Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Things my Palm Pre does Wrong

Updated: Some things have been fixed along the way :)

My personal list of things my Palm Pre does not get right.

WRONG!!!!!
No Voice Dial
Treo Pro...press the bluetooth button on my earpiece and speak.
Pre...slide up, enter PIN number, open dialer or hope I have PhotoContacts open, type select...bah! not a good situation in the car. I literally have to pull over or just avoid calls in the car. What a waste of time.
Cannot select the amount of time to snooze an alarm
5 minute snooze? Really? Flippin' annoying when I need to remind myself to get going somewhere and hour prior but need that 5 minute warning just before the same event.
UPDATE: Preware and a patch fixes this one thank you. But it still should be built in functionality.
No categories on anything
just plain dumb to regress like this, Palm OS did it
No "Today" screen"
Good lord do I miss this from WinMo...soooooo handy!
Tasks app is so simplistic its unusable
The basic app in Palm OS and even WinMo is infinitely more ususable than this. Was this a complete after thought?
UPDATE: The stock app is still grim but there are some useful Toodledo based apps that show promise. Done! in particular is headed in the right direction.
Application Space Limit
Really? Hundreds of apps available through the official catalog including some really good ones that I have kept installed. And now I am done. I can't install any more because Palm decided apps should live in a relatively tiny chunk of partitioned memory. So sorry app developers, would love to buy your stuff but I can't buy what I can't install.
UPDATE: Fixed by Palm, thanks!
3 Page App Launcher Limit
I now have a multitude of little apps that can do good (or fun) things. Unfortunately I have to wedge them into one of 3 available App Launcher pages. Was it that hard to perfect and release an "add a page" function? Homebrewers had it done in about 12 seconds.
UPDATE: Easy enough via Preware and a patch but Palm should just support it out of the box.


REALLY WRONG and BAD!!!
Appointments added to Pre do not show up in Outlook via Exchange
started with 1.3.1. simply unacceptable. Work around found thanks to some work by users over at the Palm Support forums
UPDATE: Fixed with an OS update
Appointments show up on Pre that are not on my Google Calendar
started in 1.2. simply unacceptable, seems to be related to iCal feeds from external websites.
Reminders from Exchange events triggering 1 hour early
this paired with the 5 minute snooze limitation is absolutely brutal
UPDATE: Fixed with an OS update
Email notifications not vibrating when ringer switch is on vibrate??
started with 1.3.1, still trying to confirm this one. Seems sporadic.
UPDATE: Fixed with an OS update
Locking devs out of calendar data
Makes it impossible for them to develope killer apps to replace your PIM trash.

Annoying
Battery Life
I seem to crush the battery life on this thing. I look for any opportunity to charge (at my desk, in the car, almost always leashed to a charger at home) Granted my set up may stress this poor little battery. The prime users have to be my email accounts, along with Twitter or web browsing. Dont make that many calls during the day.
Exchange account: as delivered
Gmail (IMAP): as delivered
Gmail (IMAP): every 30 minutes
Gmail (IMAP): every 1 hr

Workdays: off the charger at 5:45am . 50% by 9am. At work I am on roam almost all the time so its even harder on the battery
Weekends: off the charger around 8am, 50% around 2pm, sooner if I make some phone calls. Good coverage at home
UPDATE: Some of the new uberkernels were showing a lot of promise including some incremental battery life improvements. Nothing stunning, but better.

UPDATES:
11/17/2009 at 0930: added battery life entry.
7/2010: updated as a parting gift to my time with webOS :)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm trading my iPhone in on a pre in about a month and nice to see what people don't like about the pre. Everything that u don't like about it are things that I would never use. I would like to see a list of things that u like about it.

The ACK said...

Fair point Casey. I'll post those later. In the mean time keep track of this post too. It just grew again.