Palm Pre Cheap Cheap Charging
One of the major complaints of the Palm Pre is that its battery life is less than stellar. A simple workaround is of course to keep it plugged in. Carrying a charger around, of course, stinks. However, do to the magic that is IEEE standardization, there is no need for proprietary Palm chargers, as microUSB is available everywhere. For cheap.
I bought several of these cables for between $1.80 to $2.50 with minimal USPS 1st Class shipping from a great discount cable/adapter dealer, Monoprice.com. One for work, one for my laptop bag, one for my desktop, and one for my car.
Don’t want to spend $20 for Palm’s branded car-charger solution? I’ll admit, its a slick design but not really necessary to simply supply some voltage to the USB port. How about a $2 non-functioning charger, instead? (I’m sure there are others that can be purchased that supply more power).
(Useless) Car Cigarette Lighter to USB Adaptor - $1
MicroUSB Cable - 1.5 ft - $1.81
I tested it. It works hardly charges at all. Cheaply built piece of junk. I took it on a road trip and it couldn’t charge at a rate fast enough to keep up with the phone’s heavy power demand for GPS navigation. Perhaps a different, higher quality adapter would supply enough power. Who knows? It was worth a shot for $1.
That is the power of microUSB, choice. Thanks, Palm, for not being evil with proprietary connectors!
What the Palm Prē is missing
This weekend I actually stood in line and bought a Palm Pre.
Palm Pre
I know. I’ve never stood in line early in the morning on a release day for any piece of technology before, but my old phone had about 15 minutes of talk time left and it was time to buy a replacement before I go on vacation to NYC and Philly this week.
The Pre has a great interface. You can read more about all of the nifty features on other sites. I find it easier to use than an iPhone, but I tend to be generally be incompetent with Apple products for whatever reason. So far, Sprint has been great and I’ve had no issues with coverage or dropped calls. I’m glad to no longer be sharing the same network with iPhone users. Ever since the day the iPhone 3G was released, ATT’s network seemed significantly more unreliable to me.
There have been some annoyances with WebOS, though. I think it is worth publishing lacking features and gripes so that people who are considering purchasing the phone can decide if it would be a deal breaker and also I hope that Palm may read this and fix the issues.
Messaging
Once you are in a thread/conversation view, there is no way to add more people on SMS. Say somebody sends me a text message “Ya’ll in for brunch today?”. Clearly, it was sent to more than me. I have a good idea who. I want to respond to more than the sender (SMS is very limited here, but I can guess who this person invited) and say “Yeah, how about that restaurant next to my place at 12:30″. Unfortunately, from the thread view, I can’t just reply and add people. I basically want Google Wave here. Also, SMS sucks so I expect as more people move to smartish phones SMS as it stands will die when e-mail could be used instead. Not having the ability to reply-to-all will be SMS’s downfall.
Twitter does not integrate in to messaging, surprisingly. It is currently only available as a standalone 3rd party app. It would be nice to see tweets, replies, etc within the messenger so that you could quickly respond to a tweet via e-mail or sms. Imagine a conversation that could go like this:
Alex (Twitter): Heading down to Emo’s for a Foot Patrol concert. Let me know if you want to come, I’ll buy a ticket.
Me (SMS): Hey, sweet get me a ticket before they sell out. Can only afford $20
Alex (SMS): Cool man, see you there. Heading out now.
Alex (Twitter): Sorry everybody, show sold out while I was in line. Other ideas for tonight?
Me (Twitter): @Alex Oh that stinks. Emo’s sucks anyways. Who wants to go to Mohawk instead to see Spoon?
It could save Alex from having to duplicate a messages and allowing me to keep certain things private and send things for immediate SMS delivery as I see fit. Since I currently have to switch between twitter app and messenger now, the flow of conversation gets broken up. So much for synergy. I may have confused it a bit with Google Wave, but it seems like this isn’t a hard thing to implement.
*Update 6/9/2009*
There appears to be no quick way to forward a TEXT message. Copy/Paste may work.
E-mail can be made much better. There is no search functionality within e-mail. Even the J2ME Gmail client lets you search through your Gmail. I understand the limitations of searching large amounts of text on an embeded device – but this is after all WebOS – it should be doing the searching on the cloud and returning the results to me.
