Palm Pre Plus - The Best (Read: Worst) Example Of A Company Just Missing Opportunity After Opportunity I've Seen In Quite a While
I've had a dumbphone for about a year, and I've been chomping to get a smartphone for months. I was talked out of jumping into something until the Apple event on Wednesday. After it came and went without any hint of an upgrade to the iPhone 3GS, and having played with the Droid and Nexus One, I decided to take the plunge and get a Palm Pre Plus on Verizon. The Engadget review of the Pre Plus was positive enough, and a quick hands-on at the Verizon store where the Pre Plus's browser performed adequately in my http://www.nytimes.com test made it seem like it was worth a shot.
As the title of this post makes clear, the Pre Plus is a disappointment. But it's a disappointment because there are so many obvious, simple, easily fixable things about the Pre Plus - almost all of which could be rectified in a software update. It's clear to me that Palm management is just not thinking about the way that users will use the device; they're preoccupied with the Pre's specific, "on paper" advantages versus the iPhone. The device screams "but, but, but... I'm better than an iPhone because of x, y, and z" in a way that even the Nexus One does not.
As real users know, when you purchase a new phone in a carrier store, the sales rep does the unboxing of the device to activate the phone in store before you leave. This was the first Pre Plus my store had sold, so I got to see the sales rep struggle with certain things even though he had clearly been trained on the device. The first thing the sales rep tried to do was take off the battery cover so he could insert the battery. Only after he struggled and failed with the teeny tiny little battery cover did he realize that he didn't need to do that because the battery was (thankfully) already in the device. Yes, the Pre has a removable battery - better on a spec list than the iPhone! - but it's impossible to get to. How impossible? There are forum threads about removing the damn battery cover from a Pre.
After giving up on the battery cover, the sales rep turned on the device. When you turn on the Pre Plus for the first time, the device prompts the user to set up a Palm account. The rep gave me the phone and I created an account using my Yahoo e-mail address.
I use my Yahoo e-mail address for all other sites that I register for - Amazon, Dawdle, oneforty, whatever - to protect my Gmail account from their marketing e-mails. But the Pre is smarter than that - it has this magic called Palm Synergy that will automatically sync the Pre's address book with the address book in my e-mail accounts. But the Palm account signup screen doesn't even tell the user about Synergy. It's in the user's interest to use the e-mail address they use most when corresponding with their friends. At the least, the prompt shouldn't ask the user to create an account with an e-mail address and password. It should ask the user "what e-mail address do you use to talk to your friends?", then prompt for a password. If Palm was really smart, the device should prompt the user for *all* his active personal e-mail addresses. Synergy is smart - it's supposed to save the user from having to manually type in a bunch of information - but the hidden nature of this functionality at the point when it would be the most beneficial - phone activation and initial setup - is moronic.
And guess what? The ability to add a bunch of e-mail addresses in one place already exists on the damn phone - but Palm, in its infinite wisdom, forces the user to navigate to it.
After you create an account, the Pre Plus has a short tutorial that walks through the back and the up motions. I actually needed this tutorial because these motions happen on the touch-sensitive strip that is *below* the screen, not on it. Again, the fact that a user must have a tutorial strikes me as suboptimal. To me, the right move is to assume the user is familiar with iPhone gestures and ape them. Palm is the only other device maker that incorporates multitouch; they are able to natively handle iPhone veterans with ease. There have to be better reasons to not follow all of Apple's precedents beyond just "we hate Apple". And it goes the other way as well; the card metaphor is intuitive and useful for managing multiple apps, and one that Apple will have to beat if Cupertino doesn't mimic when they finally add multitouch to the iPhone platform; Palm needs to have the confidence to do the same.
After setting up the account and going through the tutorial, the device tells you to click the Contacts button. Here's the default home screen, at least as I remember it (this image is from the Palm Pre Plus splash page, so I think it's accurate):
At this point, I had to ask the sales rep "where's the Contact icon?". It's the Rolodex-style cards. Yeah, I haven't played with Rolodex cards in a decade either. It's a terrible metaphor designed by 50 year-old men. I'll blame Roger McNamee. Furthermore, the Contacts application would sure be a lot more magical if the phone was hitting servers and setting up Synergy on the user's Yahoo, Google, Facebook accounts while she's going through the tutorial. Actually, it'd be a brilliant reveal. Palm didn't do that.
