Palm Pre review

After Palm first introduced us to the Pre at CES in January, I was immediately interested in it and have been waiting for it to come out ever since. As a Sprint user, there has never been many phones that I would call “revolutionary” on their network, until now.

Palm, who many people had written off, introduced the new device and it’s very capable WebOS operating system at CES and it has been creating some buzz among the gadget geek community ever since.

Finally, the phone was released on June 6th, and I managed to pick one up.

My initial thoughts on the phone are that it is pretty in its design. It is very smooth, but I haven’t had any issues with dropping it or it being slippery. The slide out keyboard is small to some, but I’m coming from a Centro and the keyboard on the Pre is much better than what I have become accustomed to. Overall the phone feels very solid and the slide out mechanism is built very well.

The operating system is great, however, there are some things that make it obvious that this is a “1.0″ device and in the next few months there will be over the air updates and many more apps that will hopefully make the phone exceed expectations. I think that, while the phone is very good, it was not ready for “primetime.” It was released without the software development kit in the hands of many people and as a result the “App Catalog” only has 18 apps in it as of today. The apps include Soduku, Accuweather, Tweed (a Twitter application), and Pandora. While they all work wonderfully, there are so few of them.

While it may not matter to some, the 3.2 megapixel camera on the Pre is amazing compared to other camera phones I have had. The quality is excellent for a camera phone, even in poor lighting it is still ok, not excellent, just ok. There isn’t a video recording program for it yet, but Palm has said that it will have one out very soon.

On to the actual touch function! The touch sensitivity is very good. In my opinion it is on par with the iPhone. The gesture controls are extremely fluid and I haven’t had any troubles with zooming in and out of web pages or pictures. The accelerometer in the phone also changes the screen from portrait to landscape mode very quickly.

Of all the things that are great about this phone, I only have a couple of complaints:
The “cloud” that sometimes appears at the bottom of the screen can be annoying. Some are saying that it is from the phone getting hot. I just think that it needs to be fixed. This is by far my biggest complaint about this phone.

While this is actually a problem with Sprint and not Palm, not having a roaming only option doesn’t make me happy because my Sprint coverage isn’t wonderful at home.

You can’t change the message alerts as of right now…Meaning the sound that your phone makes when you get at text message can’t be changed.