Also, I’m pretty sure it is connecting to Gmail through IMAP, which really limits the gmail functionality. I can’t star, tag, or archive e-mails. I chose gmail for its rich feature set, not to have it treated like a standard imap account. My usage model for finding e-mails has changed from organizing e-mails and remembering when they were sent to searching for emails by content. Hopefully they work closer with Google to integrate a more Gmail-native-like experience into the native e-mail client, and including the ability to search the e-mail subject/body through universal search.
*Update*
It also turns out that I cannot connect to my work Exchange e-mail because “Error – The mail server requires security policies that are not supported”. This is a huge deal. I’m not sure if it is due to PIN authentication or what, but as far as I know, if an iPhone or windows mobile phone can work here just fine, so should my Pre. Here is an interesting thread on the matter.
*Update 6/9/2009*
Last night I got an e-mail from a friend that I thought I’d try to reply to various paragraphs in-line. Unfortunately, the Pre doesn’t seem to indent the old message or change font color – nothing. So the text I was entering looked just like the text my friend had written. It seems there is no clear way to do in-line e-mail replies.
Contacts
Overall, the contacts program is nice. I have way more contacts now on my phone than ever before thanks to Facebook, gmail contacts. You’d think it would be a pain to have too many, but searching makes it nice. Unfortunately, it takes a bit of manual effort syncing profiles together where it can’t automatically figure out that, say, my only “John” contact is also “John Smith” on gmail and “John C Smith” in Facebook.
What would be really nice here is some kind of app that just made suggestions that you could approve/disapprove to link contacts together. Search for name overlap and ask me a simple “Same person? Yes/No” question for each to help speed up the synergizing.
Calendar
*Update 6/9/2009*
The calendar is very well done, and I love how it integrates with my Google calendar. The updating seems to take a bit of time, though. So don’t expect to put a reminder in your google calendar through google and expect your pre to remind you in 5 minutes. I don’t know how long it takes to sync if you don’t force it.
The calendar is nice in that you can overlay all of your calendars. However, this is actually quite a problem if, say, in your Google calendar account you have several friends’ calendars, events calendars, etc that you don’t want to follow. Same for holiday calendars, local events calendars, etc. I want to have the ability to be able to look at their calendars, but don’t want that to be the default as it gets incredibly cluttered. I can view just my own personal calendar, but not select a subset of calendars to view. Its either one single calendar or all calendars. The interface gives you a check mark next to what you’re viewing (check marks tend to imply you can select multiple), but you can’t select multiple things in the box. A solution could be to provide “views” or sets of calendars that you predefine. Or just let me check all that I want to view at a given time.
Web Browser
Overall, quite nice with the exception of lack of Adobe flash. That is nothing new on any mobile platform.
Small gripes: I tried to open a pdf and it says “Cannot find an application which can open this file”. Which is false, there is a pdf viewer. I also can’t figure out a way to save files to my phone. I’ve tried double-tapping, long-tap, function+tap, etc and nothing worked.
Likewise, I haven’t found a way to open a link in a new “card”. There are times I want to leave one page open and have another one in a new window. Again, maybe the feature is there, but its difficult enough that I haven’t found it yet.
Music Player
I haven’t used it too much, but it is very apparent that switching between tracks is dissapointingly slow.
Applications
So far, its hard to say what kind of interfaces applications can have to each other, or what kind of overloading can be done. In Android, developers & users can replace features of the default system with their own. Like… get a new dialer or phonebook. It doesn’t feel like the Pre will support this extendability
The worst thing is Sprint’s NASCAR app. I have no desire to ever look at NASCAR. Ever. I don’t want it taking up valuable precious icon space. And yet, it seems I cannot remove Sprint NASCAR from my phone. Something tells me that most Pre users don’t want this app, yet Sprint shoves it down our throats. Garbage. I don’t mind if they put it on, but let me delete it. They aren’t advertising NASCAR by having this application, they’re creating more disdain towards it.