Speaking of Synergy, it sucks in way too many people. My address book is now cluttered with old business contacts, ex-girlfriends, and people I haven't talked to since high school. If Palm has full access to my Google and Yahoo address books and calendars, then surely it can gain access to my Inboxes. It would be smart to only suck in the contacts of people I've corresponded with in the last six months or a year. If Palm followed my advice and used their tutorial time to do some basic slicing and dicing of data, they could provide a magical experience by dumping the user into their Contacts - pre-filled with all the user's closest friends and contacts - before hitting the home screen. The first time someone clicks Contacts, they shouldn't be prompted to add additional accounts; they should magically see their closest contacts. All Palm has to do is ask for this information just a little earlier in the onboarding process.
Because Palm doesn't ask for the four supported Synergy account types - Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft Exchange - before the tutorial, the inclusion of Contacts and Calendar in the home screen's "dock" are wasted. Again, Palm management isn't thinking about the new user experience when deciding what to include out of the box. When you get a new phone, every single wireless carrier fires off a free text message to the new phone when the phone is activated (either with a new or a ported phone number). I asked the sales rep when my phone would be activated and he was like "I think it already is; didn't you get the text message?" Well, on this home screen, you'd expect to find this magical text message behind the only icon that looks like it might have text messages - the envelope icon. The sales rep takes the phone from my hand, clicks the envelope icon, and now is presented with a full list and snippets of my most recent e-mail. I don't know about you, but I really don't like other people reading my e-mail.
The initial four icons should be - have to be! - phone, messaging (Palm's text message application), browser, and App Catalog. The point is to get the new user in a place where she can customize her phone as much as she wants as early and easily as possible. Three of these apps are actually pretty good. Then there's the on-phone App Catalog. Oh, God, does this thing suck.
I'm not going to harsh on Palm for a lack of applications. The lead time on devices is long, and they reasonably thought that a smartphone with keyboard and a Centro replacement would be able to attack the iPhone from both the high and low ends. Developers aren't going to jump to develop for a device that no one thei know owns. Sure, their scary ballet girl ads were terrible, but Palm's a company run by men who haven't hit on a girl in thirty years. And, yeah, the name of Apple's new device brought an onslaught of jokes, so they're not perfect either.
What I am going to blame Palm for is how poor an experience the App Catalog is. The browsing experience is terrible - things are miscategorized and mislabeled. Every search is terrible. Try searching for [twitter] in the App Catalog. The first five results are BuildaSearch, Glad Thats Not Me, Los Angeles Times, Glyder 2, and Manchester Evening News. I have no idea what the hell their sorting algorithm is, but I know that those are terrible results. If they have to hand-curate lists of the top 500 search terms - and you know [twitter] is a top 20 search term - then so be it. It's unacceptable.
Lastly, the device is slow as molasses out of the box. The first time you launch any app - even Contacts, Mail, and other apps that are in the default dock - it takes forever to load. It's honestly faster to keep 20 apps running than it is to close and relaunch an app. I don't know if it just takes the device forever to write to RAM or something, but certain key apps need to be pre-installed in memory so that they launch quickly. It's how Apple gets Safari and Mail to launch so quickly; Palm needs to do the same for its core apps.
Again, nothing here is hard or impossible. The battery cover is a pain, but who actually replaces their battery on a regular basis? Everything else can be fixed. Palm just needs to think about user flows - from purchase on. They very clearly haven't. And yet it are these chances to make first impressions that excite users - and developers. I know 1.4's coming out in February with Flash support and who knows what else. But what they need to work on in 1.5 are those things that get the benefits of the Pre Plus - Synergy and multitasking - in front of new users as soon as possible and as early as possible. Palm's got 29 more days to win me over before I can return the phone and get out of my Verizon contact. Maybe the device will grow on me, but I'm not excited about my new phone on the day I bought it, and that's a crying shame.
