Ahhhh, the new Jesus Phone. Our savior come to save us from the oppressive Apple iPhone regime. How I love thee, let me count the ways…

Okay, so yesterday Palm and Sprint released the long awaited Palm Pre. When I say long awaited, I’m not kidding. They’ve been talking up this phone since the beginning of this year, and only recently did they finally start releasing some substantial info on it. I’m told and have read that there were some long lines outside of Best Buy, RadioShack, and Sprint stores (the three main places the Pre could be purchased), and that there was a major shortage of Pre’s at launch but that was not my personal experience; all I had to do was stop by the Sprint store just down the street from my work while I was on lunch break, walk in, say “One Pre, please.” and that was that. There were no lines, there was no one desperately offering me their newborn child’s soul in exchange for my purchase.

I like to end things on a positive note so I’ll start by pointing out what I don’t like about the Pre. Don’t worry, this won’t take long.

First, there’s the keyboard. Just like everyone else, I feel the keys are a little on the smallish side. They’re roughly the size of a Tic-Tac cut in half so that it’s almost square. Coming from the LG “Lotus” LX600 which has much larger keys, the Pre keyboard took some getting used to. Notice I say “took” though — I’m already to about 75% of the typing speed with the Pre that I was with my Lotus. All in all, this is a very minor complaint.

Next, I miss having a D-Pad. For those times when I notice I’ve made a typo, it’d be nice to be able to hit a back arrow to get the cursor to the word I wish to retype instead of having to try to tap the exact location with my meaty sausage fingers. It can get a little frustrating and more time consuming than it should be trying to coax the cursor where I need it to go so I can make my correction. I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or if there’s some cool trick that I’m just not aware of yet (entirely possible since I’m still learning this phone). Hopefully I’ll pick up on some better method of moving the cursor in the near future. Still, this is definitely not a deal breaker issue for me.

My next grievance with the phone is that charging via USB seems to take infinitely longer than it does with the AC wall adapter. When I first purchased my Pre at the Sprint store it had about 50% charge left. That got me a few hours of play time before it started complaining about low battery, so I whipped out the handy dandy USB cable and plugged it into my USB 2.0 port at work. Almost four hours later, it still was only at around 70% charge so I plugged it into an AC outlet and noticed that it regained its charge much faster. I don’t know if the USB port delivers less juice than the AC adapter does (which would make sense), but it was a little annoying to have had it plugged into a PC for as long as it was without getting a full charge. Speaking of charging, one of the big new innovations of this phone is the inclusion of wireless electromagnetic induction charging technology, which allows you to set the phone on what Sprint and Palm call a “Touchstone”. With the Touchstone, all you have to do is lay the phone on top of it and it begins charging. There’s nothing to hook up (aside from the Touchstone’s power cord to a wall outlet — duh). It’s a neat and innovative feature but I’ve read that it takes much longer to charge this way and that your phone can get fairly hot while it’s on the Touchstone. I didn’t purchase a Touchstone because Sprint wants like $70 for them, and I’m certain I’ll be able to pick one up cheaper down the road if I decide I want one.

I’d like it if the speaker volume on the Pre were a little louder, but it’s sufficient for my needs so far. Ringers and speaker phone just aren’t as loud as I’d prefer them to be. Maybe Palm will address this complaint during one of the software updates that they have in the pipeline.

My last gripe is that Sprint and Palm didn’t include visual voicemail with this phone. That may seem like a minor issue to everyone, but it’s become a fairly standard feature on high end phones these days. AT&T’s iPhone has it, as does Verizon’s Blackberry Storm. Heck, even Sprint’s own Samsung Instinct line has visual voicemail, so it’s kind of baffling that they decided not to include this cool feature on the Pre. Maybe there was some technical issue with the Pre’s new webOS that prevented them from doing it — who knows. Oh well, it’s still not enough of a disappointment to prompt me to return my Pre.

So that’s what I don’t especially like about the Pre (so far). As I spend more time learning the ins and outs of the phone and its webOS operating system, no doubt I’ll discover other things.

Now onward to the list of things I like (love?) about this phone!

First, the screen is fricken awesome. It’s a 480×320 24-bit display and although the specs are the same as the iPhone’s, it’s a little smaller and therefore the pixels are packed more closely together. Photos and videos look great on it!

The Pre’s new operating system called “webOS” is very impressive too. It’s slick and responsive, and has a lot of innovative new features. Anyone who knows anything about the Pre knows that it’s capable of multi-tasking (unlike the iPhone) thanks to its implementation of “cards” to represent running tasks / programs. It may sound a little weird but it works great! I haven’t pushed it too hard yet but I’ve had five programs running at the same time without any slowdowns or issues. Good stuff.

Another neat feature of the new system is that it’s all gesture based. There are no “back” or “OK” keys to deal with.  I’ll admit that the gestures took me a little bit of getting used to but after about an hour of experimentation I’ve become fairly proficient with the system. Also, when you make changes to settings they’re all saved and implemented right away (just like in Linux desktop systems).

Synergy — it sounds like something some bald headed, ass kissing corporate sycophant would mention several times during a mind numbing company meeting but  it’s what Palm named a fairly cool feature of their webOS. Synergy downloads all your contact information from places like Google and Facebook and aggregates it into your phone’s contacts book. What this means is that all I had to do was give my Pre my login information for Facebook and it automatically grabbed all my friends’ e-mail addresses and phone numbers, and it even assigned their Facebook profile pics as their contact photo in my phonebook. Very cool! Some folks have complained about Synergy not working correctly, but my experience with it so far has been terrific. It saved me from having to transfer a lot of information from my Lotus!