Navigation
Google Maps isn’t as featured as my cheapo-phone’s J2ME version. Most importantly, it lacks public transportation directions. That is really nice when taking the bus/metro somewhere. This is going to be incredibly frustrating for my NYC trip coming up next week. Hopefully Google implements the public transit search feature soon, or public-transport city-dwellers aren’t going to be terribly happy with this limitation.
GPS Navigation software was pretty impressive. It even works nicely with Pandora, lowering the music volume to announce a voice direction. It makes me want to buy a new head unit for my car that supports Bluetooth.
I’d like to see more interaction between Google Maps and Sprint Navigation. Google is great for finding places in a map, sattelite view, etc. But not good for turn-by-turn live directions. Let me click an address in gMaps and add an option to add it as a destination in Sprint Navigation.
Camera
The camera’s quality seems quite nice in daylight. The LED flash is handy, but seems to turn everybody yellowish jaundice tones. The color correction could certainly be improved in software when the flash is used.
There is little manual control over color balance, exposure, etc. It has no self-timer, either.
Worst feature is that it doesn’t preview the photo for a few seconds after taking a pic, which seems to confuse users.
The software feature set of the camera could greatly be improved.
The photo viewer also seems a tad slow at resolving photos. I doubt Palm is really using the graphics hardware to its full potential here, so here’s hoping for some improvements with upcoming OS updates.
WiFi
Day one of trying to get the Pre working on a corporate wifi WPA2 Enterprise network is a failure. I’m not convinced that it is going to have the necessary proxy configurations, either. Hopefully they update this or there is no way that the Pre is going to be able to compete with iPhone, BlackBerry, and Symbian in the corporate world.
Hardware
These are things that aren’t going to change with a software update, but I can deal with.
Battery life isn’t spectacular. I think I’ll be charging the phone every night. Luckily, with microUSB charging I won’t have to buy 3 $30 charger accessories, just a cheap cable.
Headphone jack is at the top of the phone. I can’t complain much, since Palm was smart/kind enough to include a 3.5mm headphone jack. But, it would be much less in the way if it were placed on the bottom of the phone, and would be better for putting in your pocket that way.
Tiny keys. There is no way around this for the format of the phone unless they forced you to use it Rumor/Sidekick landscape mode. So far, I’m adapting and like it much better than both iPhone’s on-screen keyboard and certainly better than T9/multitouch.
The camera lens placement is too low, and I find that I’m always covering it with my finger when trying to take a pic. I guess I expect it to be at the top of the phone when its slid open, for some reason. But, this allows you to take pics with the keyboard closed.
Summary
All in all, the Palm Pre Has a lot of potential. I do enjoy the overall UI experience, and I hope that they continue to do updates to get rid of many of the quirks that I have outlined above. I’m sure I’ll find more irksome things to post here as time goes on, and I’ll be sure to update this as things are resolved.
Also, here is a forum of wishlist items for the Palm Pre.
Cat and Squirrel
So back in January, I got a cat from Austin Siamese Rescue named Parker. He is rather awesome, and cute, and all of those things that cats generally can be. He’s about 12 years old, they say, but he acts like a kitten sometimes, batting around toys and doing the cartoonish running-but-not-moving on my slick hardwood floors.
There are pictures of him here.
Today while I was out on the balcony I heard a rather odd noise. It was a squirrel being rather aggressive towards my cat, making all kinds of funny disgruntled noises.
Luckily, I was able to get my camera before either decided to give up their territory.
And video:
eBay Spam
Every time I buy something on eBay, I’m frustrated by how much excessive mail fills up my inbox with repetitive garbage. Yesterday I purchased a new keyboard. Here is a chronological list of the subject headers that have flooded in over 24 hours. I expect at least 4 more to follow:
- You eBay bid is confirmed
- You won this item on eBay:
- You have won eBay Item …
- Your invoice for eBay purchase
- Good news. eBay item …. (won)
- RE: Item # … – Notification of an Instant Payment Received
- Thank you for your payment
- Your package will be shipped by PayPal Shipping with UPS
- Your eBay item has shipped
Nine e-mails. NINE! I knew I bid when I hit the bid button. I don’t need 4 e-mails all telling me that I won. I don’t need 2 e-mails telling me that the payment was received. And I don’t need 2 e-mails telling me the same shipping info. What is going on?
