your contacts (and calendars) into one place, whether they be from Facebook, Google, Outlook, or your phone. This can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how close you are to your Facebook friends. If you’ve clicked [accept] to every invitation from slobbering teenagers who think the hot girl in the profile picture is you and not your fiancee (and your name happens to be Dana), you’re probably not going to like Synergy much. See, there’s currently no way to select which contacts you import into your phone, they’re all there. For me this was fine since I had to recreate my Facebook profile after college so all those people who you had classes with but don’t talk to anymore don’t really apply.
One of the cooler things I’ve found with Synergy is the ability to have a conversation with a person via SMS, AIM, GoogleTalk, whatever, and it recognizes that person as the same and records it all as one conversation so you don’t have to hunt between AIM convos and text messages for the address of the party that you weren’t really invited to but are going anyway. That’ll show them!
Battery
So far the battery life has been a bit dismal, but that is likely due to the fact that I’ve stayed signed into AIM, received emails as soon as they came in, watched a few YouTube videos, and had an hour-long conversation, most of it using a bluetooth headset. Oh, I also took a few pictures of my cat. He didn’t like them though so I had to delete them. However, I fully charged it before I left work, and 5 hours later, the battery is at 11%. I’m hoping that after a few battery cycles I’ll get a bit more life, but if not, I’ll just have to either have a charger at home and one at work or else cut down on the amount of things running at any one time.
More to come later.