Palm Pre

Just nipped down to the o2 store on Victoria Street, London to check out the Pre. I love the touchscreen, it is absolutely brilliant but I really don't like the keyboard. In testing it by writing a text I could barely type (no sniggering at the back) a sentence without lots of mistakes. I've had a work blackberry in the past so I'm used to using physical keyboards but this just felt so cramped especially the top row where the top parts of the phone meet. Shame because other than that from my quick play I loved it.

I got my pre on launch day... I absolutely love it, it's so slick. It has it's faults (many of which will hopefully be fixed by a future software update) - things like, you can't save an image off a web-page, if you set a daily alarm clock it constantly shows on the screen notification area. But these issues aren't biggies.

I came to this phone after having a MDA Touch Plus (HTC Touch Duo), which crashed all the time and didn't hold signal well, plus the interface (windows mobile 5) was quite dated and fiddly to use. The Pre compared to that phone is amazing, it looks lovely, the interface is intuitive, multitasking is a breeze, web browsing is lightning fast and so well put together.

I wont compare it to the iPhone as to be honest I've never owned one and have only played with them a little bit. But the Pre is smaller than the iphone and fits nicely in my pocket.

As for the keyboard, I have seen people complaining that it is fiddly and hard to use, admittedly it is on the small size however once you have spent a little time typing with it, it becomes second nature and I really like having it.

I am definitely a fan of the Pre now and hope that as Palm update the software it'll make a great little device even better.

Well, I've had mine for nearly 2 weeks now and as an 'upgrade' from an iPhone I have to say that I'm within a hair's breadth of taking it back. I can live with the odd bits like the keyboard taking some getting used to but other things are proving to be so irritating that I'm not sure I can cope! So, in detail...

The time will not sync to the mobile network no matter how much I try and when it's on manual, it gains at least a minute a day...granted this must be down to a faulty handset.

Yahoo mail will not work properly, despite support attempts to fix. E-mails will NOT render pictures contained therein, something which worked fine from the word go with the iPhone. Not sure whether that's a 'feature' of the Pre or something to do with the settings (that don't seem to work correctly - can't even send an e-mail despite O2 support efforts).

Google maps isn't great...my iPhone used to go straight to my street when I put in the full postcode...on the Pre, you get partial postcode usage, and therefore only to the general area (Google maps online goes straight to the street). Indeed, the O2 support person said that during their training on the Pre, they were working through a navigation exercise and their destination (an airport) actually returned a location a mile away, on the other side of a river! mmm, useful, not!!!

Alarms/alerts...the same sound for every type of alert, e.g. e-mail, text message. You also can't select separate on/off for each. The 'mute' button on the top of the phone also mutes ALL sounds, including the alarm, so if you want the phone to wake you up in the morning, you have to put up with any e-mails waking you up if they come in overnight. Simply unacceptable.

Selection of ringtones on the phone is rubbish, and you can't select the tone for the alerts (remember that's everything like text messages) at all, you are stuck with the pre-set tone (which isn't great!).

The more I think about it the more it is making me think I've made a mistake...methinks a return is on the cards sadly.

The worst thing about this is that as a long-time Palm fan, a phone that is supposed to be their 'big hope' is such a silly let-down in so many ways...they really should have learned from the iPhone by now.