Here is what I want:
- You won the item! Here is your invoice. Please pay here.
- Your payment was received. Item will be shipped …
- Item shipped, tracking number. Please remember to rate.
The only other time I want to be e-mailed is if I were possibly out-bid, I guess. Even then, I’m not so sure that would change how I use eBay at all.
National Bike Bill
After my message to Senator Hutchinson regarding offshore drilling (which I received a very generic who-cares lets lower gas prices e-mail from), I thought I’d try again with another bill that is set to move through the Senate tomorrow. This one is a bit less controversial. I can’t imagine why somebody would not support it, unless they feel that perhaps it doesn’t go far enough. Or unless they simply hate any bill created by somebody outside of their party.
Dear Senator Hutchinson,
I would like to request that you please vote in favor of the National Bike Bill that is being presented tomorrow morning before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. I apologize for not putting in this request with more advanced notice, but I was unaware that such a bill existed until this afternoon.
As somebody who bikes to work now on a near weekly basis, I can see the direct benefits of doing so. It does sadden me to see how much more improvement there could be in bicycle safety, awareness, and infrastructure, and how little emphasis is placed on making bicycling an enjoying and accessible method of transportation, while so much money is poured into massive multi-lane highways for automobiles to sit in congested, polluting traffic.
Yes, I also drive a car. Unfortunately, bicycles cannot completely replace the automobile, but for many small-trip purposes, they can. However, as long as local governments cannot afford to nor are given incentives to make bicycling more friendly, many Americans will choose the automobile for a 1/2 mile trip rather than a bicycle.
The small cost of enacting this bill is certainly worth it. It helps with our nations health issues, energy issues, climate issues, and creates more pleasant communities and recreation.
Thank you for your time.
Sincerely,
-Brian Saghy
Offshore Drilling
I believe this is my first political, environmental, and energy related post. The subject of offshore drilling is something which I feel very strongly about. Enough so that I wrote a letter to both of my senators from Texas. I urge you to do the same in your state.
Beach View - Photo by Lance and Erin
Dear Senators Hutchison and Cornyn,
Having recently read President Bush’s plans on offshore drilling, I became quite alarmed that our country may be too quick to take actions which will have, if any, a delayed and very temporary effect on our energy crisis.
In a time when the world is being threatened by global warming and pollution, when our coral reefs are dying from contaminates and increase in water temperature – it seems that allowing offshore drilling near our Texas coastline would be simply irresponsible, nearsighted, and selfish.
Yes, our energy costs have gone higher and I understand that for everybody it makes life more difficult. However, for the first time in a long history of environmental skepticism and indifference, we are beginning to finally see a cultural shift in the United States where more people are actually thinking harder about their own personal energy consumption. Higher gas prices does have a benefit. Unfortunately, it seems many people will not consider what vehicles they drive, their commute distance, or to not leave their automobiles idling for 15 minutes at a time unless it hits their pocketbook. Corporations have no problem shipping items and food across the entire country (or from Mexico and Canada), even when goods can be produced locally, until it affects the quarterly balance sheet.
The real US Energy crisis is not a current low supply of oil, but a mentality that energy supply should be cheap, unlimited and constantly accessible, and that we deserve such a supply no matter what consequences it may have to our country or the rest of the world. Offshore drilling will only push that necessary cultural mind shift off to a point in the future where it may be to late.
Texas is hot enough. Its beaches are already polluted enough. I do not, for one, look forward to basking in 115 degree weather in Galveston covered in a grey film of crude oil enjoying the smells of rotting fish that washed up on shore while enjoying a view of oil rigs littering the horizon. Compared to many parts of the Caribbean and Gulf – we’re not that far off from that nightmare in Texas already. Why further it along in the name of politics? I doubt this is what Texans truly want.
I beg of you to please reconsider your stance on offshore drilling to keep our Texas shores clean. I hope that you can see in your heart that it is the right thing to do, no matter how temporarily burdening it may be on our economy until we come up with alternative energy sources and adjust our way of life to be more sustainable.
Thank you for listening.
Sincerely,
Brian Saghy
