Comments on: My top 5 wish list for the Palm Pre

CNET editor Bonnie Cha lists five things that could improve the Palm Pre and future Palm WebOS devices.

There is one thing standing between me and a Pre, voice dialing. Do you know if there are actual plans to do over the air update to add this feature?

[StennG]

Bonnie left out the big one; reason number one: A decent carrier.

[sam99999999]

Palm's marketing department seems to have really blown the specs on this device as regards their most loyal customers (the ones already using Palm products).

Here are the major problems:

1) Can't tether - Palm could have really stolen market share from Apple if they had insisted on this from Sprint (and lived up to their original spec). The old Palm products can tether with no problems, so why upgrade to Pre?

2) Sprint network can't do simultaneous voice and data in many locations. So if you are online your phone calls are going to voicemail. Really tacky.

3) No HotSync support in Classic. This is an unbelievable omission. They have no upgrade path for any customers still using Palm Desktop.

4) No local sync option. Companies do not want confidential PIM data going through Google.

5) Universal search isn't universal and doesn't even search the calendar. Existing Palm users could conceivably have 14 years of calendar data at this point.

Overall Palm's marketing department seems to have not done basic market research. In fact, they seem to have purposely thrown their most loyal customers over the side.

[Fil0403]

http://forum.treonauts.com/palm-smartphones/palm-pre/10484-will-pre-allow-voice-dialing-over-bluetooth.html

Or you can go further and get a BlackBerry or a Nokia N97.

[subie09lega]

I like to read Bonnie's reviews and I tend to agree with her critical prose but did anyone proofread this article before it was posted? Numerous word omissions (8GB of memory enough).
Here's a question: does memory = storage capacity? I've always thought of memory as RAM and the flash/HDD as storage. Is the term memory interchangeable?

[zmnatz]

technically speaking, both RAM and flash/HDD are both memory. They are just different types. RAM is configured for quick access where as Flash/HDD (Storage) is configured for persistent data. The term memory still applies to both but is not normally used. Let's try not to insult Bonnie's typos and be so nit picky. It happens to everyone some times. Clearly you and everyone else got the idea and that's the important part.

[Vanzant78]

The merging of contacts also puts 2 people of the same name together as 1 contact with 2 phone numbers, and so on. I accidentally texted a co worker with the same name as my girlfriend, kind of embarassing to explain the mushy context of the message.

Also when you try to delete contacts downloaded from facebook it tells you , you cannot delete facebook contacts! I am thinking about deleting them from my facebook all together so they dont show up on my phones list.

Other than that, love the phone, works awesome. Dont think Ill need more than a few GB of memory, so Im good there.

Battery life is a problem. Forcing someone to go out and buy an extre $50 battery almost sounds like a sales ploy...

[dgeehan]

I have had the Palm Pre since June 6th.... I love it BUT my biggest complaint is the lack of the soft keyboard. Trying to locate a contact in your address book would be SOOOO MUCH easier if you didn't have to slide the phone open every time... Palm, please develop a soft keyboard to just do a quick search..That would be GREAT.... not to mention the ease of use when viewing a web page in landscape mode. I am hoping for some quick update from Palm that address this situation. In addition I have NOT been able to download any ringtones to the PRE from a site like www.ringophone.com .... Anybody have the same problem? Bonnie how about you?
?

[ilovepool28]

I've figured out a way to use my Ringophone subscription with my Palm Pre. On a computer (not your phone), use Internet Explorer (this doesn't work with Firefox) to go to the Ringophone site, pick your ringtone, click "Get It," and enter your phone number. You won't get a text message, but it will bring you to the page you need. Scroll down to "Method #2," copy the link and paste it into the address bar. You will get a pop up window that will allow you to download the ringtone as an mp3.

When you have the files you want, connect the Pre to your computer via USB. On the Pre, select "USB Drive" and find the newly added drive in My Computer (on Windows). Then drag your audio files onto the drive in whatever folders you want to create, and the Pre will automatically find them and add them to your music library. When done, safely disconnect the Pre from your computer.

[sdf0013]

Without being able to use the device, all of these points seem valid. 2-4 could all be addressed with an OS revision. It's possible, and I think probable, that the contact and search functions will improve.

I find it very interesting that the Pre's Synergy and Google Wave arrived at about the same time. Mostly because these are both new tools that affect the way to communicate. They essentially blur the lines between individual communications across different platforms. Could both be a prelude to a totally new way to think about communications? It's certainly good for speculation.

[wavjockey]

The Pre needs a landscape keyboard. The buttons are too small.
Right now, it's just a touch-screen Blackberry with a hide-away keyboard.

[checodaman]

Preface: love the Pre...

