Chronicles of a Windows Mobile User Gone Palm Pre (2/4)
Palm Pre Review
INTEGRATED SOFTWARE
Now lets take a look at some
of the software applications that are included on
the Palm Pre.
The Home screen is very plain, but attractive. There are five icons at the bottom, and a background wallpaper image that you can change from the Photos application. The rounded corners go along with Palm's "card" metaphor.
The gray arrow button on the left opens the program launcher. It overlays your background application or graphics with a transparent gray shade, along with more icons representing applications. The subtle arrow at the bottom means it is horizontally scrollable, and the two vertical lines in the lower right mean that there are two pages to the right. Those can be accessed with a horizontal swipe of the finger. You can't sort the icons into labeled folders like you can on Windows Mobile and the vertical scrolling combined with horizontal page scrolling can be confusing.
Here is the Palm Pre Software Tour Video. Also note the method for Copy/Pasting.
Swiping up from the gesture area while holding your finger down on the screen reveals the 5-icon quick-launch bar in a wavy animated selection manner. Releasing your finger over the selected icon will launch that program.
The phone dialer only dials numbers. No auto-searching contacts from here with the number pad, however you can type names with the keyboard and it will start searching.
If you go to the contacts area of the phone dialer, then you can search for contacts by typing their names.
Of course there's a call log. It nicely shows contact photos, and if there's a number that is not in your contacts list, there's a button next to that number that lets you add it and create a new contact.
Outgoing calls show a nice large photo of the person you're calling.
Incoming calls do not take up the entire screen. It only shows the incoming call info on the bottom half, leaving the top half to the application you're currently using. Very nice feature!
The "Universal Search" is a lot like the Windows Vista/Seven Start Menu. When typing terms, first it searches applications and settings, then contacts (if you're typing a name). If it can't find any matches in any of those areas, it gives you buttons for searching Google online, Google Maps, Wikipedia, and Twitter. It does not search emails, calendar appointment, tasks, or document contents like Windows Mobile's search can do.
PERSONAL INFORMATION MANGEMENT
Unlike some other "smartphones", the Palm Pre does support tasks, but they're a bit limited. There is no support for setting the status, occurrence pattern, reminders, categories, or sorting tasks (I think they're by creation date). There's also no way to assign tasks, but no mobile platform has that feature anyway.
And the tasks do sync with Exchange thankfully just like Windows Mobile.
The Memo's application has a cool corkboard design. It does not sync with Outlook though.
The Calendar nicely supports multiple calendars from Google, Exchange, and Facebook. It also collapses free time in the day view so that you have more of an Agenda-like view where you can see more of the appointments in one screen. It does not support a normal Agenda view nor Year views.
Contacts are searchable with the keyboard and also feature a flick-scrolling list. There's no way to quickly jump to a specific letter in the alphabet without using the keyboard, and there are no list-length scrolling indicators that would let you know how long the list is.
The contacts also has a great linking feature. Since you can sync with multiple sources from Exchange, Google, Facebook, and AIM, when you have usernames for the same person from all of those sources you can link them and merge their info into one place. The data does not actually get merged to each account, but it does appear in one place. If your Gmail account, Exchange account, and Facebook account all have different contact photos for a specific person, you can also choose which one to show by default.
The email program is quite feature-rich. It shows contact photos in messages from them. It supports Gmail, multiple Exchange accounts, POP3, and IMAP push. Unfortunately, deleting emails is very unintuitive, there's no confirmation, there's no undo, and deleted emails do not go into a Deleted items folder. So it's very easy to delete messages accidentally and have no way of getting them back.
New incoming email messages shrink the main application area from the bottom. You can tap the icon on the left to go to that email listing, or the text on the right to open that specific message.
NAVIGATION
Sprint Navigation is included on the device. This is great for voice-guided navigation, except it requires an internet connection for downloading maps. The software integrates nicely with the Contacts app and allows you to bring up contact addresses as destinations. That's about the extent of its integration though. You can't invoke the navigation program from the Contacts program or Calendar location fields.
I love how the notifications appear at the bottom while using the GPS Navigation program. You can even access your music player at the same time as the Navigation map! This is an excellent feature and very important while driving.
Also, Google Maps is included.
On the next page we'll cover how multimedia works on the Palm Pre!
