Thing’s we’re still missing from the Palm Pre
On June 6th 2009 we saw a new player in the smartphone market. While it has only been two months plus since the Palm Pre launched, it has received praise from both sides of the isle as being a solid device as well as the first true iPhone challenger (not killer).
Being an owner of the device myself, I have been satisfied with my choice, but there is always room for improvement. That said I have noted the areas where the Pre is in need of change.
Battery Life:
I am not exaggerating when I say the Pre has the worse battery life I have seen on a phone. I am able to drain the battery within 3 hours with basic web browsing, texting and Pandora. I’m not fund of the internal battery in the iPhone, but if there is one thing that should be said on behalf of Apple, they might not have been wrong after all about multitasking draining battery life….then again HTC and Blackberry have completed this task quite fine without any problems.
Faster webOS:
Although the iPhone 3GS and Palm Pre both have processors that exert 600MHz, webOS does take a blow with lagging. Lagging on the Pre is not outrageous but it is a little annoying waiting 4-6 seconds for your musical collection to open or 5 seconds for Sprint Navigation to load. Fortunately, this lag doesn’t impede browser performance which is on par with that of the iPhone 3GS.
3G Reception:
We all know that AT&T is notorious for its network outages, why just this week the whole of Staten Island NYC was knocked out of reception (AT&T customers that is). However I have been noticing 3G issues with my Pre. Unfortunately (for Palm that is), this is not something that they can blame on Sprint as I have friends and family who have Sprint and they have great reception in areas where my Pre is fading in and out.
Whether this is an isolated case or not is yet to be determined but one thing is for sure, Sprint’s network isn’t “now” on my Pre.
Video Recording:
iPhone has it, Blackberry has it, Nokia has it, Windows Phone has it…what’s up Palm?
Bluetooth Tethering:
This more speaks of Sprint then Palm, but I am annoyed at the fact that it was announced as a feature and yet it didn’t make it to Sprint. At least we have a hack to complete this task.
Onscreen Keyboard:
A QWERTY keyboard is a must for me (as well as many others), but having to slide out the Pre’s keyboard every time I need to enter text is a little annoying. An onscreen option would be perfect for those times when a URL or name is all that needs to be entered.
So those are the major grips….granted there are others, so if you think I left something out, hit up the read link and let me know.