Battery is killing me, I dont even use the aim client so it cant be that. I just ordered 3 micro USB cables so every PC I'm at I will be chargin the Pre.

It needs some type of on the fly Power Profile App.
ie
LOW POWER MODE: Brightness Down, Location Services Off, Bluetooth Off etc
It would be cool to manage your preferences of these profiles as well (ie brightness = 30% in low mode).

One thing that KILLS ME is the inability to hide anything associated with your Palm Profile. For instance, I have the ability to hide certain google calendars in preferences (holidays, personal, work) but am not given the same option for the Palm Profile. It just seems lazy (one of those, its not a bug its a feature).


To sum, my "Why I love the Pre" post would be 100x as long as this post, but goes without saying.

[alee5789]

Palm needs to send out its SDK as soon as possible - the hardware is wonderful and I believe its innovations (particularly in contact management - CRM) and freedom for software developers will make it a great platform. However, without applications most people will remain on the sideline. The Classic application is not enough, many apps including just about ALL MotionApp's own Palm software (developer of Classic) are not Classic certified (that's embarrassing, MotionApp).

Most early adopters are probably not serious smartphone users and don't own many legacy apps. If they were, they probably will end up returning the phones due to lack of apps.

If there is no timeline on when SDK will come out next week, I may be lured to get an iPhone 3GS instead and wait until Palm Pre becomes more mature. I don't think I am the only one who think this way. Unfortunately for Palm, time and money are running out.

[S2k206]

My top 5 wish list for the Palm Pre

1. Battery Life
2. Lack of App's
3. Quick contacts list on the main screen without having to slide the keyboard down everytime
4. Soft keyboard
5. Youtube bookmarks

But over all I am very pleased with my new Palm Pre. And I ended up selling my 8g Iphone 3g, I'm going to miss my app's on the iphone. I'm hoping palm is working on getting more app's out soon!!

Paul

[dabitusdan]

You can add Contacts to the launcher in any order giving you a quick contact list.

[MrKishanG1]

I Just got the Palm Pre a day ago and I love it!!

[polobear1975]

Give it a week

[seven7dust]

the Synergy thing is worrying me too
I have so many contacts on my gmail account that I have no use for on my phone
even my facebook contacts need to be filtered down
Palm should give you a options for this !

as far a soft keyboard goes
one of the things I'm hoping for is a t9 keypad which will allow for one handed typing
to quickly send out message while doing something else
and a landscape one for the web browser too

it's funny that nobody has complained about the music player
which is lacking a lot of functionality ,

More options in the camera like a timer etc.

and lastly a widget system for the home screen {probably hoping for too much}
like widgets thats shows your next calendar entry
or to do list, stickys, weather etc. like how Android has !

[jcunwired]

Synergy is a great feature, but it could be much more useful than it is. I synced and quickly removed my Facebook contacts due to several factors - no deletions allowed, no calendar sync with facebook friends' birthdays, no IM capability with those friends logged into FB. More intelligent control of contact sync would be nice too.
My second gripe - build quality. It is a bit on the fragile side. I already have a replacement phone coming in, my slider is separating. USB cover is just silly, and battery cover is ferocious to get off.
While I love the river stone feel of it in my hands, its a wet and very slippery one, and needs just the tiniest border around it with a better grip surface. I'm getting all the cardio workout I need every time it slips from my hands :)
Battery life certainly could be better, though I'm getting a good 6 hours with frequent general usage, including wifi on most of the time.
I'm with you on the limitations of universal search. What it does is great, what it doesn't do is a real drag.
Wouldn't it be great if Palm created a dual slider with keyboard in both portrait and landscape orientations? While I love the aesthetics of the phone (its the perfect size) I would gladly sacrifice some of its slimness to have both.
More memory isn't a big issue for me, I'll just use the cloud more, but I would welcome removable storage just for the convenience.

Palm definitely has a hit with the Pre, and as more useful applications become available for WebOS (Evernote to day - YES!!) I'm loving it even more than those first few hours alone with it. I'm convinced they're listening to people like Bonnie, and its only going to get better and better.

[Nicholas Buenk]

Just to note, it's not necessary to have a removable battery to be able to carry extra batteries with you.
http://us.kensington.com/html/15462.html
And I prefer it this way, because it's nice to not have to reboot the phone.
Sure like the ability to replace a faulty battery without having to disassemble the whole phone though! Which is fairly hard.

[FormerPCwonk]

Pre? What's that? Oh yeah, this year's winner of the "Instinct" award as the touchscreen phone released just before Apple's annual iPhone upgrade that is immediately forgotten.

