Background

Life as a gadget geek can be tough.  You know about cool new tech far before most others and far before it is available on the market.  When you see tech you want or need, you often have to wait months until that product is released.   During this time, your gadget lust grows and you are forced to seek your fix by reading fanboy drenched tech blogs.  In that world, everyone has a black or white opinion.  They either see a product as a savior or the devil.  I live in the middle.  I buy based upon my personal experience, needs, and typically not based on brands.

Until last weekend, I’ve been using a Palm Treo 650.  The thing was a workhorse and it dutifully dealt with over 1000 minutes of calling and data each month for 3.5 years.  Other than the occasional OS freeze, it worked.  My Treo was latched onto the Sprint network.  Here in Southern California, their coverage is great.  I’ve rarely dealt with dropped calls or bad call clarity.  So it was an easy call for me to make the switch to the new Palm phone and keep my current carrier.

Phone Purchase Process

It was early-ish on Saturday morning June 5th.  I was waiting in line outside a Sprint store in Durham, NC.  I was on a trip, visiting a friend and like the gadget dork I am, I made time to go stand in line for a Pre.  The local Sprint reps did a great job of keeping the line moving and keeping people informed about the remaining phone stock.  I was in and out, including my line wait, in under an hour.  I only had to choose my new plan and pay for the phone.  The Sprint rep dealt with the phone activation and the data migration to the new phone.  But it was this data migration that was Sprints first stumble.  The hardware the stores keep to migrate contacts and data from the old phone to the new phone was not capable of migrating my contacts from the Treo 650 to the Pre.  The employee said it was because I had more contacts than the system could handle (300+).  To me it wasn’t a huge deal.  I would manually program in the numbers I use often and wait until Sprint updates it’s software before going back for the data migration.  Off I went with my new Pre.

First Day with the Phone

Call me old fashioned, but I like having an actual user manual included with the products I buy.  I’m one of those folks who actually reads it from front to back before I use my new gadget.  When I looked into the Pre’s complex and appealing packaging, I saw a number of things including a cool little micro-suede phone pouch, but I did not see a manual.  There was a ‘getting started’ pamphlet that helps you figure out how to answer that first phone call and where the charger plug is inserted.  It doesn’t help with more advanced features like how to adjust the screen brightness, which will become an issue shortly for me.

After a complete charge, I began fiddling with the phones features.  I went out to the ‘net to see how well the Pre renders my favorite sites.  It does an amazing job at bringing up pages quickly.  Though the Pre’s browser does not support Flash, it sites look just as they would if they were loaded on your pc.  The multi-touch functionality make reading the small text easy.  A few years into phones having internet browser ability, I’m surprised they still are lacking things like Flash.

After an hours worth of button pushing, I noticed that my battery had depleted to almost 50%.  I was a bit alarmed at that and the fact that the phone had become quite warm during the initial work-out.  Then I realized that the getting started pamphlet didn’t have a section to help you optimize the battery life.  After locating the manual on Sprints site, I noticed that Sprint shipped my phone with Bluetooth, GPS, and Wifi turned on and the screen set to a very bright setting.  I went in and turned off bluetooth, GPS, and Wifi and set the screen to a less bright setting.  The good thing about this phone is if you open an app that needs GPS or Bluetooth, it gives you the option to turn on that functionality.

One Week Later

In the week since I started using my Pre, I’ve been quite happy with my buy.  After adjusting the phones default settings, the battery lasts through a day of calls and data usage.  But by the time I plug the phone in at night, only 20-30% of the charge remains.  I would have sacrificed some of the slimness of the phone for a few more milliamps of juice.

The App Store

I’ve downloaded a few apps from the Pre App Catalog over both the Sprints EVDO data connection as well as over Wifi.  Over Wifi, the 253k Pandora app took about 5 seconds to download and an additional 3-4 seconds to install/launch.  I’m not sure how fast apps are downloaded on other smart phones, but 10 seconds from download to launch seems perfectly acceptable to me.  The app catalog is also growing by the day.  There were only a handful of apps available on launch day.  One week later, the number of apps has almost doubled. I have yet to see even one fart app however.

The one issue I see with the app store is that you can’t easily tell how much the apps cost before you download them.  Most give you a free ‘try it’ download.  But none clearly list the price to buy.  I feel like Sprint is offering most of the initial apps for free while they test the stability of their brand new App Catalog.  Whether a download is free or not, I want to know how much I am spending before I click to download.

Hardware Quality

Put simply, it feels more delicate than the Treo I used previously.  Whether that is because of the mechanical slider or because of the smoothness of the plastic, or the fact that the Pre weighs a lot less than the Treo it replaced.  The slider works smoothly.  There is a quality feel to the way it locks into place in the open and closed position.  The fingerprints are annoying however!

The keyboard works great for me.  I have a few years experience using the Treo keyboard.  That likely has something to do with my level of comfort with the new phone.  The keys are just slightly more cramped than the Treo but I have no problems typing quickly.  With the soft rubbery texture of the keys, I do wonder about the long term durability of the buttons.  At the end of my Treo’s 3.5 year life, the V and the P keys were no longer working properly.  When I sent text messages, it occasionally sounded like I had a speech impediment.

A major gadget blog made popular a rather sensationalistic video showing a Pre cutting a piece of soft cheese.  While I think the edge at the bottom of the slider is a bit sharper than I would expect from a product at this price point, it isn’t nearly sharp enough to cut any fingers (not even if you have the overly moisturized girly fingers of a tech blogger).  If you have the hands of a guy who works on cars (like we have here at Motorlust), the phone could be made of razorblades and you would still be fine.  And remember, you can cut soft warm cheese with a number of other blunt items like the back of a butter knife or the side of a fork.

Signal Strength/ Call Quality

I’ve also read about a few folks complaining about signal strength.  Here in Orange County, CA, my signal strength has been perfectly fine.  I’ve had no dropped calls or low quality phone connections.  I think most people are comparing the number of ‘bars’ they had with their old phone versus the ‘bars’ they see on their Pre.  I think this is a bad comparison for people to make because the number of bars on a phone display is not directly comparable to the bars on another.  They are relative measurements, like the temp gauge on a modern automobile.  I judge my signal strength by whether I can make and receive calls when I need to make or receive calls.  I haven’t had any problems with my Pre as of yet.

Push Email

I set up my Gmail account to push mail to my Pre.  This was a blessing and a curse.  I now have instant access to my email as it arrives in my Gmail inbox.  Since this is my business email account, being able to instantly reply to emails increases my productivity quite a lot.  The problem is that my Gmail contact list was migrated over to my phone’s contact list.  It populated my phone contact list with the names and email addresses of EVERY person I’ve EVER emailed.  My Gmail account is quite active and I now have over 500 useless contacts on my phone.  Sure, I access my contacts by typing in names.  I don’t have to wade through those 500 contacts manually.  I just wish the application offered me the choice of whether to migrate Gmail contacts to my phone, or better yet, give me the chance to migrate a specified contact list from my Gmail account.  I hope Palm fixes this issue with future software updates.

Overall

I have a phone that perfectly fits my needs and just about all my wants as well.  It is small enough to slide into my pocket easily and is big enough that it’s screen is still useful.  I like it and I’m happy.  But will it hold up for 3 years like my Treo?  Only time will tell.

Is it an iPhone killer?  I don’t even know what it means to be an ‘iPhone killer’ in the general sense of the phrase.  For me, it was an iPhone killer.  Because if it was not for the Pre, I likely would have bought the iPhone.