Category: Gadgets and Gizmos

If you look back to a time before I had my Evo the phone I was drooling over was the Palm Pre. Finally after roughly 15 months I found somebody willing to sell me one on the cheap (and it wasn’t even from a suspicious truck in the parking lot). Needless to say I dinked around with it last night and compared it to my Evo.

GSM technology allows you to swap SIM cards between phones which gives you the ability to easily use multiple phones without much hassle. The Pre is not a GSM phone meaning you have to swap your ESN registration. I found out that you can do this for free via Sprint’s web interface so this is actually damn easy. If you log into your Sprint account they have step-by-step instructions on activating a new phone and it’s pretty easy.

First let me say one thing, WebOS kicks levels of ass that can not be described in words. The interface for multi-tasking is friggin’ amazing. Applications have a clean and consistent look to them, and everything you want to do can be accomplished with little or no hassle. I can say I still think WebOS is the best of the four current smart phone operating systems (iOS, Android, WebOS, and Blackberry OS) with Android coming in at a decently close second.

Of course a great OS doesn’t make up for poor hardware. The hardware in the Palm Pre isn’t poor per se but it is long in the tooth. The Pre only has something like a 600Mhz processor while the Evo has a 1Ghz processor leaving the Pre feeling sluggish. Applications actually take notable time to open whereas I can’t remember the late time I had to wait for an application on my Evo to open. Even with the diminutive hardware the Pre is pretty capable. The Pre certainly can multi-task but if you have too many applications open there is a noticeable slowdown. Being the phone came out 15 months ago this wasn’t surprising to me in the least.

One thing I absolutely loved about my Treo 755p was the hardware keyboard. The Pre has an almost identical keyboard which was a plus but after using the on-screen keyboard contain within the Evo I can see I’ve moved to the point where I no longer need a hardware keyboard to be flexible. I won’t go so far as to say I prefer an on-screen keyboard but they are pretty flexible as they allow you to hold the phone in either landscape or portrait mode and still be able to type. Certain applications on the Pre can go into landscape mode but most are restricted to portrait mode as that is the only method you can hold the phone and type on the keyboard.

An aspect of the phone’s construction I don’t like is the shiny plastic backing. Although my Evo picks up finger prints on the screen the Pre picks up finger prints everywhere. The Evo has a rubberized back which improves a holder’s grip while also not showing every place somebody has touched the phone. Beyond that the volume up and down rocker on the Pre feels incredibly cheap as does it’s micro USB port cover. Speaking of the USB cover that little tab of plastic is a huge pain in the ass. It’s cheap, fragile, and prevents you from easily connecting any micro USB cable. The edges of most of my cables actually bumped into the tab preventing it from seating all the way into the port.

I can’t comment on the battery life as the battery in the Pre I have is probably as old as the phone. Needless to say I found out buying new batteries for the Pre is actually damn cheap so I’m going to pick one up and do a full battery life test at some point.

Either way you can expect some Palm Pre and WebOS related posts in the future as I dink around with it. Now I just need to get an old iPod Touch on the cheap and I’ll have reference hardware for every major mobile phone besides the Blackberry (which I’m not wasting my time writing applications for).

I believe this will mark the third post I’ve made bitching about Android. Why do I spend so much time complaining about it? It’s quite simple, I really like the OS. My Evo 4G is a pretty awesome phone overall. But Google and carriers have been making some questionable decisions when it comes to Android that make it difficult to use and develop for.

Engadget has a great blurb posted titled Engelligence: Will carriers destroy the Android Vision? One of the key features of Android is it’s open source. This means anybody can download the source code an modify the operating system to their heart’s content. Google keeps some of the applications closed source such as Google Maps so they can add some value to the OS but overall you’re free to do as you wish with it.

Unfortunately this also means carriers have the ability to do whatever they want with it. Why is this unfortunate? Because they do stupid things. AT&T lock out all non-Market applications while Verizon recently switched out Google search for Bing. Basically having a phone that runs Android doesn’t guarantee anything, the carriers may have changed any number of features on the phone.

Hardware manufacturers have also been a pain in the ass. For every awesome phone like the Evo 4G, Droid X, and Nexus One there is at least one piece of shit device that runs Android 1.6. This is a headache for developers because you have no idea what version of the OS people will be running and really need to attempt making your applications run on a wide variety of Android versions. Android 2.x has made some good in grounds but many phones are still on 2.1 and not the newer 2.2. Of course that falls back to the whole point I previously made about hardware manufacturers being willing to drop support for one of their devices a short while after introducing it.

We we’ve learned with Windows fragmentation is a pain in the ass. Sure Windows 7 has some awesome new features you would like to utilize in your application but can’t because a majority of your customer base is still running Windows XP. There is something to be said about a manufacturer who controls both the hardware and software as can be seen with the Nexus One. Even though it’s no longer being sold to consumers the Nexus One is the flagship Android device because Google continues to maintain it with timely updates and didn’t give the carriers a chance to mess with it.

Because I’m sure you’re very interested in what I think… OK maybe not but this is my site so I’m going to post my thoughts anyways.

The new iPod Shuffle… meh. I never really found a use for a device that randomly plays from a selection of songs. Don’t get me wrong I have my music players on shuffle most of the time but I also have the ability to listen to songs in order when I chose.

The new iPod Nano… meh. It’s a tiny touch screen device. Of course the touch screen means you can no longer have it sitting in your pocket and skip songs by reaching in and clicking the button.

The new iPod Touch… kind of neat. A full iPhone without having the phone internals or the nicer rear facing camera is a novel idea. It would be a good references platform for anybody wanting to develop iPhone software but no wanting to buy the phone and accompanying contract.

The Apple TV… bleh. I’m not a fan of paying $0.99 to rent a television who and $4.99 to rent a new release movie. Likewise the steaming support is most likely only going to support the few formats that iTunes does which are few and far between. The ability to stream NetFlix is pretty cool if you don’t already have an Xbox 360 to do it.

iTunes 10… meh. Social networking for music? Man I wish somebody would have thought that one up before.

Overall I wasn’t impressed with anything announced. Everything was evolutionary (nothing wrong with that granted) except the Apple TV and that was ruined to me the second they said it was going to work on a rental only model. I will say if I ever decide to start developing iPhone software I may get an iPod Touch as reference hardware but I don’t see that happening anytime soon (if ever).