[jtiis]

You're being too skeptical - we didn't forget about the iPhone upgrade announcement immediately... it took at least a few hours.

[ace10134]

EXCHANGE DOESN'T WORK!!!!!!

If your Exchange server requires you to not use a SSL connection, then you can't use it with your Pre! That's like half of the Exchange users that can't use the Pre! Well, I'm gonna be returning mine pretty soon, because that's crap.

NO FILE EXPLORER!!!

Serioulsy? Come on Palm. I'm sick of this. If I wanted to be unproductive and have limited functionality, then I'd get the iPhone.

BACK TO WINDOWS MOBILE FOR ME! I'M GONNA LOVE WINMO AFTER USING THIS CRAPPY PRE

[hamedhemmati]

Having exchange without a valid certificate causes problems. It's actually a wise decision on Palm's side to not allow the connection. It all comes down to Autodiscover. Pre can communicate with autodiscover and get everything setup for you but if you don't have a valid certificate your autodiscover is also not functioning which means you can't even do outlook anywhere properly let alone EAS connection.
You can get a fairly inexpensive certificate from godaddy and solves a lot of headaches. The old Palms used to let you connect without a certificate but not only the connection wasn't secure it also had issues with going out of sync.

[ace10134]

Syncing without a certificate works perfectly fine on Windows Mobile and on the iPhone. There's nothing wrong with not using a certificate. Palm MUST update this soon, because many Pre users are going to return their phones if Palm doesn't update it within 30 days.

It's not a wise decision at all. It's the worst decision they ever made. Fix it Palm, or you're Pre is going back to the store.

[hamedhemmati]

I would have to contact Palm regarding this and see if there is bug because it looks like you can use it without the secured page. Have you tried typing the incoming server name as an HTTP:// not HTTPS://?
I can't do it on mine because all my servers use SSL. It looks like it allows you to type HTTP so theoretically it should work not sure though. Unfortunately I don't know anyone with an unsecure server to ask them to let me try. If it doesn't work then we need to find out if Palm really is disabling unsercure servers or it's just a bug.

[ace10134]

Nope, HTTP:// doesn't work. Palm knows about this, and they said they would have it fixed "in the near future".

All they had to do is put in a check box for "Use SSL Connection", and everyone would be happy.

[hamedhemmati]

I was told they will extend EAS support within 60 days. I also heard something a lot more exciting for us IT supports. Looks like Palm is actually aiming at Blackberry rather than iphone. There seems to be plans for releasing IT support console that would allow systems admin assign profile to phones so all you would have to do is have the user boot the phone and use the profile information give and everything just starts loading on the phone automatically. Though this may not come any time soon.

[hamedhemmati]

am I the only one who thinks the battery life is actually not that bad? I am not saying it's good but I haven't really had any problem with it. I am using all of the features except for WIFI and messenger with normal daily usage I still have about 20 percent battery life left at the end of the night.

I also put the phone to a stress test just to see how long the battery can last under intense usage. I used pandora to stream music and used it with my S9 stereo bluetooth headset at the same time did some browsing and emailing just to pass time and the battery last a little over 6 hours. To me that's pretty amazing compared to some of the other phones I have used in the past. I would be great if it could last longer but it's normal to drain the battery that quickly when you are doing all that stuff at the same time. Compared to it's predecessor the Treo 755p with the hack for stereo bluetooth could only last at best 3 hours and that was without streaming music, just playing audio from the memory.

[ldbriq]

Wow. That is much longer than my battery life. It's impossible for me to make it through an entire day without constantly charging it. In fact, the 6 hours of juice you got out of heavy usage is about all I get out of mine in 'standby time'.

I go to work around 7a and am down around 20% by noon. And I consider my usage to be light. I've got the screen set at 50% brightness, I have bluetooth off and wifi on, i'm logged out of aim, and my email updates every 15 minutes. I also don't play around with it excessively.

So, is my battery life WORSE than normal??? Or is yours better? Anyone else?

[hamedhemmati]

it all depends if you are roaming too much or not. in my case I never even activated the messenger after I heard there is a bug so maybe even activating it causes problems not just using it. I would definitely look into roaming though. try turning off roaming instead of set to automatic for a day and see if it makes a big difference in battery life if it doesn't make much of a difference then I would suspect the messenger is causing some serious issues with power management.
also make sure you have the latest update. I heard some of the phones that were shipped didn't have 1.02 update on them.
On my phone have 2 exchange accounts and 2 other email accounts and they are all set to push so that can't be the issue. I am really curious to know what's causing the problem.

[ace10134]

My Pre dies within about 2 hours probably of intense usage. You got a lucky phone, my friend.