Next up is the phone’s web browser, which is top notch. Until now I thought that the iPhone and iPod Touch had the best browser out there, but that’s no longer the case. The browser included with the Pre is as good as, if not better than, Moble Safari on Apple’s gear. They’re both based on WebKit, so I guess technically they’re cousins. Either way, the browser is fantastic. When Flash is released for webOS later this year, it’ll put the Pre’s browser in a whole different class than Apple’s Mobile Safari (which Apple has stated will never support Flash).

Let’s see, what else to mention. Oh yeah, the GPS! Sprint includes their version of TeleNav for free on the Pre, and it works great. I went to a wedding yesterday and had no idea where I was going, so I decided to give the Pre’s GPS a crack at it. It guided me turn by turn to my destination with no problems. A Google Maps app also comes preloaded on the Pre but I haven’t really played with that very much yet. Getting lost should be a thing of the past now!

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head, so I’ll leave off there. I’ve only had a Pre for about a day now but I’m completely in love with this device. I’m looking forward to unlocking its full potential in the near future!

- UPDATE -

Haha, I should change the title of this article to “48 Hours with a Pre” because I returned mine this afternoon. Before I explain why I took my Pre back, let me first say that Palm has put out an absolutely amazing phone which is revolutionary in many ways. I can honestly say that the Pre is the coolest phone I’ve laid hands on yet, and yes, that includes Apple’s impressive iPhone series (on AT&T’s crappy overpriced network).

So why did I return my Pre? There are a few main reasons but the biggest was money. Even though Sprint’s plans are hands down the best value in the industry, their current plans can’t compete with my current Sprint SERO plan which comes to a grand total of $33 a month including taxes and the usual nonsense fees. As with their Samsung Instinct, Sprint refuses to allow the Palm Pre to be added to any account other than their “Simply Data” or “Simply Everything” plans. Both are very reasonable when compared to other providers — the Data plan is $70 + tax and fees, and the Everything plan is $100 a month + tax and fees. The Data plan includes 450 anytime minutes, nights and weekends at 7pm, Sprint’s GPS service, and unlimited messaging and data. The Everything plan is basically the same thing but includes unlimited anytime minutes. Both of these plans are a great deal when you compare them to AT&T’s ludicrous pricing and even Verizon can’t compete. However… my SERO plan has 500 anytime minutes, and unlimited everything else. The only thing it doesn’t include is Sprint GPS, which I can gladly live without. As I mentioned above, the Pre is a spectacular phone but I just can’t justify paying twice as much as I’m currently paying, especially for less anytime minutes. It boils down to this — if I didn’t have my SERO plan, I’d still have a Pre in my pocket.

Okay, so that’s the big deal breaker for me. However, there are other things that influenced my decision as well. For starters, the keyboard which was supposed to be one of the Pre’s biggest selling points ended up being one of the things I most disliked about the phone. Sure it’s small, but that really didn’t bother me. In fact, I got used to it very quickly and could type pretty darn fast without any errors. No, my big beef with the keyboard was that it became tedious to flip it out any time I wanted to input information. As frequently as I was typing stuff in, I began to realize that it’s more efficient to just leave the darn thing open most of the time and that really sucks. Yes, I thought that having a physical keyboard on a phone like this was a must, but it turns out that a well implemented virtual keyboard would be better. You know what would be even better than that though? Having both! Honestly, I don’t understand why Palm didn’t include a virtual keyboard. I have a feeling the the Pre2 or whatever the Pre’s predecessor is will go either full virtual or have a combination of the two.

Next on my list of complaints is something that other Pre owners have complained about in the forums. It seems that some batches of Pre’s have a “light bleeding” issue where there are faint splotches of white at the bottom of the screen when it’s oriented in portrait mode. I noticed it on mine and at first I thought it was just the background of the programs I was in (it’s only apparent in some applications — other applications do not show it at all). Pandora is a probably the best example. I was willing to live with the discoloration, at least until the cause was more widely investigated and explained online, but this is one of the factors that influenced my decision to return the phone. It honestly wasn’t a big deal for me but I can understand why others that have noticed the discoloration have raised a stink about it.

The last big reason that I’ll discuss is battery life. Yes, I’m fully aware that a phone that can do everything that the Pre does is going to go through batteries more quickly than my trusty old Samsung A900 Blade did, but the Pre seems to be a very hungry little beast. I don’t know how long an iPhone lasts with moderate use (sending / receiving about 20 e-mails, maybe 30 minutes of browsing, and hour of Pandora streaming, some light YouTube streaming, about 30 minutes of talk time, and maybe 100 text messages). For the Pre, I was able to get around 9 hours of usage like that before it wanted me to recharge. That was starting out with a freshly charged unit. It was very shrewd of Palm to make the battery removable so you can swap in a spare, but I hate carrying around spares. I’d much rather be able to drop in an aftermarket extended life battery with twice as much capacity. I have no doubt that such aftermarket batteries will become available in the near future, but for now I’d have to settle for a spare stocker or carrying around the little charger with me.

There you have it. The main reasons I returned the Pre after owning one for only 48 hours. Again, I want to stress that the Pre is an amazing phone that I truly believe runs circles around Apple’s current iPhone lineup. That might change with the arrival of the 3rd generation iPhone, but for now that’s my take on things. I’ll say this — if I were a Verizon or unfortunate enough to be an AT&T subscriber, I’d jump ship and grab a Pre with Sprint’s Simply Data plan in a heartbeat.

As a stingy SERO user, I eagerly await the arrival of HTC’s Touch Diamond2 later this year. I doubt it’ll be as impressive or groundbreaking as the Pre, but at least I’ll be able to use it with my beloved $33 plan!