Palm Pre Review

MULTIMEDIA & CAMERA

In Media Sync or Mass Storage USB modes, the Palm Pre is completely unusable.

At least it will warn you!

The Pre syncs just fine with iTunes, but for how long will Apple allow this?  Of course only non-DRM content will sync, and forget about Contact, Calendar syncing.

The music application has a nice interface for changing songs. All you do is flick to the left or right in the now-playing screen. The library views are also searchable with the keyboard, just like Windows Media Player on Windows Mobile.

The Palm Pre also has the Amazon Music store where you can purchase and download MP3s.

The YouTube application is pretty good. You can watch videos and send them to your friends as links via email.

However, it does not support Street View or Latitude.

The camera application is extremely basic and completely void of settings or features.  You can't change the resolution, switch to video record mode, adjust colors, etc. None of that. The only setting you can change is whether the flash is on or off.

The photo quality is just as bad as most of the camera phones out there. Click the image above to see a full resolution sample. However, the camera's response time is extremely fast! You can press the shutter button very quickly and repeatedly to take multiple photos and there is very very little lag. I am very impressed with the speed of this camera application.

The "Sprint" icon brings you to this screen, which is basically a web page with links to frequently asked questions and some video tutorials.

Of course there's a calculator.

SETTINGS

The Palm Pre includes an automatic backup application similar to Microsoft's MyPhone beta except that it's preinstalled and more well-integrated. It's unclear exactly what is backed up here, but it's stored in your Palm Profile.

The Bluetooth Control panel doesn't have many options. It does support stereo A2DP, AVRCP, PAN, HFP/HSP, and PBAP bluetooth profiles. Not nearly as many as most Windows Mobile devices, and the lack of file transfer or PIM object transfer profiles is a disappointment.

You can change the language to spanish without installing a different ROM like you do on Windows Mobile.

The "Updates" control panel is a central application manager. You can see if any of your downloaded programs have new versions available here. The "Install Free" button will install all of the free updates listed.

The Date & Time settings are pretty simple. Shutting off the network time or network time zone options will allow you to manually enter that information.

In the Device Information control panel, you can see some of the details about your device's battery level, memory available, Palm webOS version, serial number, etc.

In the location services control panel, you can toggle some of the GPS related options.

The WiFi control panel lets you select which available WiFi network you want to connect to as well as toggle the WiFi power on/off.

You can also enter custom IP address and connection settings if you want. There are no options for power/performance tweaking, security settings, or other connection details that you can get on Windows Mobile.

There's no automatic screen brightness sensor, but you can change those settings here in the "Screen and Lock" control panel. You can also turn on Advanced gestures for the gesture panel as well as change the wallpaper. There are secure unlock options here as well as the option to show or hide notifications while locked.

The Sounds and Ringtones control panel gives you a few options. This is not nearly as comprehensive as what you can do with Windows Mobile. You can change the ringtone and that's about it. You can't change the sounds for any of the system sounds, incoming text messages, none of that. However, in the contacts program, you can choose different ringtones based on who's calling.

OTHER APPLICATIONS

A PDF viewer is included.  You can view and search through the text of PDFs, but that's about it. You can't sign, annotate or modify them.

You can save your PDF however, or send it to some one via email using the "Share" command.

There's a document viewer for viewing Office files, but you can't edit them.

The Sprint TV application gives you access to all of Sprint's streaming video and radio content.

The NASCAR application gives you lots of information on NASCAR events and driver stats.

The App Catalog lets you browse through programs that are available for download on the Palm Pre. Right now the selection is limited.

If you have too many programs open, you get an error that suggests you close some programs. This is a huge departure from the old Palm OS and iPhone OS which only allow one program open at a time, and the Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and Symbian operating systems which will slow down, close some programs by itself, or become unstable when you have too many programs open.

Click on to the next page, where we'll offer a final recommendation on the Palm Pre!