Day Two With The Pre Plus: Yes, It's Grown On Me. But I'm Still Convinced Palm Wasn't Thinking A Lot
Day Two with my Pre Plus has convinced me that the Palm Pre Plus is a remarkable piece of hardware. It feels that apps launch faster today than yesterday (or maybe I'm just less impatient); the community on Twitter has been exceedingly helpful with my very specific questions; and Synergy popping up a picture and name of a friend I've not talked to in months when she called was pretty neat, even though I know that's how Synergy is supposed to work when you link your accounts.
But I still can't shake the feeling that Palm is thinking about competing with the iPhone feature-by-feature on paper, not experience-by-experience.
One of the most irritating things about the Pre is text entry. The keyboard is fine - it's not BlackBerry caliber, but it's not worse than the iPhone's virtual keyboard. (It's certainly not *better*.) The keyboard itself is a design decision that I won't quibble with, but the ability to edit text on the Pre Plus is much inferior to the iPhone. On the iPhone, you can hold your finger down in the general vicinity of where you want to insert the cursor and a magnifying glass pops up to make placing the cursor easier. This isn't available on the Pre. If the Pre had physical direction keys, it wouldn't be a problem that the Pre lacked this functionality. But it doesn't. You have to either keep tapping until the cursor goes where you want to or place your cursor after the text you want to edit, backspace to your error, and re-type. (Also, Palm should think about adding a d-pad for gaming alone.) Palm decided to challenge Apple on multi-touch pinch and zoom functions; I'm sure they could add this functionality (or something exceedingly similar) very easily. I'm convinced that the only reason they didn't was that they didn't want to draw additional attention to their main competitor. However - leaving it out draws even *more* attention than mere aping does.
Using Launcher still takes some getting used to. As Android does, the mechanism for additional apps is up and down, not side-to-side as on the iPhone. But there are three "screens" in Launcher; one with apps, one with business tools and "premium" apps (like VZ Navigator and Amazon MP3), and one with utilities. These are accessed with the more familiar side-to-side swipe. In addition, the little white bars to denote where you are between these screens only make sense when you figure them out; I thought they were stylistic choices at first. There was no reason for Palm to decide to go with vertical scrolling as well as "grouping" horizontally; it strikes me as a very "we're not Apple" decision.
Lastly, there are all sorts of things you can do on the Pre Plus that are poorly documented and/or not particularly polished. Unlike the iPhone, I can make any song on my device a ringtone for free. But when I do so, the Pre automatically takes the first 30 seconds; it doesn't allow me to pick the best 30 seconds. (My solution: Jay-Z and Kid Cudi's Already Home, which drops immediately into the chorus line. I purchased it using the on-phone Amazon store, which is a good app.) You can add a webpage to Launcher (good!); you can't remove it from the Launcher menu in the upper left like you can with applications you add to Launcher - you have to know to hold down the orange/gray key and click the icon to bring up the option to delete. Why treat webpages different than apps even though they act the same way in the Launcher? One more: the lack of a scientific calculator on the Calculator application is pitiful. I know the 3GS just added scientific functions, but it's been over six months now. Furthermore, Palm could step up their game and add financial functions, reverse polish notation, graphing capabilities, and so forth with very little development effort.
Let me be clear: this little phone is starting to grow on me, and I'll have a rundown of all the excellent things it does soon. I give Palm credit for doing many, many things right on the Pre Plus. (I can't speak to the Pre as I only played with it briefly in a Sprint store last summer.) But as someone who's built a company with large entrenched competitors, I made damn sure that I did the best I could on the fronts I competed head on with my competition. Palm, not so much. The implementation of multitasking is great; Synergy, not so much. The hardware fits better in the hand - as long as the keyboard is closed. Standard USB connection is a win for consumers, but why have a cheapo plastic door?
Palm feels like they're competing on paper in many ways and not on experiences, and the places where they fall short are more glaring than the successes that they've had in the places where they win.