[hamedhemmati]

I am looking into this issue. As this morning I noticed a memory leak. Unfortunately I had three cards open so I can't say for sure which one caused it but memory leak can drain the battery. I had my emails, Pandora, Palm media player and Sprint navigation all opened at the same time. I wasn't using Pandora and Sprint navigation at the time the cards were just opened. I wasn't checking emails and listening to my songs and then started getting really slow. I tried closing the cards and opening them again and I got the message that your pre is low on memory try closing some cards. Even after closing all the cards I couldn't open any so had to turn the phone off and then trun it back on and it got fixed.

I seriously doubt it was the email or Palm media player as I have been using those intensly since Saturday. Pandora I started using a couple of days ago and I have had some issues with Pandora changing songs so that gives me some indication that it might be Pandora. On the other hand this morning was the first time I opened sprint navigation so that's also a suspect at this point. It would be nice to know if anyone else has had any issues with any of these two. The memory leak can cause serious power issues which is basically the problem they are having with the messenger right now.

[Nicholas Buenk]

There is a bug with the messenger that wastes battery, keeps the data connection always on, major power waster.
And BTW, you should use wifi, it helps to maximize battery life. Simply because its a much lower power protocol than cellular networks, hell it's low power is why wifi's range is so small.

[ISA2000]

everyone keeps complaining about the battery life. i have a HTC Touch and using the internet and stuff i get maybe 1 1/2 days worth of battery life. i have an IPOD Touch and i get a couple days but i only use the itunes and poker. now i have pocket tunes and use my satellite radio account and i get 1 day.

the question i have is it worse then the other phones you are compairing it to, iphone?

[jenga1121]

For me, the lack of Phone As Modem (PAM) capability is the deal breaker. It just doesn't make sense to pay for a Pre data plan + an air card broadband plan, when I already get this combined on my Treo 755p with a PAM data plan. Bummer, since I was all set to upgrade.

[macslut]

The biggest deal-breaker for me was Palm's choice of plastic versus glass for the display. I've seen many demo units that were already scratched up pretty bad, and I don't like any of the 3rd party screen protection options. Didn't everyone learn from Apple's Nano problems with the scratched screens?

Also, the multitasking capability, while hyped up is actually a dud. The iPhone doesn't allow 3rd party apps to multitask, but the critical apps like phone, SMS, email, iPod, etc... do multitask and the AT&T network allows for full voice and data at the same time. Since Sprint doesn't do this, and the Pre is dependent on the Sprint network for now, the Palm doesn't really do full multitasking, specifically where it matters most...being able to have full data access while on a phone call.

I don't know what the heck they were thinking with 8GB of storage. I'll be looking forward to the 32GB I'll be getting with the iPhone next Friday.

The Pre would've rocked about 2+ years ago. I'm not sure they're going to be able to catch up...especially with Sprint as their partner.

[ace10134]

I would take true multitasking any day over talking on the phone and using e-mail. The Pre is wayy better in my oppinion, but then again, WinMo is wayyy better than the Pre!

[smil3e]

Battery life is okay if you've optimized it, and I've found a couple of great (and much less expensive) microUSB adapters to charge it from car or wall when needed.

My absolute must haves (okay and a couple wants):
- More apps with a Home key! Many of the apps, including built-in things like the contacts list and music player, don't have a way to return easily to the main screen of the app without exiting and relaunching it. That gets really annoying after a while, especially if you want to do multiple things in the same app. If there is a way to do this that I am just missing, please someone clue me in!
- If, say, your contact list got imported by a cust service rep 8 times, you need to have a way to check which profile actually holds the contact info. I deleted what I thought were copies of a profile only to have all the phone numbers disappear from the main entry. I didn't find a way to switch profiles for a contact to see which profile contained which data.
- It would be nice if the music player had a way to delete MP3s which made it on to your Pre without having to connect to the computer.
- Likewise, a file browser would be most helpful!

[hamedhemmati]

I haven't tried this myself but have you tried setting your music player to playlist instead of cover flow and once in that mode if you slide your finger across the song name from left to right it might give you the option of deleting. that's how you can delete an email without having to open the email. so I would try that with music it might work.

[hamedhemmati]

Ok I just tested that and it does delete the song. so just slide your finger from left to right on the song name.

[ace10134]

+1 on file explorer!

[itseriko]

I would love to see visual voicemail.
I wish I could delete that NASCAR app. It's a waste of valuable space since I will never ever ever use it.
I would like a way to go back in text without clicking on a text field or deleting text.

[thepack90]

You can go back in text without having to tap in the exact location or deleting the text before it. If you hold down the orange button on the keyboard and move your finger in the direction you want to go on the screen it will move the cursor in that direction.