Once again I’ve been absent for a while. Things, as normal, have been very busy. Yet, I wanted to write an update post on my Palm Pre since I’ve been in that mode here on my blog.On the plus side (I always try to look on the bright side of life – thank you Monty Python), I still love how Palm has hit the nail on the head with the Pre being a great business productivity tool. Case in point:
- I was on Facebook looking around.
- I have the web browser up on another card holding the address and phone number for something I’ll need in a bit.
- I’m IM’ing with a friend, and…
- I can quickly slide over to my calendar to confirm a time for that IM conversation and not miss a beat.
A quick jab towards my “iPhone has changed my life” friends; I would like to see your iPhone do the above just as effectively. Alas, in a touché’ to the iPhone, there are sure some things the Palm misses the mark on:
- Battery Life. When I travel in Denver, and use my phone some to medium (Maybe a call or two, Bluetooth, GPS), it is dead by noon. My Treo at least would last all day.
- I’m on a (very) mini-vacation in Vegas today. Phone came off the charger at about 9:00am, it is now noon and I’m down to 49% battery.
- Calendar. I wish the monthly calendar view displayed colors and more effective information like the Treo did. In its current form, it is pretty useless.
- Adding Contacts. On my Treo, when I found something on Google, there was an option to add it to contacts with the “touch” of a link. No more.
- Slow. It is NOT a peppy unit. I watch iPhone users and, bam! They are there!
Where I stand: if Apple comes out with the new phone this year, and the OS is up to multitasking par with the Pre, then I will probably jump ship. I read an article recently that said Palm is working on new phones. So if they address the above, I may say on board as I have been on the Palm ship a long time (I started with the Palm Pilot) and have always appreciated what they do for productive people like me.
Epilog: I think the world of “$.99 Apps” is killing us. Of the (very) few apps I have found worthwhile and useful on the Palm Pre, no one is coming out with much needed updates or growing their applications. I have to imagine that because the app is so cheap, and it was so easy to make using the WebOS operating system, that there is no motivation to keep developing the application. When I talk to iPhone users, they say their cheap apps get updates fairly frequently, and I have to wonder if that is due in part to the effort the developer had to put into the iPhone app. As I understand it, the programming language is much harder to learn and Apple is very strict about what they allow in their web store. I think this is something critical the world needs to ponder, let alone Palm.
Tags: Relaxed Productivity
